Transgression in Korea: Beyond Resistance and Control

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Acknowledgments This book is the product of a collaborative effort that began at an academic conference titled “Transgression as a Secular Value: Korea in Transition?” hosted by the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan, October 25–27, 2012. The Nam Center would like to express its sincere appreciation to the AKS (Academy of Korean Studies) in Korea for its generous support to make this academic event possible. This edited volume is part of the Nam Center’s ongoing publication series Perspectives on Contemporary Korea. Special thanks goes to the director of the Nam Center and series editor Nojin Kwak, series editor Youngju Ryu, and the conference discussants whose comments and suggestions greatly benefited the papers in this volume. I would also like to offer my sincerest gratitude to the keynote speaker of the conference, the late Nancy Abelmann, who will be missed dearly. I would also thank the anonymous reviewers of this volume for their helpful insights and suggestions. The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the generous assistance of DoHee Morsman of the Nam Center; Adrienne Janney and Jiyoung Lee, formerly of the Nam Center; Yunah Sung and Sang-Eun Park of the University of Michigan Library; and Christopher Dreyer of the University of Michigan Press, whose infinite patience and understanding is the real reason why this volume exists.

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Introduction Juhn Y. Ahn On April 16, 2014, a 6,825-ton ferry named SewЕЏl capsized off the southwestern coast of South Korea. Among the 476 people reported to be on board, less than 180 made it safely off the sinking vessel on the day of the disaster.1 To the great dismay of the Korean public whose eyes remained fixed on the disaster site for days and weeks in anticipation of a miracle, the continued rescue efforts produced no additional survivors. The public was outraged and traumatized, but the failure of the rescue efforts to produce a miracle was not entirely to blame. The outrage and trauma emerged from the realization that the sinking ferry was a site laden with transgressions (wiban or wibЕЏp).2 Initially, the sinking of SewЕЏl was reported as an “accident” (sago).3 The SewЕЏl crew made their first distress call at 8:55 a.m. and then informed the passengers to remain where they are.4 Help arrived approximately thirty minutes later. Rescue efforts—recorded and analyzed with much intensity by the mass media and online community—continued for about two hours until the ferry completely submerged under water and vanished from plain sight. Images of the ferry listing sharply to its side and eventually sinking to the bottom of the ocean soon flooded the airwaves in Korea. Text and video messages transmitted by the passengers onboard the sinking ferry were also later revealed to the public through various online media outlets. How was all this information received? It was processed as, among other things, shock and dismay (ch’unggyЕЏk and kyЕЏngak), but shock soon turned into public outrage as it became clear that the majority of the lives lost in the disaster belonged to a group of high school students on a school trip to the nearby Cheju island.5 What was particularly disturbing about this discovery was not only the Page 2 →age of the victims but also the fact that less than half of the crew, who were responsible for the lives of the passengers, went down with the ferry. Captain Lee Joon-seok (Yi Chun-sЕЏk), who pusillanimously took off his pants to hide his identity, and his crewmembers were, in fact, the first to jump ship.6 But after it was discovered that the capsized ferry was also loaded with three times more than the maximum recommended weight, scholars and journalists began to pay closer attention to larger structural problems such as corporate greed, lax regulation, poor government oversight, and the widespread culture of cutting corners in public safety to meet the high demands of Korea’s fast-paced economic development and recent experimentation with neoliberalism.7 Politicians belonging to the opposition party in Korea were also quick to lend a voice to these concerns. Citing similar problems, they went so far as to claim that the SewЕЏl “tragedy” (ch’amsa) was not so much a “man-made disaster” (injae) as a “state-made disaster” (kwanjae) (ChЕЏng S. 2014). Did these criticisms and inquiries bring the ugly truths about Korea’s hurried march toward unbridled capitalism and neoliberalism to light? Far from it, some claimed. In a full-page ad published in The New York Times (May 11, 2014) and The Washington Post (May 16, 2014), tellingly titled “bring the truth to light, ” a Korean diaspora group known as the South Korean Democracy Movement (SKDM) accused President Park Geun-hye (Pak KЕ-n-hye) and her administration of botching the rescue efforts and censoring the media (Son 2014). A second ad in The New York Times (August 17, 2014), produced in collaboration with an online grassroots initiative called Sewol Truth, specifically cited governmental corruption, corporate greed, deregulation, lack of a central emergency response coordinator, and the president’s failure to act quickly as the primary factors behind the tragedy and featured a suggestive image of two ominous hands holding up an upside down SewЕЏl ferry on strings like a marionette (No 2014a). In fact, one of the main aims of the ad was to support the passing of the SewЕЏl Ferry Act, which would allow an independent committee with special subpoena and prosecutorial powers to freely investigate disasters like SewЕЏl and expose all the transgressions at the

root of these disasters—hence the title of the ad, “the truth shall not sink.”8 This call to seek the truth soon found influential supporters. Echoing this call for more transparency, the famed Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-dЕЏk (Kim Ki-duk), for instance, appeared at the 2014 Venice Film Festival with a sticker that read “the truth shall not sink—Sewol” displayed prominently on his chest (Kim 2014 and No 2014b).9 Page 3 →But can we, in fact, take what transparency promises for granted? In an opinion piece written soon after the tragic incident for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine the philosopher Byung-chul Han, like many other scholars interested in the issue, argued that neoliberalism is ultimately to blame for the lives lost on the sunken ferry, but he also cautioned against holding the view that more transparency can prevent disasters like SewЕЏl (Han 2014). According to Han, the rapid rise in the number of temporary jobs after Korea’s radical turn toward neoliberalism following the 1997 Asian financial crisis—like the limited term contract positions held by the SewЕЏl crewmembers—resulted in more people in Korea thinking only of their own “survival”; whence, he claims, the SewЕЏl transgressions. To prevent further disasters like SewЕЏl what Korea thus needs is an effort to restore “a sense of community” (Gemeinsinn) and “trust” (Vertrauen)—the glue that holds society together. Han, however, opined that transparency, contrary to common belief, does not foster trust. Rather, in trust’s place transparency establishes uniformity, self-surveillance, and control. As he explains elsewhere: “Matters prove transparent when they shed all negativity, when they are smoothed out and leveled, when they do not resist being integrated into smooth streams of capital, communication, and information” (Han 2015, 1).10 When individuals willingly succumb to this compulsion to bare all and leave nothing inaccessible, secret, or ambiguous (as they tend to do, for instance, on social media) trust is lost, for trust, as Han points out, is impossible without these kinds of negativity.11 If so, then for those who want to put an end to tragedies like SewЕЏl the demystification of the politics of transparency is truly an urgent issue. All the more so since the word transparency, as Han points out, “is haunting all spheres of life” (Han 2015, vii.). Indeed, on his first day in office President Barak Obama declared transparency and open government the top priority of his administration and, during his second term, he signed an executive order to that effect. Hoping to extend this political doctrine to other countries, he also played a leading role in launching the Open Government Partnership (OGP) at the 2011 United Nations general assembly meeting. In the United Kingdom, an OGP partner, similar changes to make government data more accessible by publishing it online were made under the leadership of Francis Maude. The sixty-nine countries now participating in the partnership, Korea included, have all similarly pledged to make government activities more accessible and encourage civic participation in decision-making and Page 4 →policy formation. Not coincidentally, these and other state-level changes were made as the world struggled to come to terms with the new challenges and opportunities presented by the pervasive influence of social media (consider, for instance, the Arab Spring and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement) and the Wikileaks and Edward Snowden affairs. It is in this context of the growing global concerns about direct access to sensitive information that Han speaks of transparency as transgression (or, more precisely speaking, the lack thereof). As Han himself puts it, “transparency dismantles borders and thresholds” (Han 2015, 31).12 Transparency and, more generally speaking, the neoliberal attitude that fosters the demand for this transparency threaten to erase the borders and thresholds in social processes like communication (e.g., secrets, interruptions, and gaps in information) that grant these processes a sense of narrativity rather than instrumentality. But this, Han warns us, has serious consequences. The dismantling of this form of negativity, he writes, “flattens out the human being itself, making it a functional element within a system” (Han 2015, 3). What is at stake in the loss of negativity, then, is nothing less than our autonomy. This, Han submits, is precisely the condition in which Korea found itself at the time of the SewЕЏl tragedy: after its conversion to neoliberalism, Korea had developed into a trustless society of control that cared only about the unhindered circulation of commodifiable information and privatized capital. It had thus become, as Han poetically puts it, “an inferno of the same” (Han 2015, 2). And therein lies the true transgression responsible for the SewЕЏl tragedy. Transgression in the context of SewЕЏl refers not, in other words, to the violation of a neoliberal society’s limits—transgression in the conventional sense of the term—but to the denial of anything beyond them.

Is Han right? Is our autonomy really at risk if we dismantle what he calls “negativity” through more transparency? If we seek democracy through the removal of the thresholds responsible for providing social processes with a sense of narrativity (and hence meaning and beauty), will we end up subjecting ourselves to “freely willed, self-generated constraint” as Han predicts? (Han 2015, 33 and 48) And, under such circumstances, will our freedom “no longer constitute an outside that might question the systemic inside” (Han 2015, 49)? That is to say, can there be no resistance without limits and thresholds? Before we can answer these questions, this book argues that we must first ask whether or not transgression—as either the flight into negativity or the dismantling thereof—is a selfevident concept. As the nine chapters that comprise the present volume will try to show, Page 5 →transgression has been feared, disavowed, regulated, interrogated, and enjoyed to fashion and often exploit various sorts of subjectivities in Korea. The boundaries and thresholds that were either erased or respected to make these subjectivities possible, however, were not incommensurate with the instrumental aims of the established sociopolitical system as assumed by Han. Cannibalism is a good example. As demonstrated in one of the chapters of this book, during the ChosЕЏn dynasty (1392–1910) cannibalism posed a serious conundrum for a state that sought to find stability and order in the Confucian vision of a well-structured, deferential, and hierarchical society. The state knew that it could encourage the populace to cultivate the Confucian virtue of filial piety by taking advantage of the numerous stories of exemplary men and women sacrificing parts of their bodies to feed their ill parents, but it also knew that malicious rumors of humans eating other humans (as medicine and sustenance) had the potential to threaten the stability of the established social order. In the eyes of the state, the human body could be consumed if it was sacrifice but not if it was flesh.13 The state accordingly made a serious effort to ensure that the body consumed remained sacrifice. Contrary to what Han and others claim, the present volume will also try to show that thresholds such as secrets, mysteries, and the body-as-food are not essential or natural conditions of human existence and often had little, if anything, to do with resistance and autonomy. In making this claim, the present volume is not alone. For instance, Georges Bataille, who most famously explored the intimate relationship between transgression and autonomy (or sovereignty as he preferred to call it), had already tried to avoid referring to “negativity” in positive or essentialist terms as a fundamental characteristic of human existence that exists outside the discursive realm of rules and prohibitions. For Bataille, it was the transgression of these rules and prohibitions that brought negativity into existence. Bataille regarded life defined by utility (e.g., sex for reproduction), that is, by its voluntary “servility to thought” as a life devoid of sovereignty. But he also maintained that sovereignty could be realized only through the transgression of the threshold, limit, or prohibition that separates the profane world of thought from what he called the accursed domain of the sacred. Although this prohibition emerged from the rejection of animality or nature (i.e., a life defined by blind needs), Bataille was convinced that its transgression does not therefore constitute a return to this original bestial state. Instead, what the transgressor returns to, he writes, “is nature transfigured by the curse, to which the spirit then accedes only through a new Page 6 →movement of refusal, of insubordination, of revolt” (Bataille 1993, 78). If Bataille is right, sovereignty, then, is not something that can be acquired through the preservation or denial of negativity—the sacred. It is something that emerges only through transgression and the discovery of the “curse” of its prohibition. In an essay written in memory of Bataille and his work on transgression aptly titled “A Preface to Transgression,” Michel Foucault similarly tried to avoid speaking of negativity in essentializing terms (which could result in misguided, contested claims over the right or wrong way to approach what lies beyond the limit or threshold). Instead, like Bataille, he spoke of the limit and what lies beyond it as something that must continue to be made and unmade through transgression: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. But can the limit have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? .В .В .В Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited

to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity. (Foucault 1977, 34–35)

Like Bataille, Foucault presented the relationship between the limit and transgression as a paradox: one depends on the other for its existence, but the two are mutually exclusive. Transgression must, to borrow Bataille’s terminology, carry the mark of limit’s curse. What Foucault did not share with Bataille, however, is the latter’s confidence in the liberating potential of transgression. Indeed, although Foucault is often remembered as a champion of resistance, his much-celebrated work on the history of sexuality clearly demonstratesPage 7 → that his analysis of transgression cannot be simply understood as an account of how to oppose repressive power.14 In order to challenge the widespread belief that sexuality was repressed and kept a secret during the Victorian era, Foucault first made note of the proliferation of discourses about the repression of sexuality and then offered the following explanation of what it means to refer to sexuality as a secret: But this often-stated theme, that sex is outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it, is precisely what needs to be examined. Does it not partake of the injunction by which discourse is provoked? Is it not with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made to mirror, at the outer limit of every actual discourse, something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge? .В .В .В What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. (Foucault 1990, 34–35) Foucault’s aim here, as we can see, is not to liberate sexuality from the shadows of secrecy and repression. It is to convince his readers that this illusion or promise of unveiling the secret is precisely how power—the will to knowledge—operates and shapes us as subjects of sexuality. The present volume will raise similar questions about transgression. Was it always in the best interest of the state or established authority to repress it? Or did institutions of established authority exploit transgression or the liminal (to borrow Arnold Van Gennep’s terminology) as a means of executing its will to knowledge and power? Was transgression a viable way of realizing autonomy or, conversely, control? Are transgressive desires an inherent part of who we are as human beings? A good way to avoid reaching hasty, reductionist answers to these questions, this volume argues, is to look at specific case studies that reveal how the shape and significance of transgression changed over time. The volume therefore brings together nine essays that cover three different time periods in Korean history: premodern, colonial (modern), and contemporary Korea. For the sake of convenience and clarity, the chapters have been arranged in rough chronological order and grouped into three large parts. The first part consists of three chapters that cover the premodern period. Page 8 →These chapters offer examples of the sanctioned representation of transgression. The first chapter by Karen S. Hwang takes us all the way back to the KoryЕЏ period (918–1392). In her chapter, Hwang examines the pictorial representation of transgression, more specifically, the desire to overthrow an existing social order on a double-sided, single-panel screen from this period. The screen was produced in 1307, more than

three decades after the KoryЕЏ court submitted to the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The front side of the screen is decorated with the painting of the buddha AmitДЃbha, which was quite popular by the fourteenth century. The reverse side, the focus of this chapter, consists of two separate registers. In the bottom register there is an image of the bodhisattva Kб№Јitigarbha. There are also two prostrating figures located to the left and right of the bodhisattva. One prostrating figure is identified as No YЕЏng, the artist responsible for the images on the screen. The other, who appears to be No YЕЏng’s patron, is paying veneration while a Buddhist monk stands by his side. The upper half of the reverse panel also features the image of another bodhisattva and his attendants as well as a prostrating figure identified as T’aejo (r. 918–943), the founder of the KoryЕЏ dynasty. They are set against the backdrop of the famous Mt. KЕ-mgang. As Hwang notes, the depiction of T’aejo or Wang KЕЏn against the backdrop of Mt. KЕ-mgang was intentional. It was meant to invoke the dynastic founder’s legendary encounter with the bodhisattva Dharmodgata on the mountain. What, Hwang asks, could be the relationship between the two vignettes? What, in other words, is the relationship between No YЕЏng’s encounter with Kб№Јitigarbha and T’aejo’s encounter with Dharmodgata? Challenging previous studies of the screen that saw the two vignettes as unrelated and their cohabitation of the same space as a matter of saving space, Hwang argues that the reverse panel is the product of “a brilliant pictorial strategy, designed to normalize a subversive intent.” Through an analysis of the No YЕЏng screen, Hwang shows us how pictorial strategies were used to address what she calls the moral paradox of political subversion. As Hwang points out, for a new dynasty to rise, transgression against the established political order must necessarily occur, and once it does the transgression that gave birth to a new political order is retroactively banned, prohibited, and condemned as a crime against the mandate of Heaven. Accountability (for doing the very thing that was retroactively prohibited) is thus established. No YЕЏng’s screen was able to address this moral and temporal paradox by placing two separate temporal events—T’aejo’s transgression in the past and the transgression desired by No YЕЏng Page 9 →and his patron—together in one panel. And, as Hwang reminds us, this conflation of past, present, and future and also of memory and desire was possible precisely because it was done in pictorial form. Charles La Shure’s chapter discusses the transgressive nature of the trickster in folk tales from Korea. Rather than offer a comprehensive overview, La Shure focuses on the stories of three famous Korean tricksters from the late ChosЕЏn period (nineteenth century): Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏndal. These late-ChosЕЏn tricksters, as La Shure demonstrates, attack the social order in a variety of different ways. They find ways to poke fun at decorum, decency, social hierarchies, and even language. But they are no hero of the poor, weak, or downtrodden. They all make fun and take advantage of the disenfranchised and marginalized as well. The trickster in Korea, La Shure therefore claims, is “a liminal figure that exists outside of these categories, and thus he is easily able to slip back and forth across the boundaries of these categories.” But were these tricksters considered a real threat to the state? La Shure argues that the tales of the Korean tricksters are expressions of popular sentiment or, more specifically, “discontent with the existing social structure.” Folk tales about Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏn-dal, as he notes, appeared during a time of turmoil and deteriorating social conditions. Among other things, late ChosЕЏn society had to deal with the devastating aftermath of the Manchu invasions of the seventeenth century, incessant natural disasters, banditry, insurrections, and popular uprisings. Also relevant to understanding the discontent expressed in the tales of the Korean tricksters is the heavy tax burden that forced commoners, who suffered from low crop yields, to rely on the wealthy to survive. Unable to pay back their loans, an increasing number of commoners chose to become wandering landless people (yumin) or tenant farmers during the late ChosЕЏn period. Discontent among the populace consequently grew, and this discontent, La Shure claims, was expressed through the figure of the trickster. But unlike the famed bandit Hong Kil-tong, the trickster does not offer visions of a new world or give expression to the desire to establish a new ideal society. The tricksters do not, then, stand in opposition to the interests of the state. Rather, what the trickster tales seem to offer is an enjoyable, temporary respite from the bleak realities of the late

ChosЕЏn period. One could perhaps even argue that the trickster tales “attacked” the social order with examples of transgressive behavior not so much to overthrow it as to sustain the illusion of a functioning social order or a functioning limit. This illusion could be sustained, in other words, Page 10 →as long as the violence and discontent inherent to the establishment of a social order could be externalized and represented in the form of its sinister double, the trickster. Se-Woong Koo’s chapter shows that cannibalism can play a similar role. Although the ingestion of human body parts may appear to us today as the epitome of unforgivable transgression, Koo reminds us that cannibalism, as sacrifice, can in fact be an accepted and well-respected practice in certain contexts. This, as he shows, was certainly true for Korea. Cutting off a part of one’s body to feed it to an ailing father or mother was, for instance, regarded as an exemplary demonstration of filial piety and virtue and, hence, as a praiseworthy act during the ChosЕЏn dynasty. In order to use this virtuous cannibalism as a means of buttressing the existing social-political structure, the ChosЕЏn court made sure that it was institutionalized and properly represented in the form of governmentsanctioned moral guidebooks such as the Samgang haengsilto (Conduct of the Three Bonds, Illustrated). But a different attitude toward cannibalism and the body defines the modern period. Korea’s commitment to moral progress and secular reason made it impossible to see the human body as anything but flesh. This made cannibalism unacceptable. The presence of cannibalism had to therefore be disavowed and representations of cannibalism had to rely on secrecy, rumor, and xenophobia. The recent discovery of human meat capsules (inyuk k’aepsyul) made of aborted fetuses at various ports in Korea has led, for instance, not to questions about the traditional Korean appetite for human flesh but to questions about the morality of the Chinese who were allegedly producing and selling the capsules to Koreans. Similar fears of the Chinese can be seen, as Koo points out, in films such as Kim HongsЕЏn’s The Traffickers (2012), which deals with the subject of illegal organ trafficking between Korea and China. Rather than address the Korean desire for commodified human body parts, the Korean media, Koo claims, was complicit in the disavowal of this desire and has therefore allowed it to return in the form of the (evil) Other. The two chapters that comprise the second part of this volume focus on the period when the tendency to disavow transgression as an unacceptable and impossible act began to emerge—when, in other words, the relationship between the limit and what lies beyond it began to take the shape of a “curse.” The emergence of this tendency or curse coincides with Korea’s efforts to come to terms with the process of modernization. Jennifer Yum’s chapter on “new women” (sin yЕЏsЕЏng) in Colonial Korea shows, Page 11 →for instance, how the emergence of this new social identity was necessarily accompanied by transgression. Yum focuses on the case of two young women—twenty-one-year-old Hong Ok-im and nineteen-year-old Kim YЕЏng-ju—who jumped in front of a train together at one of the busiest stations in the colonial capital of KyЕЏngsЕЏng on April 8, 1931. Their double-love suicide created, as Yum puts it, “a media frenzy.” At first glance, the amount of attention that Hong and Kim’s suicide received seems unwarranted, for suicide, as Yum notes, was not uncommon during this period. Between the years 1920 and 1940, over thirty thousand references to suicides appeared in Korean newspapers. Most common reasons cited in major newspapers for these suicides include “lifestyle difficulties,” “domestic tensions,” and “illness.” But none of these suicides received as much attention as the double suicide of Hong and Kim. Why, then, did their case stir so much controversy? Yum contends that nationalist male intellectuals saw Hong and Kim’s double-love suicide as a serious threat to their efforts at gender reform, which they considered to be key to the liberation of the nation. According to Yum, these intellectuals used Hong and Kim’s double suicide as “a platform for their contemporaries to publicly grapple with the contradictions inherent in the historical transformations they encountered.” Hong and Kim were expected by the nationalistic male intellectuals to conform to the ideals of the “new women”—young and educated women who were self-aware and full of individual spirit—but “their voluntary deaths deemed them transgressors of the very agenda that had been so key in the creation of their identities.” In the eyes of the

modern reformers in colonial Korea, what Hong and Kim had crossed was a seemingly impossible limit. In her chapter titled “The Cat’s Cradle: Middle Class Optics of Desire in Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid,” Se-Mi Oh investigates how transgression works in the film The Housemaid (1960) directed by Kim Ki-yЕЏng. The Housemaid, as Oh shows, skillfully interrogates how various discursive limits were crossed as South Korea struggled to come to terms with middle-class desire and anxiety on its path towards rapid industrialization during the postwar period. As Oh notes, Kim Ki-young (Kim Ki-yЕЏng) begins his interrogation of these limits at the very beginning of his film, which features two scenes located in a living room and textile factory. The juxtaposition of the two scenes, respectively featuring a housewife and female factory workers, can be read as the crossing of the limit that separates the domestic space from the industrialized space of the factory. It can Page 12 →also be read as an effort to resituate domestic labor in the context of Korea’s efforts to industrialize. The juxtaposition therefore brings the issue of women’s labor and class mobility in postwar Korea to the fore. As these traditional discursive limits were crossed new ones were introduced in the film to take their place. Oh focuses on one new limit that continues to haunt the film through the presence of its absence. This is the limit that separates the desiring subject from the desired object. In the film a few key objects—the house, the piano, the television, the housemaid (!), expensive Western commodities, and so on—serve as representations of middle-class desire. According to Oh, the film stages these objects in such a way that they seem to return the gaze of the occupants of the house (the subjects of middle-class desire) as if to ask, “Is this what you truly desire?” This gaze, Oh argues, transgresses the coherence of the subject and renders the social divisions that comprise his or her identity untenable. The gaze, however, remains inscrutable to everyone in the film. This inscrutability gives the gaze a truly horrifying quality. It also gives the director Kim Ki-young a perfect way to explore impossible limits that began to appear in an industrializing Korea. In the third and final part of the present volume we take a closer look at different ways in which transgression was used to make sense of Korea’s hurried march toward neoliberalism and also the related issue of self-generated constraint or control. The New Christian Right in South Korea, as Myung-Sahm Suh shows in his chapter, offers us a good example of a social group that voluntarily embraced the conservative politics of control that the group had once fought bitterly to end. The New Right’s conversion, which Suh describes as transgression, was not necessary or inevitable. As implied in the group’s conversion, its desired aim, in fact, was not always consistent. According to Suh, the New Right emerged largely in response to the ascendance of the liberal-left government of Roh Moo-hyun (No Mu-hyЕЏn). It was in part as a measure to return the balance between left and right to equilibrium that the center-right Christians—who later became the New Right—began to support the embattled conservative Hannara Party. But the rise of the New Right cannot be explained away as the product of President Roh’s progressive politics. The leaders of the New Right also had other, older issues with the 1980s generation of progressive student activists. These older issues began to emerge after the violent suppression of the Kwangju uprising in May of 1980, which split the Christian democratization movement leaders into two groups along generational lines: an Page 13 →older generation that supported strong government and a younger postwar generation of Christian activists who became aware of the dangers of (military) authoritarianism. Dismayed, however, by the radicalization of the progressive politics of the student and labor movements of the 1980s, many of the younger activists turned to their Christian roots. For abandoning the antiauthoritarian cause of the mainstream progressive movement, these young Christian leaders were ostracized by their fellow progressive activists. For these and other reasons, the New Right abandoned the mainstream progressive movement and began to support conservative causes such as neoliberalism. In her chapter, Bonnie Tilland asks why traditional notions of success are assuming a more transgressive role in contemporary South Korea. As Tilland claims, the cultural and economic neoliberalization of South Korea after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the virtually unregulated growth of the private education

sector, widespread Internet sociality, and large amounts of public and private investment in “soft culture power” have together created a new education environment in which the once cherished goal of “academic success is becoming вЂtransgressible,’ subject to hacking, and creative pursuits are becoming conventional.” Key to understanding this reversal, as Tilland points out, is the changing attitude toward the relationship between innate ability and success. During South Korea’s high-growth developmentalist era of the 1980s and 1990s, there was, she notes, a tendency to consider academic success “a natural outgrowth of innate ability developed through hard-work.” But as the equal opportunity ideal began to fall apart in subsequent decades with the privatization of education, academic success came to be associated less with developing one’s innate ability than with “gaming the system” and “the use-you-up-and-spit-you-out neoliberal ethos” of post-IMF South Korea. The “innate” academic abilities of individuals were thus exposed to be obsolete social (i.e., noninnate) constructs of a developmentalist state. Tilland therefore claims that academic success, if pursued in this context, can be transgressive because it defies, among other things, the logic of the market, the liberal imperative to develop inherent talent and creativity, and the fast-paced “immediate gratification-seeking” temporality of contemporary South Korea. Peter Y. Paik’s chapter takes a closer look at harrowing, cinematic portrayals of wayward youths and their impotent guardians engaging in odious acts of transgression to shed deeper light on the problem of morality in South Korea today. As Paik argues, the transgressive behavior of the Page 14 →young in Kim Kiduk’s Samaria (2004), Park Chan-ok (Pak Ch’an-ok)’s P’aju (2009), and Lee Chang-dong (Yi Ch’ang-dong)’s Poetry (2010) differs from the antisocial behavior of rebellious teens in coming-of-age Hollywood films in a fundamental way: transgressions of the young in Samaria, P’aju, and Poetry are not commodified, justified, or presented in such a way as to ridicule and mock the traditional values of the old. Rather, their transgressions serve as shocking reminders of the dangers inherent to the modern pursuit of self-realization and self-fulfillment, namely “the temptations of radical individualism.” Through shocking examples of transgression, Samaria, P’aju, and Poetry attempt to raise our awareness of this temptation through its exposure as the lack of self-imposed constraint. As Paik argues, the three films in question focus as much on the impotence of those who represent moral authority as on the transgressions of the young. Lee Changdong’s Poetry, for instance, draws a sharp contrast between a guilt-ridden grandmother and her unregenerate teenage grandson, a glutton who shows no remorse after sexually tormenting and causing the death of a female classmate. The grandmother, Mi-ja, while struggling to instill a sense of guilt and moral responsibility in her grandson, also tries to protect him by procuring the large sum of money necessary to reach a settlement with the dead girl’s mother. But, shockingly, to earn this money, Mi-ja reluctantly sleeps with an old stroke patient suffering from partial paralysis. None of her efforts, however, bear any fruit. The grandson is eventually arrested and never shows any sign of remorse. In Mi-ja’s story what we thus seem to have is an allegory of the battle between moral consciousness and neoliberal values, albeit a battle that is decidedly in the latter’s favor. Samaria offers another good example of this battle. The plot of the film begins to unfold as two teenage girls turn to prostitution to fund a trip to Europe. During a police raid, the girl who happily and willingly slept with the clients is fatally injured while escaping. The other more reserved girl, YЕЏ-jin, tries to honor the dying wishes of her friend, but in order to do so she is forced to sleep with one of the clients and lose her virginity. The absurdity of the entrepreneurial spirit of the two girls is thus exposed in the form of sexual transgression. But transgression is given a new meaning in the second part of the film. Deeply shocked by her friend’s death, YЕЏ-jin seeks “atonement” by sleeping with all the former clients and returning their money. YЕЏ-jin’s unexpected form of atonement brings a spiritual awakening to the former clients who, feeling deep remorse, decide to become better fathers and compassionate citizens. The sense of morality Page 15 →that YЕЏ-jin establishes in the film is thus far from traditional, but effective nonetheless. The sense of morality that YЕЏ-jin’s father—a police detective—tries to establish, however, is a different story. It is far from effective. The father’s discovery of his daughter’s promiscuity leads him on a

blood-thirsty quest for revenge and justice. The increasingly violent path he takes eventually results in the death of a client and, consequently, his arrest. The father thus fails to perform both his duties as a moral authority figure, that is, as a father and as the law. Paik therefore describes his actions as “post-patriarchal.” In my chapter, the final one of this book, I challenge the popular reading of Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk)’s vengeance trilogy—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005)—as a work of arty exploitation and argue that the trilogy consistently relies on the idiom or the family of metaphors of cruelty, violence, and transgression to reflect critically on the question of moral agency in post-IMF Korea. The plot of each film in the trilogy similarly develops around a central character who, painfully aware of their place in a (neoliberal) world where the law is impotent, seeks extremely cruel forms of revenge for the seemingly unwarranted violence that he or she was forced to endure him- or herself. I argue, however, that these characters seek vengeance not because they are innocent victims who deserve vigilante justice but because revenge has the power to retroactively turn naivetГ© into a transgression. It is, in fact, precisely because the point of vengeance in the trilogy is to establish answerability, not Hollywood justice or empowerment, that none of the protagonists actually enjoy it. The pursuit of vengeance therefore does not empower these central figures. Turning the conventional (Hollywood-friendly) understanding of vengeance on its head, I suggest that Park may have used the cinematic medium to demonstrate how individuals paradoxically become both victims and moral agents by violently avenging themselves and others under the neoliberal gaze of post-IMF Korea. Together, the nine chapters that comprise this book present a picture of transgression in Korea that is complex and perhaps even fragmented. They do share, however, a common purpose. By weaving together a complex tale this book hopes to provide a viable alternative to the rather simple reading of transgression as either resistance or control. This, however, does not necessarily mean that transgression, resistance, and control are not real. As the case of SewЕЏl demonstrates clearly, real people were affected by the struggle against transgression and real changes took place as Page 16 →a consequence. SewЕЏl is by no means unique in this regard. Numerous struggles, including those presented in this book, have been made to come to terms with transgression in Korea. But none of them were inevitable. This simple but critical point is what we hope to ultimately establish by the end of this book.

Notes 1. Lee and Choe 2014. The number of passengers who lost their lives on board the ferry—304—did not become clear until the seventh of May; see http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/05/09/2014050900101.html 2. After an initial investigation into the Sewol tragedy, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office of the Republic of Korea (SPO) published a public report (dated October 6, 2014) detailing their findings. In this document, the SPO identified “transgressions” (wiban and wibЕЏp) as the cause of the tragedy. Similar views were continually expressed in the Korean media where the tragedy was attributed to “transgressing” (~rЕ-l ЕЏgida), among other things, regulations (мЎ°н•-), the law p( ЕЏpkyu), and the duty (Е-imu) to protect passengers. A reference to the “transgressions” responsible for the SewЕЏl tragedy can also be found in Gale 2014. 3. For instance, see Ch’oe 2014. “Accident” (sago) was the term used by President Park herself; see “Pak KЕ-n-hye taet’ongnyЕЏng” 2016. The media later began to refer to the sinking of SewЕЏl as a “disaster” (ch’amsa). 4. For a convenient timeline of the SewЕЏl tragedy, see “South Korea Sewol ferry” 2014. 5. It should be noted here that this reaction was not necessarily local but also global. A CNN report (“Video’s capturing ferry’s final moments fuel fresh outrage over ship’s fate”) that interpreted the images as “shocking” and as a source of “outrage” was cited by the Korean media as evidence of the universally shocking and outrageous nature of the SewЕЏl tragedy. For the Korean media’s reaction, see “CNN, SewЕЏl-ho majimak

yЕЏngsang pangyЕЏng” 2014. CNN and the Korean broadcasting company JTBC broadcasted part of a video sent by one of the student passengers to his father. The full version was made available on the following website: https://thenewspro.org/?p=3641 6. See Choe and Lee 2014. Fifteen crewmembers, including the captain, were rescued. Officially, there were twenty-nine crewmembers onboard the sinking ferry, but it was revealed that there were four additional part-time crewmembers onboard; see Chang 2014. 7. See Choe 2014; and also Jun 2014. The media also pointed out other structural problems such as the culture of lax enforcement, lack of respect for government posts that monitor public safety, and the tendency among government officials to seek postretirement positions in the very private-sector industry bodies that they are assigned to monitor and regulate. There has also been a tendency to associate the tragedy with Korea’s experimentation with neoliberalism; see “A Statement by Scholars Concerned about the Sewol Tragedy”; ChЕЏng Y. 2014. For a criticism of this tendency, see Paek 2015. Unlike the media and scholars who voiced their concerns about the SewЕЏl tragedy, Page 17 →however, the government focused on corporate greed as an important factor behind the SewЕЏl tragedy. After it was discovered that the capsized ferry was actually loaded with three times more than the maximum recommended weight to increase profits, prosecutors raided the offices of Chonghaejin Marine Co. (Ch’ŏnghaejin haeun), the company that operated the ferry in question, and also began investigating religious leader and businessman Yoo Byung-eun (Yu PyЕЏng-ЕЏn), whose family controlled the company. President Park Geun-hye also personally ordered a nationwide manhunt for Yu and his sons to make good on her promise to the public that she would fight the “deep-rooted evils of the past,” namely government corruption and its ties to corporate greed. This resulted in the largest manhunt in Korean history; see Choe et al. 2014. 8. For the proposed content of the act, see the Sewol Families’ Committee website: http://sign.sewolho416.org. Parliament passed three related bills, one called the Special SewЕЏl Bill (SewЕЏl ho t’Е-kpyЕЏlbЕЏp), on November 7, 2014. 9. The Sewol Truth website provides banners, posters, and t-shirt logos bearing the message “The truth shall not sink with Sewol” for free; see http://www.sewoltruth.com/events/#download-design 10. Han also warns against the reduction of transparency to more accessible information: “Whoever connects transparency only with corruption and the freedom of information has failed to recognize its scope. Transparency is a systemic compulsion gripping all social processes and subjecting them to deepreaching change” (Han 2015, 2). 11. As Han emphatically puts it, “If I know everything in advance, there is no need for trust” (Han 2015, 47). 12. Han refers to these thresholds as “zones of mystery, uncertainty transformation, death, and fear, but also of yearning, hope, and expectation” (Han 2015, 32). 13. This point about sacrifice and flesh is indebted the observations that Giorgio Agamben made about “bare life,” that is, “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Agamben 1998, 12). 14. See Asad 2003, 71.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1993. The Accursed Share, Volumes II and III. New York: Zone Books.

Chang TЕЏk-chong. 2014. “SЕ-ngmuwЕЏn t’alch’ul chЕЏn sЕЏnsa wa t’onghwaВ .В .В . sЕ-ngmuwЕЏn myЕЏngdan nurak,”YЕЏnhap News, April 29. http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/society/2014/04/29/0701000000AKR20140429196200054.HTML Ch’oe Chae-hyЕЏk. 2014. “Pak taet’ongnyЕЏng вЂCh’oehu Е-i han saramirado kujohara,’”Chosun ilbo, April 17. Choe, Sang-hun. 2014. “Korea Confronts Tendency to Overlook Safety as Toll in Ferry Sinking Grows,” The New York Times, April 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/asia/as-ferry-toll-rises-hand-wringing-over-tendency-to-overlook-safety-in-south-korea.htmlPage 18 → Choe, Sang-hun, and Su-Hyun Lee. 2014. “Errors Mounted as Chaos Ruled Capsizing Ferry,” The New York Times, April 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2014 /04/21/world/asia/chaos-ruled-sinking-ferry.html Choe, Sang-hun, Martin Fackler, Alison Leigh Cowan, and Scott Sayare. 2014. “Greed Before the Fall,” The New York Times, July 27. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/world/asia/in-ferry-deaths-a-south-korean-tycoons-downfall.html ChЕЏng Sang-hЕ-i. 2014. “Sim Sang-chЕЏng вЂSewЕЏlho sagЕЏn, injae nЕЏmЕЏsЕЏn kwanjae,”P’ainaensyЕЏl nyusЕ-, April 21. http://www.fnnews.com/view?ra=Sent0801m_View&corp=fnnews&arcid=201404210100235000011879&cDateYear=2014&cDateMonth=04&cDateDay=21 ChЕЏng Yun-ch’ŏl. 2014. “SinjayujuЕ-i ka purЕ-n pigЕ-kВ .В .В . iboda chЕЏngch’ijЕЏgil su ЕЏpta,” Hanguk ilbo, May 14. http://www.hankookilbo.com/v/ddf0d612ae484d72a9a31a63bae9e597 “CNN, SewЕЏl-ho majimak yЕЏngsang pangyЕЏng, on segye ga ch’unggyЕЏk.” 2014. News In Progress, April 29. https://thenewspro.org/?p=3641 Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Gale, Alastair. 2014. “Sewol Disaster Shines a Light on a Cultural Problem,” Korea Realtime (blog), The Wall Street Journal, April 30. http://blogs.wsj.com /korearealtime/2014/04/30/sewol-disaster-shines-a-light-on-a-cultural-problem Han, Pyung-Chul. 2014. “Das Schiff sind wir alle,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 26. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/unglueck-vor-suedkoreadas-schiff-sind-wir-alle-12911567.html Han, Pyung-Chul. 2015. The Transparency Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jun, Kwanwoo. 2014. “President Apologizes for Ferry Handling,” The Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, April 29. Kim KyЕЏng-ju. 2014. “Kim Ki-duk, PenisЕ- esЕЏ SewЕЏlho ЕЏn’gЕ-pВ .В .В . вЂChinsil Е-n ch’immolhaji annЕ-nda,” Osen, August 29. http://osen.mt.co.kr/article/G1109941547

Lee, Su-Hyun, and Choe Sang-Hun. 2014. “Students Among Hundreds Missing After South Korean Ferry Sinks,” The New York Times, April 17. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/world/asia/south-korean-ferry-accident.html No Ch’ang-hyЕ-n. 2014a. “вЂChinsil Е-n ch’immolhaji annЕ-nda’ NYT SewЕЏlho 2-ch’a kwanggo,” NEWSis, August 18. http://www.newsis.com/ar_detail/view.html?ar_id=NISX20140818_0013113794&cID=10104&pID=10100 No Ch’ang-hyЕ-n. 2014b. “вЂPenisЕ- yЕЏnghwaje Kim Ki-duk kamdok SewЕЏlho t’isyЕЏch’Е- chumok’ Teilli meil tЕ-ng oesin,” NEWSis, August 31. http://www.newsis.com/ar_detail/view.html?ar_id=NISX20140831_0013141215&cID=10104&pID=10100 Paek SЕ-ng-yЕЏn. 2015. “SewЕЏl-ho ch’amsa nЕ-n sinjayujuЕ-i ttaemunin’ga,” The Hankyoreh, January 15. http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion /because/673801.html “Pak KЕ-n-hye taet’ongnyЕЏng, вЂChindo yЕЏgaeksЕЏn sago kujo ch’oesЕЏn tahara’ chisi.” 2016.YTN, April 16. http://www.ytn.co.kr/_tm /02_1940_201404161057342688_0101 Page 19 →Son Chae-min. 2014. “вЂMissyUSA’ NYT e вЂSewЕЏlho chЕЏngbu taeЕ-ng pip’an’ kwanggo,”The Kyunghyang Shinmun, May 12. http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201405121216521 “South Korea Sewol ferry: What we know.” 2014. BBC, News Asia, May 15. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27342967

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1 Transgression as Heaven’s Mandate Buddhist Iconography and Political Resistance in No YЕЏng’s Painting of 1307 Karen S. Hwang If “to transgress” means to violate a social norm or a common moral code, then traditional Korea’s political history has shown a remarkable attitude of acceptance toward one form transgression—namely the transgression of subversion. An intent or act of overthrowing an existing order, this particular brand of transgression stood on grounds of an inherently paradoxical ideology: the “Heavenly Mandate (Ch. Tianming; Kr. Ch’ŏnmyЕЏng).” Adopted from China, the doctrine of the Heavenly Mandate simultaneously condemned political subversion as the gravest of all transgressions while it also accepted it as a periodic necessity in the workings of the universe.1 On the one hand, the authority of an incumbent ruler was to be upheld as absolute—far more imposing than the “divine right” asserted by European rulers. While the authority of his Western counterpart was based on a mere right to rule, the ruler according to the doctrine of Heavenly Mandate was selected by Heaven to govern for his extraordinary virtues. It was a difference between a system of divine permission expressed primarily through privileged birth and one of rigorous divine vetting and selection. Under the ideology of the Heavenly Mandate, resistance to a ruler who was singled out through a process of cosmic scrutiny was tantamount to rejecting Heaven’s design itself. Yet because Heaven bestowed its Mandate by deliberate moral selection, the Mandate was always dynamic and could be taken away. Any successful rebellionPage 22 → forceful enough to succeed—i.e., to succeed in transgressing against the universe of the sitting ruler—was by itself evidence of Heaven’s resolve to transfer its Mandate to a person of superior virtues. In other words, the notion of the Heavenly Mandate condemns weak rebels as traitors but hails strong rebels as legitimate successors. This paradox was, however, rather consistent with traditional East Asian worldviews. Art historian Alexander Soper eloquently describes as the kernel of Chinese history the acceptance of “an alternation of good fortune and disaster, the literal application of the phrase hsing-fei [xingfei].”2 The verb compound noun xingfei represents the notion of universal balance that is ever maintained by the rise and fall of all that is organic. Like everything else in the universe, any ruler who secures Heaven’s Mandate will rise to his full strength, but eventually his house will necessarily wane in order to facilitate the waxing of its successors. If the ruler and his son are both virtuous, the Mandate would be retained in the lineage. When, however, Heaven deems the virtue of the ruling house compromised, the transfer of the Mandate will be as inevitable and irreversible as the incineration of wood by fire, or as the extinction of fire by water. The notion of Heavenly Mandate spread from China to Korea and Japan, where it was adapted to serve the kingdoms and shogunal governments as they forged their own local authority while always cognizant of China’s imperial presence nearby. The acceptance of occasional subversion as a natural part of a cyclical universe has thus inspired a rich history of revolts and rebellions in all of East Asia, coupled by its equally colorful history of political suppression.3 This paper examines an eloquent expression of this worldview, presented in pictorial terms by a Korean artist of the KoryЕЏ period (918–1392) (figs. 1 and 2). Made in 1307, more than thirty years after the KoryЕЏ court submitted its sovereignty to the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), the double-sided, single-panel

screen reveals an attempt to normalize a specific act of subversion as Heaven’s design. Although for reasons of space the present essay focuses only on the reverse side of the screen, this single side alone proves sufficiently effective in delivering the claim of a man and his political group that he is the true, legitimate successor to the founder of the KoryЕЏ dynasty. As an art historical source, the reverse side reveals a remarkable accomplishment in visual narrative technology. The image text compresses two scenes into the single picture surface for one coherent claim to power, justifying the moral paradox of political subversion. Drawing a parallel Page 23 →between a fourteenthcentury rebel and the paradigmatic rebel-turned-founding king of the KoryЕЏ dynasty, the screen declares that in the arena of political contest subversion is not a transgression if Heaven shows signs of support for a radical change.

The Screen The devotional screen in question is a wood-core object of an intimate scale (21cm x 13cm). It is coated with a layer of aubergine lacquer, on which figures and their landscape backdrop are outlined and modeled with a series of thin, undulating gold brushstrokes. The work is famous not only for its display of technical mastery but also for the early date of its contents. It is the earliest dated painting by a named KoryЕЏ period artist. The date of production and the artist’s name are inscribed near the wooden feet, which were probably designed to be inserted into a metal or porcelain stand. The inscription reads: “Respectfully painted on the eighth month of th day in the year 1307, No YЕЏng joins in prayer for blessings and offers this [screen painted] in gold on lacquer.” Another reason for its fame is the content of the front side of the panel. It is the earliest dated Korean painting of the buddha AmitДЃbha with eight bodhisattvas (fig. 1).4 The iconography of this type of AmitДЃbha painting was quite popular by the fourteenth century.5 The third and fourth reasons for the fame of the object are found on the reverse side, which is the main concern of the present essay (fig. 2). The bottom half of this side features one of the earliest Korean images of bodhisattva Kб№Јitigharba (Ch. Dizang, Kr. Chijang), easily identified by the round “wish-fulfilling jewel” in the right hand and by the odd combination of the shaven head of a monk and the long earlobes of a Buddha.6 (fig. 3) This seated frontal Kб№Јitigarbha image is made even more interesting by the two groups of labeled figures that pay deference to it. To the deity’s left (the viewer’s right) is a prostrate figure on the edge of layered banks, which are separated by the rocky throne of Kб№Јitigarbha by swirling ocean waves (fig. 4). The bowing figure is clearly labeled “No YЕЏng,” the artist himself. Significantly, No YЕЏng is dressed as a layperson, in simple headscarf, jacket and pants—suggesting that he was probably not a monk-painter but rather a lay Buddhist professional painter.7 On the other side of Kб№Јitigarbha, in the lower-left corner of the composition, are a standing monk and another prostrate layman (fig. 5). These Page 27 →two figures also occupy a rocky landing, but with a flatter surface than that which supports No YЕЏng. The prostrate figure here is identified by a faint but partially discernible label, which Mun MyЕЏng-dae has read as “Nok Si(ga)” and Kumagai Nobuo has read as “Nok(ga).”8 There is also a dedication panel higher up along the left edge of the frame (fig. 6) containing the names of four or five individuals followed by the characters for TongwЕЏn, (together [we] pray), indicating that these individuals were united in prayer and possibly even sponsored the work.9 Page 24 → Figure 1. Front, showing AmitДЃbha with eight bodhisattva attendants, signed No YГґng, dated 1397. Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea. Page 25 → Figure 2. Back, showing standing Bodhisattva Dharmogata and seated Kitigarbha. Page 26 → Figure 3. Lower half of back. Figure 4. Lower right of back, showing prostrate artist labeled “No YЕЏng.” Figure 5. Lower left of back, showing a prostrate figure accompanied by a monk.

The final reason for the work’s fame—and the most important for the present study—is the upper half of the reverse side (fig. 7), which features one of the earliest extant paintings of the Diamond Mountain, or Mt. KЕ-mgang. The Diamond Mountain range stretches along the northeast coast of Korea on the north side of the Demilitarized Zone, and it plays a critical role as the backdrop to a famous legend told on this panel. In the upper-right corner of the composition stands an image of a Buddhist deity, flanked on one side by eight smaller bodhisattva attendants.10 Diagonally across the clouds and mist from the divine assembly, nearly obscured among the pointed peaks in the upper-left half of the screen, is another prostrate figure on a flat landing (fig. 8). This figure is labeled “T’aejo,” indicating Wang KЕЏn, the founder of the KoryЕЏ dynasty who reigned between 918 and 943 CE. Collectively, Wang KЕЏn, the divine entourage, and the rugged peaks of Mt. KЕ-mgang signal a famous legend about the dynastic founder’s encounter with the bodhisattva Dharmodgata (Kr. Tammugal) on the mountain. The source of this legend will be closely examined below, as the textual source will validate the identification of the deity while it will also reveal a critical oversight in past interpretations of it. Page 28 → Figure 6. Inscription panel, featuring four to five names. Page 29 → Figure 7. Top half of back, showing Bodhisattva Dharmodgata and Prostrated figure (Wang KЕЏn) in lower left corner. Figure 8. Lower left corner of top of back, showing Prostrate Wang KЕЏn. Page 30 →The foregoing reasons have made the screen one of the most famous treasures of Korean art history, and as such it is frequently acknowledged in art historical surveys and scholarly works.11 One critical question that has not yet been addressed, however, is how the top and bottom halves of the reverse side of the screen relate to each other. The prevailing assumption appears to be that the two registers were compressed into the single frame because of limited space. The tendency to dissociate the two scenes is reasonable, given the significant temporal gap between their contents. That is, a four-century period separates the two registers: a tenth-century encounter between Wang KЕЏn and Bodhisattva Dharmodgata in the upper register, and the lower register where the fourteenth-century artist No YЕЏng is portrayed with his associates worshipping a different deity, Kб№Јitigarbha. What could be the relationship between these two vignettes?12 It is precisely the way in which No YЕЏng integrates the two events across the centuries within the single frame that renders his work a true masterpiece of both historical and art historical import. The vertical alignment of the tenth-century event and the circumstances of No YЕЏng’s early fourteenth-century existence was a brilliant pictorial strategy, designed to normalize a subversive intent. As I show below, the prostrating figure of Wang KЕЏn in the higher register was to serve as a precedent and justification for the resonant fourteenth-century figure in the corresponding corner of the bottom register. The visual resonance between the two praying figures was coordinated to argue a historical parallel between the famously successful tenth-century rebel and the fourteenth-century artist’s contemporary associate, whose own ambition to subvert an existing power structure would prove less successful. Unaware of the ultimate historical outcome, the hopeful artist juxtaposed the two halves of the panel into the single frame in order to show a self-contained political restoration at a glance. The panel proclaims the recurrence of an encounter between a chosen man with a deity, as if to say: “Just as when the tenth-century founder of the KoryЕЏ dynasty received Heaven’s Mandate in the form of Dharmodghata on Mount KЕ-mgang, so too the true successor to the throne meets Kб№Јitigarbha.”

Level-Distance Framework Art historians have remarked on No YЕЏng’s indebtedness to Chinese landscape painting in designing his fourteenth-century screen painting.13 No’s Page 31 →work exemplifies a uniquely Korean stylistic inflection as much as it evokes the paradigmatic styles of several Tang and Song painters, such as Li Zhaodao, Xu Daoning, and Guo Xi. Although most studies on No’s landscape focus on his treatment of the KЕ-mgang Mountain peaks, it is also important to note his use of “level-distance (Ch. pingyuan)” structure as his narrative framework. The concept of “level-distance” began to develop prior to the Song dynasty and

was discussed in writings about landscape painting, including the famous treatise The Lofty Power of Forests and Streams associated with the eleventh-century painter Guo Xi.14 In art historical discourse, the term “level-distance” refers to subject matter—two distinct landmasses separated by a level water surface—as well as to the pictorial technique of vertically stacking a landmass, water, and another landmass as a means of Page 32 →indicating two distant lands separated by a body of water. One frequently cited example of a level-distance structure is found in Dong Yuan’s Wintry Grove and Layered Banks for its clearly defined lowland-water-distant hills construction. (fig. 9) Both as a pictorial subject and as pictorial space-building technique, level-distance has been one of the defining features of East Asian landscape painting tradition. Figure 9. Dong Yuan, Wintry Grove and Layered Banks, ca. 950. Courtesy of the Kurokawa Institute. The level-distance structure of No YЕЏng’s screen is not as readily apparent as it might be in a work done in ink on paper or silk. Because No has used densely concentrated, wiry, and quivering gold brushstrokes for shaping and texturizing, the eye requires some time to adjust. Before long, however, the charged, shimmering gold squiggles stabilize into a familiar level-distance formula, legibly connecting “this shore” with the distant mountains beyond the waters. The three groups of rocky outcroppings in the foreground, respectively supporting Kб№Јitigarbha, No YЕЏng, and the two other worshippers, constitute the landmasses of “this shore,” while the mountainous backdrop for Wang KЕЏn’s encounter with the standing deity Dharmodghata constitutes the distant mountains. Tight curly-cues float down from the top center edge of the panel, hugging the contours of the eight attendant bodhisattvas to bisect the vast range of Mt. KЕ-mgang. The confluence of clouds and mist then settles into a liquid body of water behind Kб№Јitigarbha, forking two ways to define the island throne of the seated deity. Any cultured fourteenth-century Korean viewer would have been sufficiently familiar with the level-distance structure to understand that the waves that divide the foreground from the background do not signal a vacuum or a disconnect. All forms of moisture in this painting—clouds, mist, and ocean waves—were to function as visual ellipses, abbreviating important contents to be completed by the viewer’s mind. In other words, the clouds, mist, and waves do not signal a rupture of the panel, but in fact connect the upper and lower halves of the panel into a continuous statement. Once the eye integrates the background and the foreground into a continuous narrative system, the resonance between the two crouching figures in the lower corners of the parallel sections (figs. 5 and 8) becomes impossible to ignore. Not only are these two figures dressed alike, but their posture, their relationship to the divinities that they worship, and even the flattened rocky outcroppings on which they perform their acts of veneration all echo one another. The only notable differences are that the fourteenth-century worshipper in the lower half of the frame is Page 33 →accompanied by a monk, and that the divinities they worship are of different gods of the Buddhist pantheon, distinguished furthermore by their different scales and postures. These variations notwithstanding, a significant degree of historical resonance between the devout Wang KЕЏn of the tenth century and the unidentified worshipper of No YЕЏng’s time is clearly legible.

The Background (Top Half): A Tenth-Century Miraculous Encounter The source that has illuminated the upper half of the composition is SinjЕ-ng tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnam , a geographical history of Korea.15 This source relates that a divine image appeared before Wang KЕЏn during his ascent to the Diamond Mountain soon after he founded the new dynasty of KoryЕЏ.16 As noted above, the divinity that manifested was the bodhisattva Dharmodgata. This deity had long been considered the patron deity of the mountain. And this legend about Wang KЕЏn’s encounter with the miraculous image of Dharmodgata was part of the dynastic founder’s legitimization process. It is noteworthy, however, that the deity’s mode of apparition has been overlooked in today’s reiterations of the legend. The SinjЕ-ng tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnamincludes a section on a temple

named ChЕЏngyangsa: “When the Founder of KoryЕЏ ascended this mountain, bodhisattva Dharmodgata appeared out of a rock radiating light, whereupon the Founder [Wang KЕЏn] conducted the rites along with his officials before erecting this temple named ChЕЏngyangsa on the Diamond Mountain; this is why the hills behind the Temple are called the Platform for Radiant Light, and the peak in front of it, the Peak of Prostration.”17 The fact that the divine image emerged out of a geological fixture of the very territory over which Wang KЕЏn would rule is a crucial detail that should not to be omitted. The detail must not be overlooked because the politics of KoryЕЏ were, in many aspects, politics of geography. The role that geomancy, or geographic theories of “wind and water (Kr. p’ungsu; Ch. fengshui),” played in the politics of KoryЕЏ is a well-known aspect of the dynasty’s history.18 A famous legend about the birth of the baby Wang KЕЏn, for example, claims that the sage monk TosЕЏn appeared to Wang KЕЏn’s young parents and helped them choose a geomantically favorable location for their new house, facilitating the birth of the future king.19 Wang KЕЏn’s youth, career, and posterityPage 34 → would also be governed by views of politics that were deeply grounded in an unwavering faith in lands and waters as living agents in the workings of the universe and its energies. Geomancy also played a powerful role in many contentious debates over the location of KoryЕЏ capital and of royal tombs. Against this backdrop, the claim that an auspicious sign of the Heavenly Mandate manifested itself as a divine image, on a specific location on the Korean peninsula, must be analyzed in relation to geomancy. The report of the material apparition of Dharmodgata was a territorial claim, consolidating the new ruler’s authority over the Diamond Mountains from which his influence was to radiate outward. In short, the location and the mode of divine manifestation mattered.

The Foreground (Bottom Half): A Fourteenth-Century Encounter When the viewer’s eyes pan out from the background narrative, they are challenged to decipher the implications of Wang KЕЏn’s tenth-century episode within the level-distance structure of the larger composition. If, as noted above, the level-distance framework signals an intimate connection between the two events across the vaporous gap of four centuries, then in what ways do Wang KЕЏn’s founding myth and all its geomantic implications inform the events illustrated in the foreground? Perhaps a dominant reason for the persistent tendency to view the reverse side of No YЕЏng’s screen as a composition containing two mutually exclusive stories is the strong “iconic” characteristic of the Kб№Јitigarbha image in the bottom register. Larger than any other figure in the composition, Kб№Јitigarbha sits frontally and centrally, poised to engage the viewer in an unmediated way. Although the standing image of Dharmodgata in the upper register is also frontal, it is relegated to the upper corner. It is also significantly smaller in scale than Kб№Јitigarbha. Moreover, at least two facts about the labeled worshipper bowing to it—“T’aejo (or, the founding ruler)”—would have distanced the standing Dharmodgata from the fourteenth-century viewer: 1. This is a deity that manifested itself to Wang KЕЏn four centuries prior to the intended viewer’s time, and 2. This is the patron deity of a mountain in a distant region—unless the intended viewer lived in or near Mt. KЕ-mgang in the northeastern province of KangwЕЏn.20 As I will show, the lower register strongly suggests that No YЕЏng’s target audience was not residents of regions near Mt. KЕ-mgang. Instead, thePage 35 →work was probably made near the opposite coast, in the western island of Kanghwa, targeting local residents there (fig. 10). Figure 10. Mt. KЕ-mgang and Kanghwa Island. Belonging to another place and another time, and also belonging to the life story of a specific historical individual, the off-centered, standing image of Dharmodgata functions conspicuously as an icon within a narrative; the viewer’s relationship with this smaller icon is mediated by the strong narrative context. In comparison,

the seated Kб№Јitigarbha below distinguishes itself as the primary icon of this reverse side of the screen. Enthroned majestically on rocky outcroppings, Kб№Јitigarbha the Savior from Hell holds up a jewel that symbolizes his power to fulfill all wishes. In scale, posture, and even the way the diminutive “donors” and worshippers Page 36 →surround him—both in Sino-Korean characters representing their names, or in figural forms—to highlight his centripetal authority, everything about the bottom portion of the panel adheres to the conventional template for icon painting. It thus sustains the currently prevailing view that the primary function of the Kб№Јitigarbha figure here is as an icon to be worshipped by whoever approaches the screen. Without undermining that primary function of the Kб№Јitigarbha figure, however, I would argue that it also participates in the comprehensive narrative of the larger composition. I have already alluded to two aspects of the larger narrative: 1. that the two crouching figures in the lower left corner of each half of the panel echo each other, both in form and in their shared political trajectory, and 2. that No YЕЏng painted for a viewership that was based in a west coast island of Kanghwa. The following details of the historical context for No YЕЏng’s artistic activity will further support my argument that the narrative function of the Kб№Јitigarbha image is as important as its iconic function. By most historical accounts, by the year 1307 the island of Kanghwa was synonymous with failed resistance. In 1232, the military leaders of the Ch’oe family had moved the capital of KoryЕЏ to the island in defiance of those who insisted on fighting the Mongol invasion and those who advocated immediate abdication to the Mongol rulers. Kanghwa was the island to which the military leadership under the Ch’oe family moved.21 For the next four decades, Kanghwa was alternately the base for resistance to the Yuan imperial court, and for resistance to the pro-Yuan KoryЕЏ court. Protected by the sea on all four sides, the capital in exile prospered materially under four generations of Ch’oe family military leaders. Their urban projects were so extensive and extravagant that, to the present day, they are a byword of extravagance. It was also on this island that the famous Tripitaka Koreana (a.k.a. KoryЕЏ Tripitaka, or Eighty-Thousand Tripitaka) was carved as a form of prayer and wish to repel the Yuan Mongols’ aggression against Korea. By 1258, however, the Ch’oe family’s power had dwindled, and in 1270 the KoryЕЏ royal house officially submitted to the Yuan dynasty, returning the KoryЕЏ royal court to its former site, KaegyЕЏng. Not surprisingly, with the return of the KoryЕЏ royal house to the mainland, Kanghwa ceased to be a frequent subject in official records. Its absence from the written record might be read as a sign that Kanghwa lost all political importance after the royal house vacated the island. Although it must be granted that it was no longer the island city of splendor and extravagance that it once was in its heyday between the 1230s and 1270, Page 37 →there is no indication that the city was destroyed to a point of disuse. Although it is likely that the interrupted flow of funds and resources presented challenges to the maintenance of the large temples and mansions, the city was functioning enough to host King Ch’ungnyЕЏl of KoryЕЏ for eighteen months between 1290 and 1291 when Hapdan, a rebel army that arose against the Yuan, invaded the Korean peninsula. Another historical fact of value for our present consideration involves No YЕЏng’s own activity on Kanghwa Island. Kumagai Nobuo and Mun MyЕЏng-dae have noted that the artist No YЕЏng was given the title of pandu, or “Chief of the [Painters’] Division,” when he was commissioned to decorate a temple named SЕЏnwЕЏnsa. SЕЏnwЕЏnsa had been a large and important institution sponsored by the Ch’oe regime during the days of their supremacy over the island capital. Most interesting and significant is the date of the commission, 1327, which was long after the KoryЕЏ government had moved from the island. No YЕЏng’s painterly activity in Kanghwa at such a late date in Koryŏ’s history under the Yuan suggests that artistic production continued as late as fiftyseven years after the royal court had vacated the island. Moreover, the fact that No YЕЏng was active on the island so long after its heyday might serve as an indicator of his political leanings—or, at least, of his social associates’ leanings. While, for obvious reasons, activities in opposition to the now pro-Yuan KoryЕЏ court did not get recorded in official histories, it can be discerned that residual anti-Yuan (and later, anti pro-Yuan) sentiments were not completely

eradicated in this island stronghold of resistance. What we are left to conjecture about No YЕЏng’s political leanings based on the above circumstantial evidence aligns neatly with the story he painted in 1307. The formal resonance between Wang KЕЏn and the figure in the bottom left corner is, then, to be read as an oath of the latter to emulate Wang KЕЏn’s act of subversion. As is well known, Wang KЕЏn rose to power by betraying his superior, Kungye, whose Heavenly Mandate proved obsolete, judging by Wang’s swift and successful overthrow. Evoking Wang KЕЏn as the paradigmatic rebel leader, then, the later prostrated figure whose inscribed name is no longer recognizable probably represents No YЕЏng’s patron, accompanied by a monk, his religious advisor. The names inscribed in the rectangular panel above these two figures probably represent a group of political allies. As a whole, the entire reverse side of No YЕЏng’s screen is a promulgation by a fourteenth-century political group, expressing its subversive intent. Although today’s viewer knows that the intentions of these rebels were not realized, neither the absence of Page 38 →the attempted actions in written records nor the undecipherability of the name over the painted prostrate figure nullifies the declaration that the painted history carries forth. To this clearly legible argument of historical parallel, No YЕЏng adds another visual reference to the island politics; he calls attention to Kб№Јitigarbha’s throne by disturbing a well-ordered universe of religious iconography.

Ksitigarbha on AvalokiteЕ›vara’s Throne As already noted, the physical features of the seated deity at the bottom of the composition identify the figure as Kб№Јitigarbha, the merciful deity who saves damned beings from hell.22 And yet, his throne and his sitting posture are undeniably the iconographic markers of another popular deity of the period: the WaterMoon AvalokiteЕ›vara, otherwise known as the Bodhisattva of Compassion. AvalokiteЕ›vara’s famous home is an island paradise called Potalaka. A drawing provided in Mun MyЕЏng-dae’s 1979 essay on the work by No YЕЏng facilitates the reading of the reverse L-shaped rocky throne (fig. 11). A possible explanation for the conflation of the two deities might be a desire to depict both deities of rivaling popularity. A recently surfaced painting in the collection of Seifukuji in Kyoto, which showcases Kб№Јitigarbha and Water-Moon AvalokiteЕ›vara standing next to each other, would support such an explanation.23 There is, however, a significant difference between presenting two popular deities together in one composition and melding iconographic traits of two deities into a single representation. The decision to enthrone Kб№Јitigarbha on Water-Moon AvalokiteЕ›vara’s signature island abode was probably No YЕЏng’s way of maintaining the physical integrity of Kб№Јitigarbha while also signaling his target viewers’ island existence. AvalokiteЕ›vara’s island home is described in the Avataб№ѓsaka SЕ«tra as a paradise of splendid jewels and sumptuous riches from nature.24 Not surprisingly, KoryЕЏ dynasty painters, who were particularly drawn to visual signifiers of wealth and splendor were drawn to the iconography of the compassionate bodhisattva’s resplendent island home. Typically a KoryЕЏ dynasty painting of AvalokiteЕ›vara in the Island of Potalaka captures a moment described in the final chapter of the Avataб№ѓsaka SЕ«tra, which describes a pilgrim boy Sudhana’s journey through “one hundred cities” in search of wisdom.25 The boy encounters fifty-three wise teachers, among whom AvalokiteЕ›vara is the last teacher that imparts his wisdom. Page 39 → Figure 11. Drawing of the reverse side of No YЕЏng’s screen of 1307 (from Mun, 1979). Page 40 → Figure 12. Water-Moon AvalokiteЕ›vara, fourteenth century. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Page 41 → Figure 13a / 13b. Lower sections of figure 12 (top) and figure 2 (bottom).

Page 42 →There are a variety of compositional formulas that KoryЕЏ dynasty painters used to describe the encounter between AvalokiteЕ›vara and the itinerant student Sudhana. One common layout is exemplified by a celebrated work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 12). AvalokiteЕ›vara is seated on his rocky outcroppings. The bodhisattva is flanked by Sudhana, who looks up at him from a small rocky landing in the lower-right corner of the composition. In the opposite, lower-left corner are the Dragon King and his royal entourage, paying homage to the deity with rich offerings. The positioning of a royal party in the far-left corner, and the earnest seeker of wisdom on a landing that is pushed slightly further into pictorial depth, all to surround a deity seated with his right ankle resting over the left knee, is a combination that intriguingly resonates the lower portion of No YЕЏng’s painted screen (figs. 13a and 13b). It would seem that No YЕЏng was counting on certain visual habits of fourteenth-century viewers in order to underscore a parallel between Sudhana’s famous visit to Potalaka and his own presence on the island of Kanghwa in pursuit of Kб№Јitigarbha’s guidance. The resonance between the Dragon King and No YЕЏng’s patron in the lower-left corners is also intriguing. Finally, it is worth noting the ontological distinction between the two divine presences that No YЕЏng has documented in this painting. Although, as noted above, No YЕЏng’s parallel construction underscores the interrelationship between the tenth- and fourteenth-century rebels, No YЕЏng’s pictorial language seems to be differentiating the temporal-specific physical manifestation at Mt. KЕ-mgang in the top half and a timeless divine presence on the island of Kanghwa below. Both Dharmodgata and Kб№Јitigarbha are halo-ed to indicate their transcendental status. Yet, while the seated Kб№Јitigarbha is encircled in a transparent perfect circle, the standing Dharmodgata above is surrounded by a body aureole of undulating lines that can be easily perceived as both radiating divine light and the fiery energy from the image’s physical emergence from a rocky surface of a Diamond Mountain peak. The nervous energy of the squiggly lines claim materiality while the unmodeled, transparent circle of Kб№Јitigarbha suggests a diaphanous ornament for an immaterial being that is invisible yet there. The parallel presentation of the two divine bodies—one form existing for the physical eye and another for the mind’s eye—reveals certain assumptions about religious images. The following, final section considers why No YЕЏng deemed it necessary to distinguish the ontological statuses of the two deities. As such, the Page 43 →discussion departs temporarily from the image-text at hand, in order to consider a general undercurrent of geomantic thinking that governed late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Korean notions of religious images as political omen. The sources reviewed in the following section suggest that, in the twilight of the KoryЕЏ dynasty, a new urge to claim location-specific divine presences emerged. And that desire necessitated an unmistakable distinction between different modes of seeing divine images.

Divine Presences and Their Locations A surge of interest in location-specific, visible manifestations of auspicious Buddhist images becomes particularly pronounced in historical texts written after 1270, when Koryŏ’s long resistance to the Yuan dynasty officially came to an end. Once the Koryŏ court agreed to move from the island capital and began its existence as a vassal state to the Mongol empire, an impulse to restore a sense of a distinct Korean past found many expressions, including the Samguk yusa (Miscellaneous History of the Three Kingdoms), compiled sometime between 1282 and 1289. Attributed to Iryŏn (1206–89), a Korean monk who was bestowed the title of Enlightened National Preceptor (pogak guksa) by King Ch’ungnyŏl (r.1273–1308) of Koryŏ, the book project began twelve years after the Koryŏ court ceded its sovereignty to the Yuan dynasty. In the Yusa, Iryŏn notes a glaring omission of legends and marvels in previously published Korean histories, and assertively reinstates the supernatural into their rightful places in the history of Koryŏ and its predecessors.26 Significantly, Iryŏn demonstrates a profound knowledge of China’s tradition of auspicious omens, or xiangrui, including physical signs that the Chinese and Koreans interpreted as evidence of the

Heavenly Mandate. The prologue of the Yusa begins by critiquing the more rigid Confucian historiography and its overt discrimination against legends.27 “However,” IryЕЏn contests, “those destined to become emperors were certainly distinct from common men,” as they received physical signs from Heaven. The main chapters of the Samguk yusa are replete with specific legends about famous sculptures of India floating or flying into Korea out of their own volition. For example, IryЕЏn reports that a six-foot golden Buddha Triad of Hwangnyongsa (Temple of Golden Dragon) “came to Korea” in the form of raw materials because the triad refused to be constructed when the great Indian Buddhist royal exemplar AЕ›oka tried to make it. Only when King Page 44 →AЕ›oka shipped the iron to the Korean Silla dynasty did the image will itself to be formed. By the time IryЕЏn was compiling the Yusa, the legendary Hwangnyongsa triad, as well as the glorious temple itself, had been destroyed by the Mongols. While the Yusa is replete with fascinating miracle tales, the most relevant fact for the present discussion is that IryЕЏn felt compelled to present the stories about divine manifestations appearing in, or migrating into, the Korean peninsula as historical facts. The conflation of Buddhist marvels with the age-old Chinese belief in auspicious omens was not IryЕЏn’s innovation. IryЕЏn’s compilation of tales about miraculous apparitions of Buddhist images was modeled after Chinese precedents, particularly seventh-century Tang dynasty collections of marvels including those of Daoxuan, Daoshi, and Xuanzang.28 These collections included many fantastic stories about images that flew or floated around, those that spoke, cried, sweated, and destroyed then restored themselves, most often as a response to, or as a prognosis of, dynastic fate. These stories were retold in the visual field as well. Empress Wu is famous for her brilliant visual propaganda through which she argued the predetermined rise of China as the ultimate dwelling of choice for the most famous of all Buddhist sculptures, while she also pitched their migration as signs of Heaven’s Mandate and used them to defend her usurpation of the throne.29 The relevance of these Chinese precedents to our understanding of the fourteenth-century Korean lacquer screen is not difficult to discern. The arguments that emerged during the waning years of the KoryЕЏ dynasty are similarly structured, inflected to promote specific sites within the Korean peninsula as the preferred dwelling places of famous Buddhist deities. Just as the Chinese had argued that famous Indian images chose to migrate to China on their own volition, the KoryЕЏ monk-historian also felt compelled to collect evidence of divine preference for the Korean peninsula as well. The literary organization and expositional style of IryЕЏn’s Samguk yusa render the author’s awareness of the Chinese miracle stories quite evident. IryЕЏn’s indebtedness to Daoshi’s Fa yuan zhu lin is particularly evident, which makes sense, as Daoshi’s text was included in the Koreana Tripitaka. Recall that this massive set of sutras in woodblocks was recarved on Kanghwa Island between 1236 and 1251 after the first set was destroyed in a fire during a battle with the Mongols. Moreover, IryЕЏn was called to Kanghwa Island in 1261 by King WЕЏnjong to serve as his religious adviser. Given the timing of IryЕЏn’s tenure on the island, there is little doubt that he would have had access to the famously revived edition of the canon. Page 45 →IryЕЏn was not alone in his effort to document divine manifestations on the Korean peninsula as a historical event. An epitaph written by a renowned Korean scholar-official named Yi Kok (1298–1351) reports another incident of Bodhisattva Dharmodgata’s manifestation on the Diamond Mountain and similarly places an emphasis on the location of the divine manifestation.30 Yi Kok’s record concerns an event surrounding the birth of a prince to Empress Ki, a daughter of a KoryЕЏ aristocratic family who later married the eleventh Yuan dynasty emperor Shundi (r.1333–70). In this record, Yi Kok first praises Empress Ki’s role in the renovation of a Korean Temple named Changan Monastery on Mt. KЕ-mgang between 1343 and 1346, and for “filling one hundred and twenty chambers with thousands of Buddhist sculptures.” Of particular relevance to our present discussion is Yi Kok’s description of the location of the temple on Mt. KЕ-mgang:

The excellence of this mountain is known throughout the world under Heaven, and even written in the Buddhist scriptures. According to the Avataб№ѓsaka SЕ«tra, “there is Mt. Vajra (Kr. KЕ-mgang) in the midst of the northeastern sea. This is the place where 12,000 Bodhisattva Dharmodgata always preach the Heart Sutra.”31 The reference to 12,000 Dharmodgatas must be understood as one manifestation of the single deity per each of Mt. KЕ-mgang’s famed “12,000 peaks.” Although Yi Kok does not specify in what form the manifestations would have occurred, it helps us understand Yi’s subsequent discussion of the particular divinity toward the end of the epitaph: This blessed place (Mt. KЕ-mgang) is where the Buddhist deity [Dharmodgata] conceals Himself, but has wisely revealed [Himself as an] auspicious omen (xiangrui). An auspicious event is indeed upon the Heaven’s Son (the Emperor of China, i.e. Xundi of the Yuan). Heaven’s Mandate continues to be bestowed upon him. The birth of the imperial descendant will consolidate the Way in concert with Heaven. The Empress told a servant, “That dharmakaya has caused many conversions, thereby renewing this palaceВ .В .В . Record the event so as to ensure that its [i.e., the dharmakДЃya’s] achievements are not forgotten.32 Empress Ki’s evocation of a “dharmakДЃya” suggests her and her audience’s awareness of a Buddhist typology of divine manifestations into three categories.Page 46 → The “Three Bodies of the Buddha (trikaya)” system distinguished the Buddha’s ontology into a three-fold hierarchy: the DharmakДЃya (Ch. fashen), or “true body” at the top of the hierarchy, refers to the invisible and inconceivable, formless Buddha body, which embodies the very principle of enlightenment33; NirmanakДЃya (Ch. huashen), or “transformation body” at the bottom of the rung, is defined as a perceptible form of the Buddha, able to manifest itself in time and space “in response to the need to teach sentient beings.”34 SambhogakДЃya (Ch. baoshen), or “retribution body, ” is the most challenging category to conceptualize.35 It is a nondual form and concept lying somewhere between the “true body” and the “transformation body,” perceptible yet imperceptible, depending on the level of the viewer’s or visualizer’s faculty. Definitions of SambhogakДЃya are wide-ranging, but one definition that is thought-provoking in view of No YЕЏng’s work is that SambhogakДЃya is a visionary experience of a divine being in his divine abode. Although this concept might hold a key to an important layer of this work, for our present purpose it suffices to establish that the “true body” of a divine being is an invisible body, while the “transformation body” is an expedient means by which a devotee can apprehend the concept of the Buddha and that it requires an identity in terms of space and time. In evoking the past manifestation of Bodhisattva Dharmodgata on Mt. KЕ-mgang to Wang KЕЏn, Yi Kok was clearly implying that Dharmodgata emerged out of a rock as “transformation body (NirmanakДЃya).” Afterwards, Yi implies, the divine body remained in the mountain as “true body (DharmakДЃya),” invisible but there, until the new Korean-Mongol prince was born, at which point the divine presence showed itself to the human eye again. This belief that divine beings usually conceal themselves until called upon to reveal their “transformed body” at a given moment and in a given place underlies No YЕЏng’s pictorial narrative.36 Before returning to our primary image text to clinch my overall argument in terms of visibility and invisibility, it may be worthwhile contemplating Yi Kok’s report in terms of Koryŏ’s sense of self as a state. It is difficult to discern what exactly the birth of the Korean-Mongol prince meant to Yi Kok, whose KoryЕЏ dynasty was already deeply integrated into the Yuan imperial system. Yi’s epitaph maintains a delicate balance between his loyalty to the present Son of Heaven (the Yuan emperor) and his enthusiasm about the Korean Empress’s intimate connection to the auspicious mountain of Korea. Clearly, the birth of the partKorean prince and his future accession to the imperial throne—which would, in fact, take place twenty-four years later—were a cause to celebrate, and the

reported Page 47 →manifestation of the patron deity of Mt. KЕ-mgang was a loaded geopolitical allusion. Though pregnant with a range of hopes, Yi Kok’s report does not necessarily posture the peninsula against the Yuan empire. But it nevertheless seems to be aimed at elevating the lot of the peninsula within the larger imperial system of Mongol China. The geopolitical boundaries of “Korea” vis-Г -vis the Yuan dynasty shifted broadly in the minds of late KoryЕЏ thinkers. Regardless, the two written sources discussed in this section—IryЕЏn’s history from the 1280s and Yi Kok’s epitaph about an event of 1340—seem to suggest continued interest in visible manifestations of Buddhist images as geographically determined political omens. IryЕЏn’s Samguk yusa was an attempt to assert a new historiography that served to remind the people of KoryЕЏ that the Korean peninsula had a long track record of being chosen by miraculous Buddha images as their dwelling of choice. Yi Kok’s recollection of the events surrounding the half-Korean prince’s birth in 1340 also attempts to argue a cause-effect relationship between the birth and a reported miraculous manifestation in the form of a Buddhist image. For both IryЕЏn and Yi Kok, miraculous appearances of Buddhist images were couched in terms of auspicious omen (xiangrui), and accordingly the manifestations were both responsive and predictive. Much like any other traditional East Asian omens (xiangrui) that at once judged the virtues of a dynastic ruler and prescribed the fate of his dynasty, the miraculous Buddhist images (ruixiang) too showed themselves in sympathetic response to virtuous leaders worthy of Heaven’s support and in prediction of their future success. Created in 1307, roughly midway between IryЕЏn’s and Yi Kok’s writings, No YЕЏng’s image text reveals a notion of miraculous images that echoes the view of miraculous signs shared by IryЕЏn and Yi Kok. Significantly, No YЕЏng’s Kб№Јitigarbha lacks the visual signs of physical emergence that characterize Dharmodgata’s manifestation depicted in the register above. The contrast between the two divine presences may suggest that the Kб№Јitigarbha image represents the “true body” or “retribution body” of the deity, one that is there but not yet visible to the human eye. It is important to recognize that No YЕЏng’s artistic medium of painting effectively articulates—in fact shows—this potential of a resident divine presence to manifest itself to the human eye. After all, in medieval religious context, the power of the painted icon lay precisely in its ability to give physical form to what is not yet visible yet brimming with potential to become visible upon being summoned by prayers and remarkable virtues of an emerging ruler. Page 48 →

Concluding Remarks While more layers of No Yŏng’s rich pictorial narrative remain to be unveiled, the foregoing discussion addressed a critical misstep in past approaches to the work. It showed that the two halves of the vertical composition were designed as a cohesive narrative system, and that the entire panel is about a dominant political ideology in East Asian tradition: a systemic attempt to normalize certain transgressive acts of subversion in the name of the Heavenly Mandate. It is critical to acknowledge that the main protagonist of the reverse side of No Yŏng’s screen is the modest figure in the lower-left corner, representing a fourteenth-century political player in the artist’s circle. The figure is deliberately formed and positioned to echo that of the founder of the Koryŏ dynasty shown above, to suggest that the fourteenth-century figure harbored aspirations that mirrored those of the more famous tenth-century rebel-turned-ruler. No Yŏng devised innovative pictorial techniques to advance his associate’s “transgressive” agenda, to advertise, to wish for, and to show faith in a miraculous sign of Heavenly support. The exclusion of unrealized efforts and failed aspirations from the written record ensured that the name of the unsuccessful fourteenth-century rebel be omitted in

mainstream histories. No Yŏng’s narrative skill, however, preserves the rebel’s ambition as a historical fact. Within the meaningful architecture of his painted landscape, No Yŏng carefully plotted the historical players to offer an argument in defense of political transgression as a natural part of the cyclical history of man under Heaven.

Notes My interest in No YЕЏng’s screen grew out of a paper on paintings of Amitabha’s descent (naeyЕЏngdo) that I presented at a workshop organized by Kim Sun-joo of Harvard University (February 2012). At the gathering, I received invaluable comments from Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang, Youngsook Pak, Insoo Cho, and Soyoung Lee. The final and most critical impetus to delve deeper into No YЕЏng’s screen as a research topic is owed to Juhn Ahn of the University of Michigan, whose conference on the topic of transgression led me to question what the screen may be saying about Wang KЕЏn’s “transgression” of subversion. I thank everyone whose names I mention here, as well as many other generous colleagues whose names space does not allow me to list. Finally, my special thanks to Christian de Pee and Kenneth Koo for their sharp criticisms on different drafts of this paper, and to Richard McBride for useful information about IryЕЏn and the history of KoryЕЏ in general. Page 49 →1. See Perry 2002, xi–xxxii, for an insightful discussion of the differences between the Chinese concept of Heavenly Mandate and the European notions of divine right of kings. Note that Perry distinguishes the Japanese view of the emperor from that of the early Chinese, as traditionally the Japanese accepted the emperor’s right to rule as his birthright. The present article confirms that Koreans during the KoryЕЏ dynasty held a view closer to that of the Chinese. 2. Soper 1948, 19. 3. Perry 2002, xi–xxxii. 4. The conventional title in Korean for this iconographic formula is Amit’a kujondo, or “Painting of Nine Beings [including] Amitabha.” 5. Among many extant comparisons are works of the same title in the following collections: Avery Brundage Collection, B72D38, late fourteenth century; Kofukugo koku zenji, Japan, late KoryЕЏ (National Museum of Korea 2010, 74–75, fig. 25); Tokyo bijutsu daigaku, late fourteenth century (National Museum of Korea 2010, 76–77, fig. 26). 6. For a scholarly introduction to Korean representations of Ksitigarbha, see Pak Yong-sook 1982, 18–31. 7. This observation was first made in Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1979, 53. 8. Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1979; Kumagai Nobuo 1952, 44–49. 9. Kumagai Nobuo proposes that the inscribed names might represent cosponsors of the project. Mun MyЕЏng-dae deems Kumagai’s suggestion about the financial involvement of the represented individuals tenuous (Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1979, 53). 10. The number 8 of the attendant bodhisattvas probably represents multiples of 8, essentially meaning “a myriad” attendants. 11. To list only a few: Ko Yu-sЕЏp 1935; National Museum of Korea 2010, 80–83; An Hwi-jЕ-n 1980, 20; Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1979; Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1980, 2–10; Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1991, 76–77, 79, 82, 84–85; Yu, Mari and Kim, SЕ-nghui ed. 2004, 32–33; Pak Е¬n-sun 1997. 12. It is worth noting Mun MyЕЏng-dae’s thought-provoking proposal that the two registers cohabit the single surface on No YЕЏng’s screen under the influence of the bianxiang (transformation tableaux) tradition. Found ubiquitously on the walls of Dunhuang caves and elsewhere, a bianxiang often compresses multiple narrative vignettes that are not directly related to each other around a compositional center. As the following discussion will show, however, the particular halves that No YЕЏng has combined in his fourteenth-century painting are directly related (Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1991, 76–77, 79, 82, 84–85).

13. An Hwi-jun 1974, 71; Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1980, 7. 14. Guo Xi’s words are transmitted in the treatise compiled and submitted to the throne in the twelfth century by the artist’s son, Guo Si. 15. The SinjЕ-ng tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnam(Newly Expanded Geographical Treatise of Korea), a fifty-five-volume series, was published in 1530. This series was rather faithfully based on a fifteenth-century original, the Tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnamin fifty volumes, compiled in 1481. Both versions were published under the auspices of the ChosЕЏn dynasty court. 16. A version of the same story is also contained in ChЕЏng Hong-gwan’s Kum pyЕЏngnok (ca. 1830), a travelogue composed in the vicinity of Mt. KЕ-mgang and along the east coast of the Korean peninsula. Page 50 →17. Yi PyЕЏng-do 1969, 94. A Korean translation can also be searched in http://db.itkc.or.kr/itkcdb/mainIndexIframe.jsp (Database of Korean Classics), but the printed text provides a facsimile of the original Sino-Korean character. 18. Chang Chi-yЕЏn 2010. Kim Ch’ang-hyЕЏn 2011, and Sem Vermeersch, 2008, 101–12. 19. Vermeersch 2008, 105. 20. This is not to completely undermine the iconic functionality of the upper register. Here I am merely comparing the degree of iconicity of the two registers, solely for the purpose of arguing that the Ksitigarbha image in the lower register shows more immediately recognizable iconic traits. In fact, it should be noted that even painted images of Mt. KЕ-mgang were venerated as a sacred site. See Mun MyЕЏng-dae 1980, 9. 21. The camp that opposed the move to Kanghwa Island included those who regarded resistance against the Mongol Yuan dynasty all but futile, and those who insisted on resistance to the bitter end on the mainland. 22. Digital Dictionary of Buddhism provides the following definition for Ksitigarbha: “.В .В .В Though associated with Yama as overlord, and with the dead and the hells, his role is that of saviorВ .В .В . he is accredited with power over the hells and is devoted to the saving of all creatures between the nirvāṇa of ЕљДЃkyamuni and the advent of Maitreya in the fifth century he has been especially considered as the deliverer from the hells.В .В .В .” Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, Kб№Јitigarbha bodhisattva (article by Muller and Foulk), updated 3/1/13. 23. A reproduction can be found in Chen Minghua 1999, 164. 24. For a comprehensive monograph on the Bodhisattva of Compassion, see Chun-fang Yu 2001. 25. Figure 5 currently belongs in the collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a short online essay on the particular work, see http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/14.76.6 26. See Richard McBride 2006, 31–59. 27. ж•ж›°е¤§жЉµеЏ¤д№‹иЃ–人方其禮樂興邦仁義иЁ-ж•™е‰‡жЂЄеЉ›дє‚зҐћењЁж‰ЂдёЌиЄћз„¶иЂЊеёќзЋ‹д№‹е°‡и€€д№џи†єз¬¦е‘ЅеЏ—ењ Print reproduction found in Kang In-gu, Kim Du-jin et al., 2002, 442. 28. Xuanzang returned to China in 645 with his famous travelogue and sketches and models of famous sculptures of the West, Daoxuan (d. 667) wrote the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu gao seng zhuan), and Daoshi completed Fa yuan zhu lin in 668. 29. It is worth noting that the narrative-type paintings (a category into which our lacquer painting would fall) are often labeled “shijitu” or History Painting. Although this is a term coined by modern historians, it reveals much about the relationship between this particular category of mid-Tang through early-Song paintings and the equally significant output of literary histories (such as those by Daoshi, Daoxuan, and Xuanzang) at the time, and compels us to think about the possible relationship between IryЕЏn’s historiography and the concurrent rise of the new pictorial idiom. 30. The epitaph was written on a stele made in commemoration of the renovation of Temple Changan. It was located in KangwЕЏn Province, KЕ-mgang kun Naegang-ni ChanggyЕЏng Peak of Mt. KЕ-mgang. While the stele no longer exists, the text is transcribed inKajЕЏngjip and TongmunsЕЏn, and also in the

Tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnam. Page 51 →31. Yi PyЕЏng-do, eds. 1969, 24 (Sino-Korean section), 90 (Korean Translation section). The reference to 12,000 of the same Bodhisattva can be understood as 12,000 manifestations of the single divine being who appears at each of the 12,000 peaks of Mt. KЕ-mgang. 32. Yi PyЕЏng-do, eds. 1969, 24 (Sino-Korean section), 93 (Korean Translation section). 33. According to the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (hereafter, DDB): “In general MahДЃyДЃna teaching, the dharma-body is a name for absolute existence, the manifestation of all existences—the true body of reality, or Buddha as eternal principle; the body of essence that is pure, possesses no marks of distinction, and is the same as emptiness (Skt. dharmakДЃya),” updated 03/16/2010. 34. DDB: “The transformation of the Buddha’s body into the form of a sentient being in order to teach and save them. In order to teach sentient beings, this kind of buddha-manifestation utilizes superknowledges to appropriately discern and respond to their various capacities,” updated 12/23/09. 35. DDB: “The ideal body of a buddha which is produced upon entering Buddhahood as the result of vows undertaken during the practices in the bodhisattva path. The body of the Buddha with which the blissful reward of enlightenment is enjoyed (Skt. saб№ѓbhoga-kДЃya; Tib. longs sku).В .В .В . The notion of reward-body overlaps with that of вЂresponse-body [Ch. yingshen],’ with the distinction being made in terms of the level of the perceiver,” updated 10/27/2012. Also see Peter Harvey 1995. 36. This conceptual framework is entirely consistent with the interpretive framework of another widely told tale involving a divine manifestation. Monk Chinp’yo of Unified Silla famously encountered a “transformation body” of Ksitigarbha as a spiritual response (Kr. kamЕ-ng) to his faith and virtues. Although the event reportedly took place in the seventh century, the “historian” who documented the story as a piece of history is, significantly, IryЕЏn. This episode is briefly discussed in Mun 1979, 53.

Works Cited Ahn, Hwi-joon, 1974. “An GyЕЏn gwa gЕ- Е-i hwap’ung—mongyudowЕЏndo rЕ-l chungshim Е-ro (Pictorial style of An KyЕЏn—with focus Dream on Journey to the Peach Blossom Orchard).” Chindan Hakbo 38: 49–80. Ahn, Hwi-joon. 1980a. “Hanguk Sansuhwa Е-i Paldal YЕЏngu (A Study on the Development of Korean Landscape Painting).”Misul Charyo 26. Ahn, Hwi-joon. 1980b. Hanguk Howhwasa (History of Korean Painting). Paju: Iljisa. Chang Chi’yЕЏn. 2010. “KoryЕЏ-Early Choson kukdo p’ungsu yЕЏngu (On Geomancy and Capital City in KoryЕЏ and Early Choson).” PhD Thesis. Seoul National University, Department of Korean History. Chen, Minghua. 1999. Hanguo fojiao meishu (Art of Korean Buddhism). Taipei: Yishu Tushu Gongsi. Harvey, Peter. 2013. Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History, and Practices, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kang, In-gu, and Kim Du-jin, eds. 2002. YЕЏkju Samguk Yusa (An Annotated Translation of the Samguk Yusa). Seoul: The Academy of Korean Studies. Page 52 →Kim, Ch’ang-hyЕЏn. 2011. KoryЕЏ ui Pulgyo wa Sangdo KaegyЕЏng (KoryЕЏ Buddhism and the Capital Kaegyong). Seoul: ShinsЕЏwon.

Ko, Yu-sЕЏp. 1935. “KoryЕЏ hwajЕЏk e taehayЕЏ (On Pictorial Relics of KoryЕЏ).” Hanguk misul munhwasa nonch’ong. McBride, Richard. 2006. “A Koreanist’s Musings on the Chinese Yishi Genre.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 6 (1). Seoul: Academy of East Asian Studies: 31–59. Mun, Myong-dae. 1979. “No YЕЏng Е-i Amita [&] Chijang purhwa e taehan koch’al (An examination of No YЕЏng’s Painting of Amitabha & Ksitigarbha).” Misul Charyo 25. National Museum of Korea. Mun, Myong-dae. 1980. “No YЕЏng p’il Amita Kujondo TwinmyЕЏn Purhwa Е-i ChaegЕЏmt’o (A Re-examination of the Reverse Side of the Amitabha Assembly Painting by No YЕЏng).” Ko Munhwa 18. Association of Korean University Museums: 2–10. Mun, Myong-dae. 1991. KoryЕЏ Purhwa (KoryЕЏ Buddhist Painting). Paju: Yorhwadang. National Museum of Korea. 2010. Masterpieces of Goryeo Buddhist Painting, 2010. Nobuo, Kumagai. 1952. “A Screen Painting of Shakyamuni in Gold on Lacquer by No YЕЏng.” Bijutsu KenkyЕ« 175 (May): 44–49. Pak, Е¬n-sun. 1997. Kumgangsando Yongu (Study of Painting of Mt. Kumgang). Paju: Iljisa. Pak, Yong-sook. 1982. “KoryЕЏ sidae Е-i Chijangdosang e po’inЕ-n myЕЏtgaji munjejЕЏm (A few issues on Ksitigarbha Images of the KoryЕЏ dynasty).” Misulsa YЕЏn’gu (formerly Kogo Misul) 157 (3). Hanguk Misulsa Hakhoe: 18–31. Soper, Alexander. 1948. “Hsiang-kuo ssi: An Imperial Temple of Northern Sung.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 68 (1). Vermeersch, Sem. 2008. The Power of the Buddha: The Politics of Buddhism during the KoryЕЏ dynasty (918–1392). Harvard East Asian Monographs 303. Yi, PyЕЏng-do, ed. 1985. “Province Hoeyang, in Chapter 47,” in Kug’yЕЏk SinjЕ-ng Tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnam(Newly Expanded Geographical Treatise of Korea in Korean) 4. Seoul: Minjok munhwa chujinhoe. YГј, Chun-fang. 2001. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara. New York: Columbia University. Yu, Mari, and SЕ-nghui Kim, eds. 2004.Pulgyo Hoehwa. Seoul: Sol Publishing.

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2 The Trickster as Transgressor in Traditional Korean Society Charles La Shure It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the study of the trickster began in the West, as the figure is one of the oldest archetypes found in literature. We can, however, find the precise moment when the term “trickster” was first used in English-language scholarship to refer to this archetypal figure, and at least take that as our starting point of modern trickster studies. This precise moment was in 1885, when Daniel Brinton used the term to describe the Cree character known as WisakketjГўk (Brinton 1890, 131).1 Even this starting point is somewhat arbitrary, though, as Brinton had already dealt with the seemingly contradictory characteristics of Native American deities nearly twenty years earlier (Brinton 1868, 159–92), and the term “trickster” itself was merely Brinton’s translation of a French word (un fourbe) found in a French dictionary of the Cree language. In any case, this term entered academic parlance as a designation for a character archetype, and the roots of modern American trickster studies can be traced to the work of Brinton and other early scholars of Native American traditions, such as Franz Boas (Boas 1898 and 1914). While trickery may be one of the most conspicuous aspects of the trickster’s personality, though, it is not the defining or even most important aspect of his character. He could have easily been called any number of other things—such as “transgressor.” To transgress literally means to “go across,” and what is the trickster but a character who crosses any and every boundary that he encounters? This transgressive aspect of his character has been at the heart of scholarly discussions of the trickster’s Page 54 →nature: early scholars such as Boas saw it as a conundrum to be solved, Paul Radin argued that it was a means by which the trickster tested and defined social boundaries (Radin 1956, 132–46), and later scholars such as Laura Makarius understood it to be the source of the trickster’s power (Makarius 1969, 1973, and 1993). It is unlikely that this argument will ever be put to rest, but it has become clear that understanding the trickster’s liminal nature is an important step to understanding the trickster figure and his role.2 In the century since trickster studies began, trickster figures have been found in nearly every literary tradition around the world, and Korean literature is no exception. Although the modern study of Korean tricksters got a relatively late start,3 the field has been a lively arena for discussion and scholarship over the last three decades. There have been too many trickster figures discussed in Korean folklore and fiction, both animal and human, to cover here, but an examination of three popular human tricksters in orally transmitted folk tales—Pang Hakchung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏn-dal—should provide a good foundation for an understanding of the role tricksters played in Korean folklore and society. In particular, they are a lucid window into the function of transgression in premodern Korea.

Late ChosЕЏn Society and the Rise of the Trickster Our three representative trickster figures all emerged during the late ChosЕЏn period, generally defined as the three hundred years from the Japanese invasion of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the ChosЕЏn Dynasty at the end of the nineteenth century. This was an era of turmoil on the Korean peninsula as the ruling order of ChosЕЏn proved more and more ineffective and feudal society began to crumble. Although the nation weathered the crisis of the Japanese invasion, the dynasty soon had to deal with an insurrection led by Yi Kwal in 1624 and two invasions by the Manchus in 1627 and 1636, the second ending with King Injo himself surrendering to the invaders. The remainder of the late ChosЕЏn period was punctuated by a succession of popular uprisings and movements that sought to tear down the feudal order and establish a new society. The motivation behind these uprisings can be seen in the manifesto published by the leader of one famous uprising at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hong KyЕЏng-nae: “Now a young king sits on the Page 55 →throne, so treacherous subjects who exercise authority flourish, with the likes of Kim Cho-sun and Pak Chong-gyЕЏng having their way with the rule of the nation. Thus the benevolent heavens have rained down calamity, and there is

not a year that has not seen winter lightning, earthquakes, comets, wind, and hail. Because of this famine continues year after year, the starving and swollen masses lie scattered in the streets, and young and old alike fall into pits, so that almost none are left alive” (Ko 2000, 149). The goal of a manifesto, of course, is to stir people to action, so a certain amount of embellishment and poetic license is expected. While it may not be rational to blame natural disasters on the political situation, we can at least conclude from this that conditions for the common people of ChosЕЏn were less than ideal. These conditions are ripe, however, for the emergence of the trickster. Natural disasters were not the only thing that plagued the people of late ChosЕЏn. In fact, a confluence of factors led to a rise in the number of wandering peoples (yumin), as farmers left their hometowns and took to the highways and byways in an attempt improve their miserable existences. These factors included: an increase in the number of tenant farmers as a result of the centralization of land ownership that made development of agricultural productivity possible; the advent of usury that accompanied the development of the commodity money economy; various taxes and obligations imposed on the lower classes, including the three major obligations of land taxes, military service, and the grain exchange system4; and the increase in population that led to an even greater shortage of farmland (Byun 1997, 7–19). This rise in the population of wandering peoples is particularly relevant to trickster tales, as the trickster’s wandering nature is both a physical representation of his liminality and a literal manifestation of his transgression. As will be seen in the tales discussed below, many of the trickster’s tricks are played on people he meets during his travels—and are in fact only possible because he is among strangers who do not know his true nature. On the most basic level, trickster tales could be seen as cautionary tales in a society where people are less likely to know each other well. But as the trickster is generally the protagonist of these tales, it seems more reasonable to see them as an expression of defiance and protest against the deteriorating social conditions. Tricksters were not the only unlikely protagonists to emerge in the literature of the late ChosЕЏn period. In addition to popular uprisings and other movements, ChosЕЏn was also plagued by bandits. The Practical Learning Page 56 →(silhak) scholar Yi Ik mentions three bandit leaders in particular: Hong Kil-tong, Im KkЕЏk-chЕЏng, and Chang Kil-san.5 Although they were a thorn in the side of the government, bandit leaders such as these were hailed as heroes by later generations. The most famous of these, Hong Kil-tong, was the protagonist of The Tale of Hong Kil-tong, a novel written by HЕЏ Kyun shortly after the Japanese invasion. In the novel, the legendary bandit leads an insurrection against the corrupt government but eventually leaves the peninsula to establish his ideal kingdom elsewhere. These bandits share with the trickster a wandering and transgressive nature, although they differ in other important aspects that we will return to later. This was the ChosЕЏn where the trickster took the stage: shaken by foreign invasions and domestic uprisings, plagued by natural disasters, and thrashing about in the death throes of the feudal order. In such a liminal period, the appearance of a liminal figure like the trickster was only natural. Yet for as inevitable as any change may ultimately turn out to be, there are those who will resist it; in this case, those who benefited from the ruling order tried to stem the tide of change, and to them any threat to their social order was deemed transgressive. For those who did not benefit from the ruling order, though, this only made figures such as the trickster even more popular.

Three Korean Trickster Figures and Their Tales Pang Hak-chung, Chŏng Man-sŏ, and Kim Sŏn-dal, as mentioned above, were thought to have lived sometime during the nineteenth century. Pang Hak-chung and Chŏng Man-sŏ both hailed from North Kyŏngsang Province (specifically, the areas of Yŏngdŏk and Yŏnggil, respectively) in the southeastern portion of the Korean peninsula, while Kim Sŏn-dal was a resident of P’yŏngyang in what is now North Korea.6 They were all considered historical individuals by the people who told their tales; when Korean scholars embarked on large-scale folktale-collecting expeditions in the 1970s and 1980s, they encountered storytellers who claimed to be their descendants. Even if these individuals did once exist, there is no doubt that they became legendary figures over the years as a wider variety of antics and escapades were associated with them. When their tales were collected in the twentieth

century, it was discovered that the same tales featured one trickster figure in some versions and another trickster figure in other versions.Page 57 → Cho Tong-il explained this as the result of storytellers simply substituting the characters with which they were most familiar (Cho 1980, 257). Cho HЕ-i-ung agreed, calling the protagonists “interchangeable elements” that were ultimately secondary to the plot of the tale itself (Cho 1983, 5). This seems logical, since the process of transmission in oral literature generally involves remembering the larger structure and swapping details in and out of these structural slots as necessary. Now, hundreds of years after these individuals were purported to have lived, they have in some cases become similar, if not interchangeable, pieces in the puzzle. This is not true in all cases, though; there are still some tales that usually feature a particular protagonist. These tales focus on some aspect of the character’s distinct socioeconomic background or personality. Kim SЕЏndal, for example, lived in a bustling urban area, and in one of his most famous tales he invests money in a con to bilk his mark of a much larger sum. Pang Hak-chung and ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, on the other hand, are poor country folk, and Pang Hak-chung in particular is often depicted as a servant. When comparing the images of ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ and Kim SЕЏn-dal in recorded tales, Kim HЕЏn-sЕЏn saw them as two sides of a coin: “Kim (SЕЏn-dal) is a thoughtful and deliberate character, while ChЕЏng (Man-sЕЏ) is a bold character who simply acts first” (Kim 1990, 133). Of the three, ChЕЏng MansЕЏ is the most likely to try to talk his way out of (or into!) a situation, Pang Hak-chung is the most likely to play a trick or prank on someone, and Kim SЕЏn-dal is the most likely to plan carefully for a big score. Thus, while there are many tales that might feature any one of these three trickster figures, there are also tales unique to each character. Only Pang Hak-chung appears as a seemingly loyal servant who accompanies his yangban (aristocrat) master on a trip to Seoul but betrays and deceives him at every turn, until finally the aristocrat can take it no more and sends Pang Hak-chung home to be punished—only to return later and find that his servant deceived his family and won his youngest daughter in marriage. Only ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ has the nerve to shout out “Ring the curfew bell!” and later claim that he was calling for his son, or the gall to joke casually when informed of his son’s death. And only Kim SЕЏn-dal has the capital and the cleverness to convince a passing stranger that he owns the rights to all the water in the Taedong River, and then manage to sell those “rights” for a princely sum. Tales like these are so well known and so tailored to the personalities and characteristics of their protagonists that, though other minor details may be changed in the telling, the hero is always the same. Page 58 →In short, it would be safe to conclude that these three characters are neither completely interchangeable, nor are they completely distinguishable from one another. It would be most accurate to call them individual manifestations of a single trickster archetype, or different versions of an overarching narrative of transgression: when the tales include specific socioeconomic or regional details, the distinction between the figures is most clear, but when the tales are of a more general nature, that distinction tends to disappear. To attempt to separate these manifestations or versions into fully distinct figures would be futile, just as it would be futile to attempt to separate the sides of a coin or the facets of a gemstone. In the study of the Korean trickster figure, though, these three characters happen to be particularly useful, as they are popular protagonists and their stories have been told time and again throughout the peninsula. An accounting of their stories in two popular collections7 of tales yields nearly 130 different tales told nearly four hundred times. Although it is impossible to cover all of these tales here, an examination of some of the most popular and representative of them will bring us closer to an understanding of the trickster’s contribution to the concept of transgression in traditional Korean society.

Playing at the Boundaries of Language Before turning to the more obvious ways in which the trickster transgresses the boundaries of society, it is first necessary to examine the perhaps more subtle but also more fundamental way in which the trickster transgresses boundaries through his use of language. Almost all trickster tales, of course, involve some sort of deceptive or at least humorous speech, but there are some tales that pay especial attention to the trickster’s use of language. It is these tales that we will deal with first.

The trickster is first and foremost famous for being a skilled liar. This is evident in one tale where a destitute yangban encounters ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ and orders him to tell a lie.8 ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ replies that he is too busy, and when the yangban asks him what could be so urgent that he cannot tell a lie, he replies that he is on his way to receive government grain (as part of the grain exchange system). The eager yangban follows ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, but when he discovers that there is in fact no government grain, he becomes furious and scolds ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ for lying to him. The punchline, of course, is ChЕЏng Man-sŏ’s exclamation: “But you told me to lie to you!” Page 59 →This tale is by no means unique to Korea; most Western readers will be familiar with its basic conceit. But it does say something interesting about the situation in Korea during the late ChosЕЏn period, and it provides an insight into the art of lying. The yangban were the aristocratic or noble class of ChosЕЏn society. The term, of course, was also used much in the same sense as “gentleman” is used in English today, but lest there be any confusion about the status of this character, one teller of this tale specifies that he is a “government minister.”9 So we can see that the aristocrats and even high-ranking government officials have fallen to such a state of poverty that they are desperate for government grain—grain that was originally intended to aid the impoverished lower classes. ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ knows this, of course, and this is the insight he provides into the art of lying: if you want your lie to be believed, tell people what they want to hear. This works because of two basic principles. The first is that, barring evidence to the contrary, people generally want to believe that other people are telling them the truth. Human society is based on communication and does not run smoothly when people lie to each other. Most people want their social interactions to go smoothly, and they assume that others want the same, which leads to the general tendency to believe what others say as long as it sounds reasonable. The second principle at work here, of course, is that even if something does not sound entirely reasonable, someone who wants it to be true desperately enough will ignore logic and believe the lie. This second principle is illustrated in the tale of Pang Hak-chung and his master. This “tale” is actually a string of episodes that may be mixed and matched according to the teller’s whims, but the basic structure is generally as discussed in the previous section. Most versions of this tale contain an episode that relates what happens to Pang Hak-chung when his master returns home to find that his mischievous servant has married his youngest daughter. The yangban orders Pang Hak-chung to be put in a sack and thrown into the water to be drowned. On the way to the nearest body of water, the other servants decide to stop at a tavern to quench their thirst, and they tie the sack to a tree limb. The trickster seizes the opportunity. He catches the attention of a passing blind or lame man and weaves a fantastic tale: he, too, was once like the passerby, either blind or lame, but then he climbed into the sack and was healed. The fact that Pang Hak-chung is now apparently neither blind nor lame is enough evidence for this poor soul, who readily agrees to take Pang Hak-chung’s place in the sack. When the other servants finally emerge from the tavern, the victim Page 60 →is thrown into the water and drowned despite his fervent protests that he is not Pang Hak-chung.10 What all of these passersby have in common in the different versions is some sort of disability. Pang Hak-chung sees this and takes advantage of it, telling his victim a tale that is too good to be true, but also too good to pass up. The poor passerby has no idea why Pang Hak-chung is in the sack, and, once he hears that he might be free of his disability, he no longer cares. Any small, quiet voice of doubt that may have spoken in his mind is drowned out by the desire to be whole. Pang Hak-chung uses this simple truth about the human psyche to his advantage and avoids death. But what if your mark does not have such an obvious weak point? What, indeed, do you offer a man who has everything? As it turns out, the answer is simple: you just offer him more of what he already has. Kim SЕЏndal’s selling of the Taedong River is a perfect example of this. His trick is to fool the wealthy mark into thinking that he owns the rights to the Taedong River, and that the mark will be able to make a fortune collecting fees from those drawing water from the river if he will only pay a relatively modest sum for those rights. But no one would believe such a preposterous story without proper evidence, so Kim SЕЏn-dal devises a plan: he approaches the water sellers—those who make their living by drawing water from the river and selling it doorto-door—and gives them each a small sum of money, asking them to return it to him the following morning. The next day he sets up a booth where he knows his mark will see him and begins to collect his money. The rich man

sees this and is intrigued, and he asks Kim SЕЏn-dal why he is collecting money from the water sellers. Kim SЕЏn-dal tells the rich man that the Taedong River has been in his family for generations, and every morning he comes out to collect the water fees. Yet he finds it tiring to rise early every morning and sit by the river. The hook is now set, but this fat fish does not even wait to be reeled in; he jumps into the boat of his own accord, offering to relieve Kim SЕЏn-dal of his “burden.” Kim SЕЏn-dal reluctantly agrees, pockets the large sum, and goes on his way. It is not until the next day, when the rich man goes out to collect the water fees, that he realizes he has been duped.11 Not only is lying one of the most common ways in which the trickster uses language to achieve his goals, it is also the most straightforward. That is, when viewed in terms of the communicative process, the trickster successfully conveys his message to his target; it just so happens that this message is untrue. There are many tales, though, where the trickster’s use of language is far more subtle. Rather than use the communicative process to Page 61 →send a false message, he deliberately undermines the process to cause confusion. A basic “sender в†’ encoding в†’ message в†’ decoding в†’ receiver” model of the communicative process will suffice to illustrate the trickster’s strategies. Simple, concrete messages are generally conveyed fairly easily, but more complicated, abstract messages can be significantly more difficult to get across. This is because not everyone is using the same exact set of codes. Even assuming a perfectly encoded message, linguistic, cultural, and even life experience differences on the receiver’s end can result in a failure of communication. At the root of these difficulties is the ambiguity of language: the fact that the same word or combination of words can often be interpreted in different ways. The trickster takes full advantage of this ambiguity to confound others. One popular technique among our three Korean tricksters is the use of homonyms or near homonyms. These tales will lose their effect in English, of course, but a brief discussion of a select few should illustrate the technique. There are two sides to each act of communication, and the trickster uses homonyms to his advantage on both sides of the equation. As the sender of the message, he deliberately uses words that can be understood in more than one way. In a tale that features either ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ or Pang Hak-chung, the trickster visits a kisaeng (courtesan) and promises to bring her a kЕЏmun’go (a six-stringed instrument that resembles a very long zither) that he just so happens to have at home. The kisaeng gives him a large sum of money and tells him to return with the instrument. So he goes home, takes the pestle from his barn, paints it black, and then returns to the kisaeng. When she asks where her instrument is, he tells her that the pestle is, in fact, a “kЕЏmЕ-n kŏ”(a black thing).12 In a famous prank tale, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ wanders around beneath the bell tower in Seoul shouting “In’gyЕЏng ch’yЕЏra! ” (“Strike the curfew bell!”). When the bell ringer hears this, he rings the bell, even though it is not yet time. His superior brings him in and asks him why he rang the bell, and the bell ringer replies that he heard ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ shouting and thought it was an official order. When the official has ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ arrested and demands an explanation from him, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ calmly replies, “I was simply looking for my son, In KyЕЏng-ch’ŏl.”13 These tricks work not just because the language used is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. In normal communication, people generally choose the most effective method of encoding in order to convey their message, and if the natural context is not enough to allow proper decoding, they will give the receiver additional information. Pang Hak-chungPage 62 → and ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, however, make sure that the deck is stacked in their favor. In the kЕЏmun’go tales, they see a kЕЏmun’go in the kisaeng house and then tell the kisaeng that they have one at home. Given the context, there is no other way for the kisaeng to interpret the statement. In the story of the curfew bell, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ creates the proper context by walking under the bell tower, and he is careful not to say anything else that might “clarify” his statement. They deliberately create situations in which there is really only one plausible interpretation, only to pull out the secondary interpretation later and feign innocence. Because that secondary interpretation is not outside the realm of possibility, though, the victim cannot be completely certain of the trickster’s intent to deceive. Homonyms are not as common a technique when the trickster is the receiver of the message as opposed to the sender, but in one tale Pang Hak-chung makes use of them. He walks into a general store and begins pointing at various items, asking the owner what they are. He first points to some clothing, and the owner replies,

“Osiyo” (“These are clothes,” but also a homonym for “please come in”). Then he picks up some pine nuts, and the owner says, “Chasiyo” (“These are pine nuts,” but also a homonym for “please eat”). Finally, he picks up a horsehair hat, and the owner says, “Kasiyo” (“This is a horsehair hat,” but also a homonym for “please go,” short for the idiomatic farewell of “please go in peace”).14 More common, however, are tales in which the trickster relies not on homonyms but on the fact that the same words can be interpreted differently depending on the context. In a tale featuring either ChЕЏng MansЕЏ or Pang Hak-chung, the trickster goes to the market and sees a food like dried persimmons or rice cakes. He asks the seller how the food should be prepared, and the seller says, “You just eat it.” So the trickster eats the food, and when the seller demands the price, the trickster replies, “But you told me to just eat it!”15 A more sophisticated example can be found in one episode of the tale of Pang Hak-chung and his master. When they reach Seoul, the master tells Pang Hak-chung to guard his horse carefully while he takes care of his business. To impress upon Pang Hak-chung just how cunning the inhabitants of Seoul are, he says, “If you’re not careful, they’ll steal the eyes right out of your head!” As soon as his master is out of sight, Pang Hakchung sells the horse, keeping only the bridle. Then, when he spies his master returning, he grasps the bridle and shuts his eyes tight. The dumbfounded master demands an explanation, and Pang Hak-chung innocently replies that he was afraid of having his eyes stolen and so kept them shut, and someone must have taken the horse from under his nose.16 Page 63 →As the receiver of the message, the trickster does not have as much control over the situation and the context, but he still has the upper hand. Just as people generally assume that others will do their best to convey their messages properly, they also assume that other people will attempt to decode messages properly. It never occurs to any of these victims that their words might be interpreted differently. The trickster, of course, is always aware of these other possibilities and uses them to his advantage. When undermining the communicative process isn’t enough, the trickster will sometimes subvert the system of symbols on which language and communication are based. In one tale that is mostly attributed to Pang Hakchung but occasionally features Kim SЕЏn-dal, the trickster is traveling with some companions when they see a woman sitting by herself, sewing. The trickster wagers his companions that he can approach this stranger and convince her to sleep with him. Thinking it a sure bet, his companions take him up on the offer and wait at a safe distance. The trickster approaches and strikes up a conversation. He picks up a pair of scissors and asks the woman what she calls them. When she answers, “scissors,” he tells her that where he comes from, they call them “panties.”17 Then he points to the mat on which she is sitting and asks her what she calls it. When she replies, “a cushion,” he says tells her that they call it a “hadЕЏn pangsЕЏk” in his hometown. This term is impossible to translate concisely, thanks to the Korean practice of dropping subjects (and in this case the object as well), but roughly it can be interpreted as “the cushion [where we] did [it].” Before he leaves, he hides the scissors under the cushion, and just as he is returning to his companions, the woman runs after him, shouting, “Where did my panties go?” The trickster turns around and calmly replies, “Did you check under the cushion where we did it?” And thus the wager is won.18 The story may sound crude, but the principle on which the trickster bases his artifice is fundamental to language and meaning. A basic tenet of semiotics is that the relationship between a word and what that word signifies is arbitrary (de Saussure 1975, 97–103); that is, words only have meaning because we give them meaning. So a “cushion” could just as easily be called “pangsЕЏk”—there is nothing in the nature of the thing that requires we associate a certain set of sounds with it. It is this principle that the trickster uses to his advantage, first calling the pair of scissors by a vulgar term and then using a rather common phrase to designate the cushion. Because she has no idea of his ulterior motive, she acts in good faith when communicating with him and ignores other possible meanings.Page 64 → When she notices that her scissors are missing, she uses the term he provided so that he will understand her, and when he replies with the new designation for the cushion, she suspects nothing. In fact, aside from having broken the taboo of speaking to a strange man (which is actually quite serious in Confucian society but is downplayed in this tale), she is no worse off for the trickster’s scheme. The trickster’s companions, however, interpreting the conversation without the benefit of having heard what preceded it, can only conclude that the trickster somehow succeeded and pay off their wager—with begrudging

admiration, we can imagine. Whether the trickster flat out lies to his victims or uses the more subtle tactics of undermining the communicative process or subverting the system of symbols, his advantage over his victims comes from his transgressive and liminal nature. That is, he exists on the borders of meaning and perception and can thus easily transgress those borders. When the trickster lies, he does not merely tell untruths, he crafts his words in such a way as to take advantage of the blind spots in the human psyche. These blind spots are a result of our attempts to categorize and organize our world, making it easier to deal with. We generalize rules and systems from single experiences, which can be very helpful in many situations, but over-generalization can get us into trouble. Combine this with our tendency to hear what we want to hear and believe what we want to believe, and you have a recipe for gullibility. The trickster is so adept at taking advantage of this because he rises above the categories we establish to organize our world. He can see that there are other possibilities other than the most obvious or intended, which is why he is so successful at using homonyms or puns and interpreting the words of others in the way that is most advantageous to him. And because he lives on the borders of meaning, he can see in an instant that the system of symbols we have built up to classify and convey that meaning—language itself—is completely arbitrary and may be bent to his will. This may not be the most obvious example of “transgression” in the traditional sense (as “violation”), but it is fundamental to the trickster’s nature, and the more obvious examples of “transgression” to be found in his tales all spring from the same source.

Turning the World Upside Down In his role as transgressor, the trickster is probably best known for violating the boundaries of conflicting socioeconomic categories such as rich Page 65 →versus poor, high-class versus low-class, and strong versus weak. There is, of course, a good deal of overlap between categories on the same side of these equations, as the same people generally possess wealth, status, and authority. These are the people often targeted by tricksters around the world, and the Korean trickster is no exception. Kim SЕЏn-dal’s selling of the Taedong River, which we examined above, is a good example. It is evident from the large sum that the victim pays for the “rights” to the river that he is wealthy, but of the eleven versions of this tale found in our two sources, nine of them specifically introduce the mark as a rich man, a merchant, or a greedy old miser, thus establishing the wealth disparity from the very start. And while it is enough for some of the storytellers that the mark simply be rich, for others an antagonistic relationship is required: in two of the tales, the mark is a Chinese merchant who floods the markets of P’yЕЏngyang with imported goods and drains the cities coffers. This obviously adds a note of nationalism to the tale, but it can be seen in another way as well: by introducing an antagonist from outside the system (that is, the domestic economy), the storyteller raises the stakes and allows the antagonist to unleash all of his economic might on the city. Thus we have an almost Marxist view of unfettered capitalism wreaking havoc on the proletariat, the most extreme dichotomy of rich and poor. The disparity in wealth can be seen on a smaller scale in other tales. While visiting Seoul, the trickster finds himself in urgent need of a toilet. There are, however, none to be found, so in desperation he knocks on the door of a nearby house and asks to use the toilet. The mistress of the house, who is home alone, does not turn him away, instead telling him that he can use the bathroom for a small sum. The trickster pays this sum and discovers upon entering the toilet a splendid room with a tiled floor and shining fixtures, far more lavish than his poor country home. He is so impressed with the room that he decides to stay, taking out a lunch he has packed and making himself at home. As time passes and the trickster remains locked inside, the mistress of the house grows nervous. She begs him to leave before her husband comes home. Of course, a proper woman would have never let a strange man into her house in the first place, and the consequences of her husband coming home and finding another man there are unthinkable. (This is also, of course, why she can’t simply call the police.) The trickster, however, has no intention of leaving. “I paid good money for this room,” he says, “and if you want it back you’re going to have to pay for it.” Left no choice, the mistress of the house ends up paying ten Page 66 →times what she received, just to convince this squatter to leave her house.19 Once again we have an individual who is far better off than the trickster, and still she is greedy for more. This greed, and the blindness to

the danger the trickster brings, is her downfall. The tales of Pang Hak-chung and his master are all excellent examples not only of rich versus poor but high versus low.20 Before he sells off his master’s horse, he deceives his master a number of times with simple ruses: when his master orders him to buy a bowl of porridge or some alcohol, Pang Hak-chung returns with the item, fishing through it with his fingers and saying that lice from his head or mucus from his nose fell into it. Disgusted, his master tells him to eat or drink it instead. The master could have avoided all of the trouble had be been willing to buy food or drink for himself, but his status does not allow that, not when he has a servant along. In most of the tales, Pang Hak-chung uses this ruse twice, and still his master never learns. He cannot imagine a world outside of the strict social hierarchy that places him on top, and thus Pang Hak-chung is continuously able to take advantage of him. The coup de grace, of course, comes after the master has had enough, sending Pang Hak-chung back home with instructions written on his back that he should be put to death. On the journey home, though, Pang Hak-chung manages to convince a literate passerby to change the instructions to “Give our youngest daughter to him in marriage.” Within the rigid social hierarchy of the late ChosЕЏn period, a servant would never be able to marry the daughter of his master, but Pang Hak-chung not only does this, he escapes his master’s wrath on his return and tricks the master and his family (except his youngest daughter, of course) into drowning themselves in the water. He pulls off the ultimate reversal of roles, tearing down the aristocratic notion of superiority every step of the way. Although ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ and Kim SЕЏn-dal never appear as servants in their tales, they are still nowhere near being members of the ruling class. In one tale, however, they seek to better their stations—and they actually succeed. While there are many tales that involve tricksters and their encounters with scholars traveling to Seoul to sit for the civil service examination, this tale has the trickster attempt to take the exam himself, despite the fact that he has not studied for the test. During the hottest days of summer, the trickster travels to Seoul and enters the testing grounds dressed in his heaviest winter clothes. An examiner sees him and asks why he is wearing such heavy clothing. In one version of the tale, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ replies that he wanted to take the exam despite the fact that he is Page 67 →an unlearned man, but he came down with ague and so dressed in his warmest clothes. The examiner is impressed by his dedication and offers him the position of assistant caretaker, a relatively lowlevel government post. In the other two versions of the tale, though, Kim SЕЏn-dal applies to take the oral examination but confesses that he has caught typhoid fever. Fearing that he might catch the disease, the examiner orders Kim SЕЏn-dal to recite his text from as far away as possible. Kim SЕЏn-dal mumbles nonsense for some time, but since he is so far away the examiner cannot hear him clearly enough to make a judgment. Afraid to ask him to come any closer, though, he simply passes him. Although these tales have the same basic plot, there are some key differences. In particular, the examiner’s attitude toward the trickster is nearly opposite. In ChЕЏng Man-sŏ’s case, he admires his dedication and rewards him with a low-level government position even though he has no learning. In Kim SЕЏn-dal’s case, though, he does not want to take the risk of getting ill himself in order to examine the candidate properly, so he simply passes him. In part, of course, this difference stems from the fact that ague is not contagious but typhoid fever is. ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ and Kim SЕЏn-dal approach the situation with entirely different strategies, the former hoping to inspire sympathy and the latter hoping to create fear. The Kim SЕЏn-dal tale is certainly more sophisticated than the ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ tale, which is only natural given Kim SЕЏn-dal’s meticulous nature and ChЕЏng Man-sŏ’s “act first” attitude. Despite their differences, however, both tales depict the trickster obtaining a socioeconomic status that would normally be out of his reach. When the civil service examination system was first introduced in Korea in the tenth century, the idea was to select the most talented individuals to serve the government—that is, to move beyond an aristocracy and achieve a meritocracy. In practice, though, only those with the wherewithal to spend the years required to master the difficult art of composition in classical Chinese could realistically hope to pass the examination. And, as time went on, the system grew more and more corrupt, straying further and further from its original goals. Kim SЕЏn-dal’s tale in particular can be seen as a condemnation of this corrupt system. As the official gateway that allowed entrance into the noble ruling class, the civil service examination was a prime target for transgression by the trickster. When it came to the relationship between the powerful and the weak, one agent of the former that the common

people frequently encountered was the patrolman. Since the patrolman’s duty was to keep order and preservePage 68 → the peace, he was a natural adversary of free spirits like Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏn-dal, who wanted nothing to do with either order or peace. Most of their encounters with patrolmen, though, were more humorous than anything, with the patrolman either left speechless or made to look foolish. In one simple but popular tale, the trickster is caught out after curfew. He sees the patrolman coming, but there is nowhere to hide. So he stands up straight and stretches his arms out. When the patrolman demands to know what he is doing, the trickster replies, “I’m doing my laundry!” Confused, the patrolman asks him to explain himself. So the trickster says, “I washed all my clothes and had nothing left to wear, so I put them on to dry them out!” The patrolman is either so taken aback or so amused by this that he lets the trickster go.21 In one version of the tale, the patrolman asks the trickster his name, and when the trickster replies that he is Pang Hak-chung, the patrol exclaims, “Ah, the peerless rascal, Pang Hak-chung! Who could hope to be his match? Be on your way now.” In yet another version, the patrolman does not even need to ask his name—he immediately recognizes him as Pang Hak-chung and lets him go. Similar tales have ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ claiming to be either a freshly dead corpse22 or a dog23—both of which are absurd but neither of which are subject to the curfew—and Kim SЕЏn-dal asking a patrolman to help him search for something he has lost, something that he will eat for the rest of his life, only to pull out some tobacco at dawn and say that he has found it.24 In the above tales, the trickster’s relationship with the patrolman might be adversarial, but it is one of grudging (or at times open) respect, at least on the part of the patrolman. The patrolman does not actually suffer at the hands of the trickster, but his authority is circumvented. Anyone caught out at night after curfew would be taken in by the patrolman, but the trickster manages to avoid this fate and prove himself an exception to the rule. He has violated the law—transgressed the boundary set in place by society—and yet he is not punished. In another encounter with the patrolman he manages to escape unscathed yet again, but this time he leaves the patrolman with egg (or worse) on his face. It is day during this tale, but the trickster once again finds himself urgently needing to relieve himself. With no other options, he defecates by the side of the street, but just as he is finishing a patrolman appears. Thinking quickly, the trickster covers the feces with his hat and tells the patrolman that he has caught a bird. He asks the patrolman to watch it for him while he gets something to put it in, and then he runs off. Page 69 →After a while, the patrolman grows curious and reaches under the hat to grab what he discovers is most certainly not a bird.25 Not only does the trickster once again escape punishment for his transgression, he leaves the agent of that punishment in a rather sticky situation. Seeing how the trickster so skillfully and gleefully attacks the rich, the high in status, and those in authority, it might seem that he is an agent of the other side: the poor, the low in status, and those without power. In fact, for as much money as Kim SЕЏn-dal swindles from the wealthy, such as when he sells the Taedong River, the poor never see a single pun (or penny) of the profits.26 Pang Hak-chung may have turned the tables on his master, but only he benefits from his situation; he does not win emancipation for any other servants. And while the patrolman may have been foiled in a few specific cases, he is still roaming the streets to arrest other ne’er-do-wells and curfew breakers. Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏn-dal are not heroes of the poor and downtrodden. At best, they might be heroes or idols through which the poor and downtrodden can live vicariously, fantasizing about how they, too, might break free from the bonds of their socioeconomic status and turn the tables on the high and mighty. But even this is questionable if we take a closer look at the trickster’s exploits. While the tale of Pang Hakchung and his master may be primarily about a servant turning the tables on a yangban, the upper-class aristocrat is not the only person to suffer from Pang Hak-chung’s tricks. As we saw above, he also deceives a passing blind or lame man, convincing the man to take his place in the sack. He seems to be completely unconcerned that he is sentencing an innocent man to death. After Pang Hak-chung is sent home by his furious master, an episode that is often part of his journey (but was apparently so popular that it was also told as a stand-alone tale) has him passing by a woman working with a baby on her back. She is pounding grain to make sticky rice cakes using a treadmill—that is, a simple machine involving a pestle on the end of a long lever, the other end of which is operated by foot, allowing the user to lift a heavier pestle for longer periods of time than might otherwise be possible. Pang Hak-chung immediately sees an opportunity and approaches the woman, offering to take care of

the baby while she works. The woman gladly agrees, thanking the stranger for his kindness. But then Pang Hakchung swipes the sticky pile of pounded grain from the mortar and replaces it with the baby while the pestle is up. Unable to lower the pestle for fear of hurting her child, the woman can do nothing Page 70 →but shout imprecations at Pang Hak-chung as he calmly walks away with the fruits of her labors.27 In most cases, this episode is followed by an episode in which a passerby sees the trickster happily eating his stolen sticky rice cake (often sweetened with honey stolen from a honey seller28) and asks him about it. Not only is Pang Hak-chung unwilling to share his spoils, but he gives the questioner an absurd recipe that will guarantee his downfall (for example, he tells a monk to grind down all the Buddha statues in his temple and boil them in a giant cauldron), apparently for no other reason than the fact that the interloper had the temerity to ask Pang Hak-chung where he might find such delicious food.29 Kim SЕЏn-dal deceives not only the rich and powerful but anyone he thinks will make a good target. In one tale he announces that he will be having a feast for the blind men in his village—a charitable act that those with the means to do so might be expected to perform. His preparations, though, reveal his less-than-charitable intentions: he hastily constructs a ramshackle platform, beneath which he places piles of broken crockery. Then he gathers scraps of meat and fat and the dregs from brewing alcohol. When the blind men arrive at his house, he directs them to the platform, where they sit and wait. They can smell the fat and scraps of meat that Kim SЕЏn-dal has begun to grill, as well as the heady fragrance of the alcohol dregs, and become excited for the feast. As time passes, though, they grow tired and eventually fall asleep. Kim SЕЏn-dal takes a stick, dips it in feces, and then smears a little of the feces beneath the blind men’s noses. They wake up from the stench and begin to accuse each other of farting, and before long they are scuffling. The platform collapses under the strain, crashing down on the shards of broken crockery. Kim SЕЏn-dal rushes out and exclaims that they have broken all of the dishes he had prepared for the feast. Worse still, they weren’t even his dishes, but family heirlooms that he borrowed from the family next door. He drives the blind men away, but only after coercing them into compensating him for the “priceless” dishes.30 In other tales, though, Kim SЕЏn-dal seems content to forgo making a profit as long as he can make a blind man’s life miserable. In one tale, Kim SЕЏn-dal torments a blind man living next door with various pranks. First he pricks the blind man with a needle while he is out weeding his garlic patch. The blind man, thinking he has been bitten by a poisonous snake, decides that he will eat his favorite dish before he dies: boiled eggs. But Kim SЕЏn-dal quietly follows him and eats each egg as the blind man peels it. The next day, the blind man spreads his grain out in the yard to dry, so Page 71 →Kim SЕЏn-dal begins to spin a millstone and tells the blind man that the sound is thunder. The blind man hurriedly gathers up his grain and waits for the storm that never comes. Realizing he has been deceived by Kim SЕЏn-dal, he vows that he will not let it happen again. The next time he hears a sound like thunder, he sits in his house with a smile on his face. This time, of course, the thunder is real, and the rain spoils all his grain. Finally, on another day, Kim SЕЏn-dal goes to the blind man’s house and tells him that he knows a place where they can steal some squash. He takes the blind man on his back, carries him around the house a few times, and then lets him down in front of the blind man’s own squash patch, where they proceed to steal all of his squash.31 Another tale includes the squash thievery episode and two similar episodes, one where Kim SЕЏn-dal tells him that they are going to the bathhouse but instead has him climb into his own urinal tub, and another where Kim SЕЏn-dal tells him they are going to catch crabs and sends him home with a pail full of feces.32 In none of these episodes does Kim SЕЏn-dal gain anything (except for a few boiled eggs and some squash). He simply plays mean pranks on the blind man. These are just a few examples of the many tales in which the Korean trickster turns his attention away from the rich, the noble, and the powerful and toward the poor, the humble, and the weak. Why would he do this if he were the hero of the downtrodden? He wouldn’t, of course, and he isn’t. In the tales where he deceives the high and mighty, it may appear that he belongs to the other side of the equation, but that is only because we tend to see things in dualistic fashion, in black and white. The truth is that the trickster is neither rich nor poor, neither noble nor base, and neither powerful nor weak. He is a liminal figure that exists outside of these categories, and thus he is easily able to slip back and forth across the boundaries of these categories. He violates not only prohibitions against assaulting the rich and powerful but also the principle of being merciful toward the poor and

weak, because to him those categories and distinctions are meaningless. In a word, transgression is not simply what the trickster does, it is who he is.

Violating Decorum and Decency Perhaps the most scandalous of the male trickster’s transgressions, no matter where he may be found, are those that violate society’s norms and mores concerning the relationship between men and women. The Korean Page 72 →trickster, of course, is no exception, although his transgressions may appear somewhat different from those of other world tricksters. Roughly speaking, the Korean trickster interacts with three types of women: “normal” women, kisaeng, and his wife. Here we will deal specifically with only those interactions that have a sexual aspect to them (with the exception of tales that feature the trickster’s wife, as these are never sexual). Trickster most often interacts with nameless women he meets by chance on his journeys. They are usually defined only by what they are doing, such as sewing or weeding the fields. The only exceptions to this are woman at taverns and inns. Kim SЕЏn-dal in particular is often seen at such taverns and inns, and in two similar tale types he sexually harasses the women there. In both tales he is traveling with a group of people, and he waits until late at night before he springs into action. In one tale he creeps into the room where the proprietress is sleeping, pulls down his pants, and rubs his buttocks against her face. She wakes and, startled by the assault, claws at her attacker. Kim SЕЏn-dal hurriedly pulls his pants back up, returns to his room, and pretends to be asleep. The proprietress wakes up all the guests and demands to know who the culprit is. She claims that she scratched her attacker’s face, which was quite hairy, and Kim SЕЏn-dal says that all they need to do is find a man with scratch marks on his face. In one version of this tale, none of the guests are found to have scratch marks on their face and the proprietress is forced to apologize. In another version, after assaulting the proprietress and before returning to his own room, Kim SЕЏn-dal dashes into the room where the proprietress’s father-in-law is sleeping and claws at his face. When the scratches on the father-in-law’s face are discovered, Kim SЕЏn-dal demands that he be dragged off to the government office. The proprietress and her father-in-law beg Kim SЕЏndal for mercy, and he finally relents. In both versions, the humbled proprietress refuses payment from Kim SЕЏndal the next day.33 In an even more scandalous ruse, Kim SЕЏn-dal waits until everyone is asleep, then he quietly goes to the door of a room where a young maiden, the daughter of the proprietor, is sewing by candlelight. Kim SЕЏn-dal pokes a hole in the rice paper door and sticks his penis through the hole. Then he says, “The young scholars staying here need some light to study by. Please light this candle for me.” (The young scholars are the members of Kim SЕЏn-dal’s party.) The young maiden screams and Kim SЕЏn-dal once again flees and pretends to be asleep in his room. When the proprietor hears what happened he is furious, and he storms into the room where Kim SЕЏn-dal and the young scholars are staying, demanding that Page 73 →someone be held accountable. Kim SЕЏn-dal immediately orders the young scholars to stand up. Then he orders them all to drop their pants and present their penises. With all the young scholars standing in a row and naked from the waist down, Kim SЕЏndal then turns to the proprietor: “Now, bring in your daughter and she can identify the culprit!” Mortified, the proprietor realizes he is in an untenable position and apologizes to Kim SЕЏn-dal and the scholars. The next day, as expected, he refuses payment from them.34 Interestingly enough, in none of these tales does the trickster sexually harass his victim as an expression of his libido. Whether he is rubbing his buttocks on the face of the proprietress or waving his penis around in front of the daughter, his ultimate goal is to enrage his hosts and then humble them, earning himself and his companions free room and board. In a much cruder tale that has a similar premise, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ makes a sexually suggestive comment regarding the innkeeper’s daughter, but he makes sure that the innkeeper can hear him. The innkeeper naturally grows furious and chases ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ away, only to later realize that he never paid his bill.35 It just so happens that insulting or compromising the virtue of a woman is one of the quickest ways to enrage people. The same thing could be said for the tale mentioned above in the discussion of the trickster’s language, where

he tricks a woman into saying something that suggests they slept together. In this case, the woman never even realizes that she is the brunt of the trickster’s mischief—she is simply a way for the trickster to win a bet. There are, in fact, many tales where the trickster does something simply to win a bet. For example, the trickster and his companions see a woman doing laundry or some other chore, and the trickster bets his companions that he can make the woman lift her skirt and expose herself. He approaches the woman, claiming to be a representative of the government office, and the scholars or yangban standing a short distance away lend credibility to his claim. In the most common ruse, he claims that he has been ordered to arrest all women with two vulvae, and he has it on good authority that this woman does, in fact, have two vulvae. She protests her innocence, but the trickster insists that she either offer visual proof or accompany him to the government office. Seemingly left with no other choice, she raises her skirt and exposes herself, and the trickster wins the wager.36 Another bet that the trickster makes is that he can steal a kiss from a strange woman. Since most women were naturally wary at the approach of strange men, he uses various ruses to get close enough for a kiss, such as Page 74 →pretending that he has something in his eye, pretending to be blind, and claiming that he has been sent from the government office to examine everyone for misaligned teeth.37 In some versions he simply runs up to a woman, grabs her by the ears, and plants a kiss on her lips.38 In a variation on this tale, he kisses the woman not to win a bet but to enrage the men around her—a simpler version of the strategy used at the inn. In this tale type, the trickster asks a tobacco seller to give him some tobacco, but when the man refuses he vows to get revenge. So the trickster travels a short way ahead of the tobacco seller, and when he sees a woman weeding a field he kisses her and then quickly runs away. As he flees, he shouts back to the tobacco seller, “Watch out, brother! These people are trying to kill us!” The men near the woman give up on chasing the fleet-footed trickster and settle for the next best thing: his “brother” who is coming along behind. They grab him, roll him up in a straw mat, and beat him senseless.39 In all of these tales, the women are nothing more than a means to an end, whether that end be winning a bet, getting out of paying a bill, or exacting revenge. There are very few tales in which the trickster simply uses women to satisfy his sexual urges, as is often seen with other tricksters around the world. In fact, there are only two tales (with one version each) in our sources that depict the trickster actually engaging in sexual relations with a woman who is not a kisaeng. In one of these tales, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ approaches a group of women and claims that he can fix crooked vulvae. His fix, of course, is to have sexual relations with the women.40 In the other tale, Kim SЕЏn-dal sees a widow bent over, and he approaches, violates her from behind, and then runs and hides. The widow turns around to see a dog passing by and mistakenly thinks she has been violated by a dog. Kim SЕЏn-dal hears her muttering and jumps out of his hiding place, threatening to tell everyone. She begs him to keep quiet and, to guarantee his silence, has sexual relations with him (again).41 Both of these tales call to mind the overly active libido seen in other world tricksters, but in the Korean context they are two isolated incidents that make up a very small part of all tales concerning the trickster’s interaction with women. Whether the trickster actually has sexual relations or not, though, all of his interactions with women show his complete lack of respect for them. They are little more than playthings, and he enters their lives, humiliates them, and then leaves them to deal with the consequences once he is gone. In almost all of the trickster’s tales, these consequences take place off screen, so to speak, but one storyteller has Kim SЕЏn-dal return to a neighborhoodPage 75 → where he had earlier tricked a young woman into exposing herself. The residents there tell him that ever since the incident, the girl has wanted to die. So Kim SЕЏn-dal takes pity on her and marries her.42 This is very uncharacteristic of the trickster, who pities no one, but it is not unheard of to find a storyteller who realizes just how cruel the trickster’s pranks are and attempts to paint a picture less harsh. This one exception is interesting not necessarily for what it says about the trickster but for what it says about Korean society at the time. Although Kim SЕЏn-dal did not actually have sexual relations with the girl, simply having publicly exposed herself to strange men was enough to make her a pariah. She wants to die because her life as a woman is essentially over, at least as long as she stays in that neighborhood where people know her story. She is unmarriageable and doomed to spend the rest of her life as a spinster and an outcast, which is why Kim SЕЏndal’s offer of marriage is such a merciful gesture. In a narrative world where the trickster passes through women’s lives like a whirlwind through a town, this is a unique glimpse of what the aftermath really would

be in traditional Korean society. In addition to interacting with everyday women that he meets on his journeys, the trickster also interacts with kisaeng as well. Although kisaeng are courtesans, they have many ways of entertaining guests that do not necessarily involve prostitution, such as poetry, music, or by simply providing company, and in many trickster tales there is nothing sexual about his encounters with kisaeng. The “kЕЏmun’go” trick discussed above is a popular example of such an encounter. There is one tale, however, where Pang Hak-chung visits a kisaeng and claims to have dreamt of a dragon. Dreams of animals or mythical creatures are often thought to foretell the birth of a child in Korea, and a dream of a dragon indicates that a very exceptional child will be born. When the kisaeng hears this, she leaps at the chance to have an exceptional child and drags Pang Hak-chung, who feigns reluctance all the way, into her bedchamber.43 While Pang Hak-chung does manage to satisfy his sexual urges here, the act of sleeping with the kisaeng is not in and of itself a transgressive act—sleeping with clients, after all, is what kisaeng did. Many kisaeng, though, were more than just simple prostitutes and could choose which clients they wanted to sleep with. This kisaeng is apparently one such kisaeng, and she would normally not sleep with a penniless profligate like Pang Hak-chung. Sex is a product that the kisaeng sells, so when Pang Hak-chung tricks her into sleeping with him, he does not violate her so much as he steals from her. Despite the fact that this tale has the trickster engaging in sexual relations Page 76 →with a woman, it is less transgressive than even those tales where the trickster steals kisses from women weeding the fields. Ultimately, the kisaeng may occasionally provide a sexual outlet for the trickster, but her occupation prevents the sexual act itself from having any real impact as an act of transgression. The trickster’s encounters with kisaeng end up having more in common with tales in which the trickster cheats or deceives a merchant than tales in which the trickster humiliates or harasses other women. There is, of course, one other type of woman that appears in the trickster’s tales, and that is his wife. The taboos regarding relationships between men and women of course did not apply to encounters with kisaeng, but not only are there no sexual taboos for the trickster to violate here, his wife is the only woman on earth who is more or less legally obliged to have sexual relations with him. So it should come as no surprise that the trickster’s wife is depicted as almost entirely asexual. There is one tale in which Pang Hak-chung boasts to a woman he meets that the walls of his house are decorated with paintings of blue and gold dragons—but she goes home with him only to discover that the “dragon paintings” are nothing but the patterns made by rainwater seeping through a leaky roof.44 Most versions are very short and end with this discovery, but one version implies that they sleep together and ends with Pang Hak-chung marrying the woman. This is the only time the couple are depicted as being sexually active (and of course the actual marriage occurs after the sexual encounter). The most common tale that involves interaction between the trickster and his wife, in fact, tells of an argument they have. Once again, the leaky roof symbolizes the trickster’s inability to take care of his own house (and, by extension, household). His wife complains about the rainwater, which has seeped down the walls and is now running across the floor, and the trickster threatens her with violence. But his threats are merely bluffs and he knows it: “I would go over there right now and teach you a lesson,” he growls, “but I have no boat to cross this river between us. Count yourself lucky!”45 This is the extent of the trickster’s interactions with his wife. He may engage in trickery to get her to marry him, but once they are married he never attempts to deceive her. And though he may rain down vengeance on others at the most insignificant of slights, both real and imagined, his wife is free to scold and berate him, and all she gets in return is an empty threat. The trickster barely manages to save face, if it could even be called that. But this impunity is not limited to the trickster’s wife. While the trickster almost always comes out on top when dealing with men,46 there are Page 77 →quite a few tales that show the trickster being bested by a woman. The tale of the quarreling husband and wife mentioned above is one such tale. Another has the trickster see a woman dumping out water with which she has rinsed rice. He makes a joke, saying that she certainly urinates a lot.47 Unfazed, the woman replies, “My water just broke and already my child is grown and talking!”48 In other tales, women may be the brunt of the trickster’s jokes and pranks, but this woman has a clever reply at the ready and turns the tables on him—not only does she mock the trickster for his immaturity, she positions

herself as his mother, a woman who cannot be the object of sexual derision for the trickster. And while the popular tale discussed above may have the trickster convincing a woman to expose herself, there are other tales where the trickster finds himself on the receiving end instead. Specifically, a woman steals his clothes and leaves him naked in public. In one version it is a kisaeng, in another version it is a tavern proprietress, and in another it is a woman who marries him for the sole purpose of cheating him out of his money (she does not succeed, but she gets the last word when she steals his clothes and runs away).49 When his clothes are stolen, the trickster is not simply embarrassed, he is put in a precarious situation; after two of the above episodes, passersby discover the trickster lying naked on the side of the road and, thinking him dead, attempt to cut off his testicles to use as medicine.50 The trickster escapes with his life (and his testicles), but this very literal threat to his manhood is the direct result of women having gotten the upper hand. We can see from the above that the trickster’s interactions with women are less a matter of libido and more a matter of violating taboos and transgressing social borders. The trickster treats women just as rudely as he treats men, but the outcomes of his schemes are different depending on the gender of his target. In the most severe cases with men, the trickster’s target ends up dying, but the worst that happens to women is that they are humiliated or abused. As we saw in the one example of Kim Sŏn-dal marrying such a girl, though, in traditional Korean society this humiliation was a fate equal to, if not worse than, death. And yet, despite this treatment, it is women, not men, that most often get the better of the trickster.

Transgression and the Trickster Attempting to define or neatly categorize a boundary-stepper like the trickster is in some ways a task doomed to failure. In that elusiveness, Page 78 →however, we can find meaning, and that meaning says something about the trickster’s role in traditional Korean society. The above discussion of trickster tales involving different forms of transgression raises a few interesting questions. Why does the Korean trickster succeed at transgressing social boundaries when so many other world tricksters are often hoisted by their own petard when they attempt to do the same? Why does the Korean trickster seem to be less libido-driven and more interested in violating taboos? Why is it that women and not men are the ones who, though still relatively rarely, succeed at turning the tables on the trickster? Why is the trickster content in most cases to simply attack the rich, powerful, and mighty, but rarely interested in becoming rich, powerful, or mighty himself? Some of these questions may have been answered in part above, but we will attempt to bring those answers together here and address the question that rises above them all: what is the role of the trickster’s transgression at this particular point in Korean history? One of the first things that a reading of Korean trickster tales reveals is just how successful the trickster is in violating taboos and social mores. Unlike the Native American trickster studied by Radin and other scholars, the Korean trickster is not a bumbling buffoon. Even when he does get the short end of the stick, it is rarely the direct result of an attempt to violate a taboo. One significant difference between the Korean trickster and tricksters of other cultures that are presented as buffoons is that buffoon tricksters tend not to have enemies on the social level. For example, Wakdjunkaga, Radin’s trickster, has no real enemies other than his own foolishness—the suffering that he experiences he mainly brings on himself. Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏndal, on the other hand, exist in a very rigidly structured society and are opposed by distinct social elements. Pang Hak-chung, as a servant, is in conflict with his master. ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ and Kim SЕЏn-dal are in conflict with those who possess more wealth or greater standing. All of these elements—the rich, the noble, and the powerful—present very real threats to the trickster. The fact that he never loses when up against them shows that orally transmitted trickster tales function to express discontent with the existing social structure. This is also why most of the trickster’s interactions with women involve the violation of taboos as opposed to the simple satisfaction of sexual urges. The underlying philosophy that makes the pranks played by the trickster on women so shocking can be summarized as follows: women exist for the sake of the men in their lives, as daughters to their fathers, Page 79 →wives to their husbands, and mothers to their sons. Once a woman married in traditional society, she was no longer considered part of her parents’ family, she was considered part of her husband’s family. This move from one family to another was permanent—if her husband died, she could not return to her own family, and remarriage was out of the question. In fact, monuments were erected to honor

women who took their own lives when their husbands died. While couples marrying today in the West may pledge themselves to each other with the words, “’til death do we part,” there was no such parting for the traditional Korean bride. And just as the duty of the wife extended beyond death, so it extended to before marriage—a woman was expected to be pure and unsullied for her eventual husband. This is why the trickster’s pranks were actually quite serious for the women involved. But while the women may have been the target of the trickster’s pranks, the trickster stories as a whole were also an attack on the Confucian and patriarchal ideas regarding women. The more these taboos were attacked, the weaker they would become. In the answer to the first question above we can also find a hint to the question of why women are most often seen getting the better of the trickster. The simplest answer is that women do not pose as much of a threat to the trickster. Women do not wield nearly as much social power, if they wield any at all, as men in high places. So it is in some respects “safe” for women to win in a contest with the trickster. But that is only part of the answer. The other side of this coin is that, because women are in a position of relative weakness, their victory over the trickster is that much more unexpected and that much more humorous. People in traditional Korea did not have to gather around to hear and tell stories of the powerful defeating the less powerful. That wasn’t entertainment, that was real life. But just as the tales of the trickster toppling the high and mighty were cathartic, so were the tales of the trickster being toppled by someone who supposedly had even less power than he did. Even though these tales are relatively few compared to the total number of tales featuring our three tricksters here, they still play an important part in the lore. If we return to the trickster’s successes for a moment, we find that we are left with the question of why the trickster attacks the rich, the noble, and the powerful, but he never joins their ranks. One answer to this was already given above: the trickster is a liminal figure, and thus exists outside of classes and categories. But this does not really answer the question we are asking here: it may be obvious that the trickster is a liminal figure, but why was a liminal figure chosen for these tales? The trickster does not Page 80 →succeed in becoming rich, noble, or powerful because that would leave him nowhere to go. If he became rich, what motivation would he have for deceiving the wealthy? If he became noble or powerful, who would his adversaries be? The rich, noble, and powerful control the social structure, so in order to attack the social structure, the trickster must exist outside those categories. So why then is the trickster not a member of the poor, humble, and weak categories? Social revolutions are, in fact, often carried out by those who previously had little or no power in the social structure. One example of this in ChosЕЏn is the reversal of roles seen between the yangban and the merchant class. At first, the yangban ruled and merchants were considered base. But as the merchant class grew more wealthy and began wielding economic power, they began to gain social power as well, until the yangban grew so weakened and diluted that they were little more than empty shells. The numerous bandits, popular uprisings, and other movements mentioned above all sought to set the ruling order on its head, to cast down those who sat in power and build a new society. None of these movements succeeded, but even if they had—despite whatever changes might have been brought about—the social structure would have essentially remained the same. Korea may have developed from a feudal society to a democratic society, and class mobility may be far greater now, but there is still a hierarchy with the haves on top and the have-nots on the bottom. This, then, is our answer to why the trickster cannot belong to the categories of the weak: if he succeeds in his attacks, he will eventually join the powerful and no longer be an agent of change, and if he does not succeed in his attacks then he ceases to function as an effective agent of criticism. And here we come to the trickster’s role at this particular point in Korean history, and what separates him both from figures in earlier eras who might at first glance appear similar and from other transgressive figures in the same era. There have always been those who deceive others, and the fundamental logic and techniques of deception are far older than the late ChosЕЏn period. Korean mythology, for example, is filled with deities who use trickery to defeat their opponents and achieve their goals, but these figures are a far cry from the trickster figures we see on the cusp of Korea’s transition from the medieval era to the modern era. These deities or demigods may be clever or even deceitful, but their ruses involve no transgression, and ultimately the purpose of their actions is to establish a new social order. The latter can also be said of bandit leaders like Hong Kil-tong, who Page 81 →(at least in his literary incarnation) left ChosЕЏn behind to found a new society, or real-life

leaders of popular uprisings, such as Hong Kyŏng-rae. These figures may indeed have been transgressive, but however chaotic or violent their methods may have been they ultimately strove for order. In the case of Hong Kiltong, this is in large part due to the fact that The Tale of Hong Kil-tong was written by an author who himself dreamed of a new world (and was eventually executed for conspiring against the king). The trickster that we have examined here, however, is only interested in attacking the social order and tearing it down. He is not the product of a single authorial imagination but an embodiment of a popular narrative of transgression; perhaps he is simply too transgressive to take part in any constructive activity. He may make way for a new order, but he will leave the building of that order to others. Instead, he will wait—until we once again grow comfortable with the status quo and forget that any given instance of the social structure is only one possibility that precludes all others. Then he will step forward again to show us that it is indeed only one possibility, and that there are myriad other, equally valid possibilities.

Notes This chapter is based on research conducted in my doctoral dissertation. “Hanguk sЕЏlhwa e nat’anan t’Е-riksЕ-tЕЏ yЕЏn’gu: Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, Kim SЕЏn-dal chungsim Е-ro” (“A Study on Trickster Figures in Korean Folktales: Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng MansЕЏ, and Kim SЕЏn-dal”) (PhD diss., Seoul National University, 2011). 1. The essay presented in this book originally appeared as a separate paper five years earlier in the May 1885 issue of American Antiquarian. 2. The concept of liminality was first introduced by Arnold Van Gennep in his 1909 Les rites de passage and later developed by Victor Turner in various writings, including Turner 1967, Turner 1969, and Turner 1974. 3. Kim Yol-gyu’s 1980 discussion of the trickster figure in North Korean mask dances marks the first use of the term in Korean scholarship, although, as with American scholarship, research on the character archetype were being carried out before this time. 4. The grain exchange system involved the government loaning grain to the people during the lean months of spring and receiving it back with interest after the fall harvest. The system was often abused and used as a means of exploiting the people. 5. The passage concerning these three bandit leaders can be found in Volume 14 of SЕЏnghosasЕЏl (The Trifling Treatises of Yi Ik). 6. What little is known about these characters in terms of biographical and historical information can be found in Cho 1979 (254–61), Cho 1987 (90–91), and Kim 1990 (112–14). 7. These two collections are Hanguk kujЕЏn sЕЏlhwa (Im 1987–93), a twelve-volume Page 82 →collection containing tales recorded during the late Japanese colonial period and supplemented with tales recorded during the 1970s, and Hanguk kubi munhak taegye (Cho et al. 1980–88), an eighty-two volume collection of tales recorded during the late 1970s and the 1980s. Although there are no English translations of these collections or their titles, they will be referenced in notes as Tales and Compendium, respectively, based on the last word in each of the Korean titles. 8. Compendium: 7–1, pp. 434–37; 7–3, pp. 125–26. 9. Compendium: 7–3, pp. 125–26. 10. Tales: 12, p. 47. Compendium: 7–6, p. 423; 7–9, p. 891; 7–10, pp. 42–43. 11. Tales: 1, pp. 266–67; 3, p. 192; 3, p. 193. Compendium: 1–2, pp. 463–64; 1–7, pp. 748–49; 1–9, pp. 601–7; 2–5, pp. 827–31; 2–7, pp. 198–99; 3–1, pp. 213–17; 5–6, pp. 76–79; 7–10, pp. 54–55. 12. Compendium: 7–1, pp. 127–30; 7–1, pp. 576–78; 7–2, pp. 321–23; 7–7, pp. 414–15; 7–9, p. 770; 7–11, pp. 430–33; 8–10, p. 219. 13. Compendium: 7–3, pp. 643–44; 7–10, pp. 49–51; 7–11, pp. 435–36. 14. Compendium: 7–9, pp. 768–69. 15. Compendium: 7–1, p. 49; 7–1, pp. 77–78; 7–6, pp. 400–1; 7–7, pp. 718–19; 8–10, pp. 214–15. 16. Compendium: 2–3, pp. 134–35; 7–6, p. 421; 7–9, pp. 888–89; 7–10, pp. 39–40.

17. The term used in Korean is “ssipssigae,” a vulgar term that could be literally (albeit more delicately) translated as “vulva covering.” 18. Tales: 1, p. 269. Compendium: 1–7, pp. 216–17; 7–6, pp. 401–2; 7–7, pp. 36–39; 7–7, p. 65; 7–7, pp. 530–31; 7–7, pp. 549–51; 7–7, pp. 553–56; 7–7, pp. 588–89; 7–7, pp. 742–44; 19. Compendium: 7–1, pp. 133–35; 7–1, p. 318; 7–3, pp. 127–29; 7–7, pp. 375–77; 7–7, pp. 687–88; 7–11, pp. 332–34. 20. Tales: 12, pp. 45–48. Compendium: 2–3, pp. 133–38; 7–2, pp. 114–19, 7–6, pp. 420–24; 7–7, p. 64; 7–9, pp. 887–92; 7–10, pp. 38–40; 7–10, pp. 41–43; 7–10, pp. 43–45. 21. Tales: 1, p. 268. Compendium: 7–3, pp. 232–33; 7–6, p. 416; 7–7, pp. 367–68; 7–7, pp. 411–12; 7–7, pp. 541–43; 7–9, p. 889; 7–17, pp. 111–12; 8–6, pp. 589–90; 8–10, p. 171. 22. Compendium 7–17, pp. 113–14. 23. Compendium 8–10, pp. 171–72. 24. Tales 3, pp. 196–97. 25. Compendium: 7–1, pp. 135–37; 7–9, p. 894; 7–11, pp. 334–36. 26. It should be noted that this is a universal characteristic of orally transmitted trickster tales in Korea, but the situation does change when written tales are taken into account. In most written tales, Kim SЕЏn-dal shares varying proportions of his profits with the water-sellers (and sometimes others as well), a plot point intended by the writer to either make the story more believable or Kim SЕЏn-dal a more sympathetic character. 27. Tales: 12, pp. 45–46; 12, p. 49. Compendium: 7–2, pp. 115–16; 7–6, pp. 421–22; 7–7, pp. 40–42; 7–7, pp. 543–44; 7–7, pp. 591–92; 7–9, pp. 1077–79; 7–10, p. 44. 28. Tales: 12, p. 46. Compendium: 7–2, p. 116; 7–7, pp. 42–43; 7–7, p. 424; 7–9, p. 1079. 29. Tales: 12, pp. 46–47; 12, pp. 49–50. Compendium: 7–6, p. 423; 7–9, pp. 1079–80. 30. Tales: 1, p. 280. Compendium: 1–9, pp. 605–7; 7–11, pp. 348–50. Page 83 →31. Tales: 1, pp. 277–79 32. Tales: 1, pp. 279–80. 33. Tales: 4, pp. 467–68. Compendium: 2–2, pp. 200–5. 34. Tales: 3, pp. 189–91. Compendium: 7–3, pp. 628–33; 7–7, pp. 738–42; 7–17, pp. 168–73. 35. Compendium: 7–1, pp. 78–79; 8–10, pp. 215–17. 36. Tales: 1, p. 268; 3, p. 194. Compendium: 1–7, pp. 745–47; 3–1, pp. 216–17; 6–8, pp. 139–42; 7–2, pp. 358–62; 7–3, pp. 633–36; 7–7, pp. 736–38; 7–10, pp. 48–49; 7–17, pp. 173–75. 37. Tales: 1, pp. 269–70. Compendium: 1–7, pp. 217–18; 7–1, pp. 102–4; 7–7, pp. 534–35. 38. Compendium: 7–7, pp. 35–36; 7–7, pp. 590–91. 39. Tales: 12, pp. 48–49; 3–3, pp. 377–79; 7–7, pp. 372–73; 7–7, pp. 539–40; 7–7, pp. 688–90; 7–9, pp. 691–92; 7–17, pp. 110–11; 8–10, pp. 212–14. 40. Compendium: 7–2, pp. 275–76. 41. Tales: 2, p. 266. 42. Compendium: 7–17, pp. 176–77. 43. Compendium: 7–7, pp. 415–17; 7–7, pp. 690–92. 44. Compendium: 7–7, pp. 369–70; 7–7, pp. 489–90; 7–7, pp. 532–33; 7–7, p. 551; 7–7, pp. 724–28. 45. Compendium: 7–1, p. 137; 7–2, pp. 732–33; 7–3, pp. 109–10; 7–7, p. 270; 7–7, pp. 540–41; 7–7, p. 549; 7–10, p. 708; 7–11, pp. 436–37; 8–10, p. 218. 46. In our sources there are only two distinct tales that show a male target getting the better of the trickster—and one of these pits Pang Hak-chung against ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, so even though one trickster loses, another trickster wins. 47. The act of urinating was traditionally seen as a symbol of a woman’s libido, so the more a woman

urinated, the stronger her libido was. This can be seen in The Ballad of Byŏn Gangsoe (Byŏngangsoe t’aryŏng), where the nymphomaniac Ongnyŏ is often depicted as producing a literal stream of urine. 48. Compendium: 1–7, p. 218; 7–1, pp. 57–58; 7–2, pp. 126–27; 7–6, p. 324; 7–7, pp. 33–34; 7–7, pp. 368–69; 7–7, pp. 531–32. 49. Compendium: 2–2, pp. 211–17; 2–9, pp. 105–8; 7–3, pp. 234–35. 50. Compendium: 2–2, pp. 213–15; 7–3, 235–36.

Works Cited Boas, Franz. 1898. “Introduction.” In Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia, 1–18. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Boas, Franz. 1914. “Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians.” Journal of American Folklore 27 (106): 374–410. Brinton, Daniel. 1868. “The Supreme Gods of the Red Race.” In The Myths of the New World, 159–92. New York: Leypoldt & Holdt. Brinton, Daniel. 1890. “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar.” In Essays of an Americanist, 130–34. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates. Page 84 →Byun Ju-Seung. 1997. “ChosЕЏnhugi yumin yЕЏn’gu” (“A Study on Yumin of the Late Yi Dynasty”). PhD diss., Korea University. Cho Hee Woong (Cho Hui-ung). 1983. Han’guk sЕЏrhwa Е-i yuhyЕЏng. Seoul: Iljogak. Cho Hee Woong. 1987. “T’Е-riksЕ-t’ŏ (Trickster) dam yЕЏn’gu.”Ŏmunhak nonch’ong 6: 85–94. Cho Hee Woong et al. 1980–88. Han’guk kubi munhak taegye. 82 volumes. Seoul: Academy of Korean Studies. Cho Tong-il. 1979. Inmul chЕЏnsЕЏl Е-i Е-imi wa kinЕ-ng . KyЕЏngsan: YЕЏngnam University Institute of Korean Culture. Im SЕЏk-che. 1987–93. Han’guk kujЕЏn sЕЏrhwa. 12 volumes. Seoul: Pyeongminsa. Kim HЕЏn-sЕЏn. 1990. “KЕЏndarhyЕЏng inmul iyagi Е-i chonjae yangsang kwa Е-imi.”KyЕЏnggi ЕЋmunhak 8: 98–157. Kim YЕЏl-gyu. 1980. “Pukhan Е-i t’alch’um (III) t’Е-riksЕ-t’ŏ t’alch’um Е-i chuyЕЏktЕ-l (I).”Pukhan 104: 221–25. Ko Hye-ryЕЏng. 2000. “SЕЏbukchibang ch’oedae Е-i minjunghangjaeng,” inMillan Е-i sidae, ed. Yang Е¬n-ha, Kim Hye-chin, and Oh Mi-yЕЏng, 127–77. Seoul: Karam Kihoek. La Shure, Charles. 2011.“Han’guk sЕЏrhwa e nat’anan t’Е-riksЕ-t’ŏ yЕЏn’gu: Pang Hak-chung, ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, Kim SЕЏn-dal chungsim Е-ro.” PhD diss., Seoul National University. Makarius, Laura. 1969. “Le Mythe du вЂTrickster.’” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 175 (1): 17–46. Makarius, Laura. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction.

Makarius, Laura. 1973. “The Crime of Manabozo.” American Anthropologist 75 (3): 663–75. Makarius, Laura. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Makarius, Laura. 1993. “The Myth of the Trickster: The Necessary Breaker of Taboos,” in Mythical Trickster Figures, ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty, 66–86. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Radin, Paul. 1956. The Trickster. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Saussure, Ferdindand de. 1975. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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3 Flesh Eaters and Organ Thieves Locating Transgression in Korean Cannibalism Se-Woong Koo Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. (Samuel Butler, 1912) In New York City, a police officer is convicted of plotting to kill and eat unsuspecting women. In Montreal, an adult film actor tortures and devours a Chinese student before fleeing abroad. In Tokyo, a chef cuts off his own genitals and creates a meal out of them for interested diners. The manifestation of cannibalism—ingestion of human body parts—as a global phenomenon has become fodder for tabloid journalism, scandalizing in its implication as an act that crosses all contemporary boundaries of propriety, morality, and imagination. In such stories, cannibalism appears as the epitome of transgression, but it also finds containment in retelling as a rarity, ostensibly practiced by marginal individuals on the very edge of sanity. The assumption holds that cannibalism cannot be the new norm in contemporary behavior, even as the act’s obvious frequency challenges that comforting assurance. In this chapter, I will examine the phenomenon of cannibalism in Korea over two very different periods: ChosЕЏn (1392–1910), a premodern dynasty that articulated a concrete policy toward cannibalism in the name of virtue, and contemporary South Korea, where cannibalism wins frequent mentions in criminal and cultural accounts. Discussing these two distinct Page 86 →cases of cannibalism allows us to appreciate a certain continuity in the phenomenon on the Korean peninsula, against any suggestion that records of cannibalism are divorced from historical facts and therefore should be read as metaphorical. This chapter also intends to combat the naГЇve assumption that cannibalism, impossible to understand or appreciate for contemporary rational thinkers that we are, simply could not have been “an accepted practice for any time or place.”1 Finally, contrasting ritual cannibalism of the ChosЕЏn court to the present-day discussion of flesh-eating foreigners in a time of significant economic, political, and social anxiety permits a reading of the changing way that transgression, of which cannibalism is seen as a firm illustration, expresses itself. For cannibalism is transgressive, but the significance of that transgression is subject to fluctuation over a period of six centuries, and that difference is most boldly highlighted when we focus our attention on the two temporal bookends. We have yet to fully understand why humans may choose to eat other human beings. A refusal to think seriously about the preponderance of cannibalism in Korea and elsewhere robs us of an opportunity to intellectually engage with the increasingly complex nature of emerging ethical problems, not least in the realm of biomedicine dependent on human ingredients.

Gift of the Finger: Cannibalism in Chosŏn Korea A survey of Korean cannibalism must begin with the early Chosŏn, which gave space to a particularly nuanced discussion of cannibalism as a practice both legitimate and transgressive. This was a period marked by what seems to have been two starkly different official attitudes toward consumption of human parts. The first reference to “human meat” or inyuk in Chosŏn wangjo sillok (The Chronicles of the Chosŏn Dynasty) occurs in 1423, during King Sejong’s reign (1418–50). We are told that in the northern province of Hwanghae-do, there was a nine-year-old boy named Yang Kwi-jin who cut off his finger, grilled it over a flame, and fed it to his gravely ill father.2 He did so because he had heard that eating human flesh can cure the most fatal of illnesses. The boy’s father recovered not long thereafter, and the king rewarded the child as an exemplar of virtue after

receiving a report from the provincial governor (CWSL Sejong 5 1423.11.17 Kabo/2). Page 87 →Yet twenty-four years later in 1447, with Sejong still on the throne of ChosЕЏn, another incident of cannibalism elicited a very different kind of response. A petty bureaucrat named Kim Е¬i-jЕЏng, also from Hwanghae-do, reported that a boy walked into a forest for the purpose of gathering firewood and found remains of a cannibalistic feast, including four human legs and a warm batch of charcoal used for the cooking. The deed was traced back to a man named Yi U, a known grave robber. When Yi’s house was searched, local officials found an arm and two chunks of meat, all identified as human (CWSL Sejong 29 1447.11.17 PyЕЏngo/2). The court dispatched a military inspector for an interrogation because local officials were too paralyzed with shock to act, but in a surprising turn of events, it was the original reporter of the case, the petty bureaucrat Kim who was arrested along with another individual, for the crime of spreading a wicked rumor (yoЕЏn) that humans were eating other humans. His punishment: banishment of him and his entire family to a wretched border region after the king magnanimously commuted the sentence from the initially recommended beheading (CWSL Sejong 29 1447.12.23 Sinsa/1). A boy hears that human meat is a cure, mutilates himself in supplying it, and wins fame as a paragon of filiality. A man reports on a forest banquet of human meat, the instigator is located, but the knowledge is suppressed by the state, which then arrests the source. In the former case, Yang, a facilitator of cannibalism, receives praise. In the latter case, Kim, a facilitator of cannibalism, albeit in a different way, comes under scrutiny and punishment. A simple explanation for what took place would be that while consumption of human parts was reviled under ChosЕЏn rule, harming oneself to facilitate cannibalism for a kin was not. And consumption of other humans may have been deemed reprehensible, but apart from cannibalism itself, it was apparently the act of discussing cannibalistic incidents, real or otherwise, that forced officialdom to punish anyone found complicit. To understand this picture, one must turn to the complex position of the ChosЕЏn court, which was actively involved in promoting cannibalism in the name of virtue. The 1423 case of the devoted son Yang Kwi-jin who revived his father with a grilled finger typified the contents of a text known as Samgang haengsilto (Conduct of the Three Bonds, Illustrated). Initiated in 1431 under Sejong’s command, it was designed to widely promote loyalty, filial piety, and chastity as central moral concerns of the dynasty to its subjects. Several types of conducts are used in the text to illustrate how these virtues may be performed correctly, but what stands out under the category of filial piety are gruesome tales of children, sometimes not even Page 88 →prepubescent, slicing their fingers to trickle blood into the mouth of a sick parent, or excising flesh from their thighs so that it could be cooked and offered as a restorative meal.3 Created with relevance for the people of ChosЕЏn in mind, the text incorporated local examples of virtuous conducts into a body of stories received from China. One such concerned SЕЏk-chin, who first appears in a 1420 entry of the dynastic chronicles as a man whose father was sick beyond recovery. SЕЏk-chin lived in the southwestern province of ChЕЏlla-do just eleven years before the compilation of Samgang haengsilto. He had an epileptic father who fainted on a daily basis, waking only a long time after each seizure. SЕЏk-chin cried day and night, praying and searching for a cure far and wide. One day, a Buddhist monk appeared and inquired after the invalid’s health. When SЕЏk-chin explained in detail the symptoms of his father’s ailment, the monk recommended mixing human bones and blood and administering the resulting concoction as a fail-proof prescription. SЕЏk-chin followed through in a heroic act of self-sacrifice. Rather than harming another person to make the medicine, he cut off his own “nameless” finger (mumyЕЏngji), dipped it in the trickling blood, and fed it to his father. At first, there seemed only moderate improvement, but with the second administration the disease was gone forever more. A local magistrate who happened to be visiting the village witnessed and recorded the entire affair. SЕЏk-chin’s narrative travelled up the court hierarchy and attracted the king’s attention, gaining the filial son an exemption from corvГ©e duties and gates erected to mark his residence and village as a place of virtue (CWSL Sejong 2 1420.10.18 Kyech’uk/3). It illustrates the reality that propagation of filial piety loomed large in a self-identified Confucian polity that was ChosЕЏn, much as it was the case in late imperial China described by Norman Kutcher. Among the three primary virtues of a Confucian state, filial piety commanded particular importance in the court’s theorization, seen as

correlating with a subject’s loyalty toward the throne as well as being a virtue pertinent to both men and women. A morally depraved person who willfully disregarded his parents could be just as culpable of harboring a desire to plot against the throne. Every subject was thus compelled to devote himself completely to the well-being of his progenitors, doubly demonstrating his commitment to filiality and loyalty. A failure to be filial would, naturally, feed accusations of treason (Kutcher 2006, 2). What makes the celebration of SЕЏk-chin’s conduct in ChosЕЏn’s official discourse so jarring is the seeming incongruity between the promotion of Page 89 →self-mutilating children and the rhetoric of filiality as affirmed early on by the Korean court. As Wang Sixiang notes, filial cannibalism posed a conundrum for the early ChosЕЏn political order. Self-harm was not filial, since one’s body was given by the parents and therefore must be preserved intact.4 And these unfilial children could also be seen as telegraphing their defiance of the state, which identified and upheld specific virtues in pursuit of self-legitimation. But well-meaning subjects who mutilated themselves to save their parents—in the name of filiality—were not condemned, as we see in the final outcome of SЕЏk-chin’s story. Supporters of such young people rallied to demonstrate that sourcing one’s own blood, flesh, and bones to feed an unknowing parent was a laudable conduct of virtue, and SЕЏkchin and others like him were held up in the process as proof that filial cannibalism need not be seen as depraved. One argument came from a pupil at a Confucian academy in SЕЏk-chin’s administrative region, who raised the following point in a memorial to the king: While harming one’s body in order to serve parents is not the conventional path of filial piety, [his] filial conducts have sufficiently moved people’s hearts and have expressed orthodoxy in four ways.5 Those four ways centered on SЕЏk-chin’s disregard for his own well-being while tending to his sick father. He had refused to change clothes and eat good food during the four years of nursing. He had refrained from social functions in favor of seeking out healers and medicine. He had radiated only pleasure while serving and had never crossed his parents’ wishes. Finally, he had hesitated to reveal his filial conduct in order to deflect praise. The memorial argued that SЕЏk-chin’s filial piety was already unimpeachable prior to the final act of virtue: cutting his finger for the dying father. Therefore, his self-mutilation, initially suspect in its virtuousness, still should be viewed as stemming from filial piety, as he had already demonstrated himself to be an exemplary son prior to the act. This increasingly became the standard rationale in official discourse for justifying self-mutilation and attendant cannibalism. It suggested that so long as the intention behind cannibalism was just, the court did not see it fit to confer punishment on either the facilitator or the consumer. And implicitly recognized was the possibility that the human body could transubstantiate into medicine of unparalleled power if preceded by filial piety, and occasionally, by wifely chastity.6 It was indeed imperative to remind the population that eating the human body did not work as a cure Page 90 →for anyone; the filiality debate clarified that for activation, and even knowledge, of human-based medicine, evidence of virtue was essential. The proliferating narratives emphasized that the finger’s ability to cure even the most serious of illnesses was esoteric: SЕЏk-chin himself knew what to do only when a mysterious Buddhist monk appeared as his advisor, seemingly exposing a secret of the highest order. In a similar event from 1475, another filial son, named Ch’oe So-ha, was in a state of distress not unlike that of SЕЏk-chin over ailing parents, and Ch’oe was accorded the honor of a dream visitation by a mysterious deity who was moved by Ch’oe’s virtue to divulge the secret power of a cremated finger as a cure. Only the worthy were meant to know and able to commandeer the power of human parts to restore, revitalize, and revive failing bodies of other humans (CWSL SЕЏngjong 6 1475.2.15 Kabo/5). But these stories with their official imprimatur obscured a larger, more pernicious idea at work. Though the court attempted to present a contrary picture, there seems to have been a pervasive belief among the people of ChosЕЏn that this was medicine that worked for all people, not just the virtuous. In the sixteenth century, the perception of human flesh and organs as a viable means to address incurable conditions was popular enough to incite serious crimes, causing consternation among ChosЕЏn’s ruling elite.

Court scribes took note in 1566 that beggars in the vicinity of the capital’s clinics were disappearing, to the point that streets became quiet from their absence. We are told that the cause lay with one court physician who had remarked that human gallbladders could heal genital rashes (З”mch’ang). His prescription led to a wave of murders, whose chief victims were the indigents loitering in the shadow of the clinics. When the supply of beggars dried up, children were next to be kidnapped and killed (CWSL MyЕЏngjong 1566 21.2.29 Sinmyo/1). A decade later in 1576, King SЕЏnjo (1567–1608) decreed, “Make it the official responsibility of the Ministry of Punishment (hyЕЏngjo) to arrest those who cut open people’s stomachs and cause death.” The reference was to criminals in the countryside who abducted people, children and adults alike, in order to remove livers and gallbladders, because of those organs’ efficacy in curing skin sores. The problem was serious enough that woodcutters could no longer go into the mountains, too frightened from seeing all the victims littering the woods, their bodies tied to trees and abdomens sliced open in what must have been a phantasmagoric tableau (CWSL SЕЏnjo 1576 9.6.26 ChЕЏnghae/1). Page 91 →These episodes convey a sense that cannibalism-induced murders were viewed as anomalous events grounded in immoral intentions, but equally glaring as that outrage is the lack of denial that human organs may serve a medicinal function. No one came forth and asserted that a gallbladder could calm rashes, or that a liver could counteract sores even in absence of virtue, the supposed catalyst for the awesome healing power residing in humans. This belief may be glimpsed in at least two East Asian texts that touch on the medicinal application of human flesh: Ben cao shi yi (Supplementation to the Materia Medica), a Tang-dynasty pharmacopeia that recommends renrou (human flesh) for a pulmonary disorder; and the better-known Ben cao gang mu (Compendium of Materia Medica) from the sixteenth century, a Chinese work highly influential in ChosЕЏn that denounces the earlier text as propagating a falsehood with regard to the efficacy of human meat as medicine. While conceding that there may have been persons who cut out livers and thighs for a cure prior to the time of Ben cao shi yi, Li Shizhen, the Ming author of Ben cao gang mu, condemned using medical cannibalism as misguided: Alas! The body, hair, and skin come from parents and ought never to be harmed. Even if parents are seriously ill, would they wish their offspring to mangle limbs and torsos and eat those bones and flesh? This is a view of the ignorant.7 Li argued that jeopardizing one life in order to save another defeated the purpose of medicine, accusing some of “shocking the world” so as to escape corvГ©e duties as a reward for their spectacular demonstrations of virtue. But as concerned as Li was for ethical reasons, he gave no explicit suggestion that human flesh did not work as a healing agent. Furthermore, Li’s approach was not to exclude mentions of various human parts’ medicinal function from older treatises despite his outward objection to them: he gave thorough accounts of those practices in the section comprehensively titled renbu (дєєйѓЁ). Though no Korean medical treatise to my knowledge discusses uses of human parts, certain clues outside court documents hint that the human body in ChosЕЏn was seen as a tantalizing ingredient in miraculous cures, despite the cries of reproach. Ginseng, another powerful substance much extolled in traditional medicine, made its first major appearance in a medical context via KugЗ”p kanibang ЕЏnhae in 1489, expressed as insam, or a humanshaped root. Using the same term, HЕЏ Chun’s celebrated 1613 treatisePage 92 → TongЕ-i pogam(The Eastern Mirror of Precious Medicine) described insam as follows: It has three branches and five leaves, with its back to the sun and facing the shade. If one wishes it, look under a paulownia tree. Called the divine herb, the one that is shaped like a human has efficacy. The numerous lore about discoveries of fabled ginseng had much in common with the rhetoric of virtue surrounding the activation of human parts’ hidden power. In order to find the best ginseng, one must be an exemplary figure, have a genuine need for an extraordinary cure, and receive assistance of a supernatural being who divulges the location of ginseng as a heavenly compensation for the virtue embodied. The ultimate reward is a divine herb, one that replaces human parts as their closest natural simulacrum.8 The narrative arch perfectly

mirrored the logic expressed in recorded lives of men and women who were exemplary children, had a genuine need for an extraordinary cure, and received assistance of a supernatural being who divulged the truth of the human body. The ultimate reward was a forbidden medicine made legitimate by virtue. Even in the twilight of ChosЕЏn, the local obsession with the medicinal power of human parts was palpably felt, inspiring a comment from the wife of Horace Underwood, the medical missionary who worked at the first foreign hospital in the capital at the end of the nineteenth century. This was a time when the effectiveness of medical treatments provided by Westerners spurred rumors of black magic, and of consumption of babies. Lilias Underwood recounted upon returning to her home country that the natives thought the hospital to be “the headquarters of this bloodthirsty work” because “where medicine was manufactured and diseases treated, babies must certainly be butchered” (Underwood 1908, 16). Anything so powerful as the medicine of the white people must surely be made from bits of infants, the material sine qua non in ChosЕЏn’s medical imagination. In this climate, the transgression of cannibalism encountered a particular policy of the Korean court. While the practice of eating human flesh was seemingly unstoppable, it enjoyed a rational explanation accounting for its tenacity. The belief in the power of human parts as medicine was evidently hard to suppress, but that power could be correctly channeled to buttress the existing sociopolitical structure whose foundation was morality. The assertion was that committed as a filial act, cannibalism need not be transgressive. Page 93 →The first order of business was to swiftly eradicate salacious gossip about cannibalism of the criminal variety, an activity that subverted the agenda of the state that required its authority to be constantly affirmed by auspicious signs and virtuous acts, not undermined by bizarre indicators of misrule such as drought, flood, irregular astral movements, or cannibalism sans virtue. If we return to the 1447 case of cannibalism, the result of which was the banishment of the petty official Kim and his family for spreading a wicked rumor, accusations of deception on his part find no supporting evidence within the narrative. On the other hand, Yi U, the suspected villain whose home yielded unconsumed human parts, received no discernible punishment. Rumormongering about wickedness within the kingdom, as Kim was accused, was from the court’s point of view a serious crime regardless of the truth.9 Meanwhile, Samgang haengsilto made what was supposedly an esoteric ritual available to a few deserving souls widespread knowledge, thereby helping to propagate cannibalism of the correct kind.10 As an illustrated text, its objective was to propagate virtue by inspiring ordinary subjects to follow suit. Its accompanying images, one for each story, often utilized the strategy of continuous narration, clearly laying out within a single frame the entire sequence of events leading up to the pivotal feeding of the flesh. It meant that a protagonist appeared engaging in a specific action in each of the three miniature scenes: first, an encounter with an unexpected source of knowledge; second, the self-mutilation of the body; and finally, the dispensation of the cure. Less a text for passive consumption and enjoyment, Samgang haengsilto instructed the reader on proper execution of virtuous cannibalism, serving as a hagiography and a manual for all who aspired to fulfill their responsibilities toward virtue, as well as those who were simply desperate for a miracle. Compelling evidence for this interpretation comes from 1526 when a minor country scholar’s wife cut off her nameless finger while praying for her husband’s recovery. The record makes it a point to mention that she was a literate woman who could recite Samgang haengsilto by heart, indicating she found inspiration for her action in the body of this text. Her sincerity was such that the mere act of cutting the finger and spilling blood was sufficient to bring about her husband’s immediate recovery. Her virtue reigned supreme, allowing the sick husband to rise without taking a single bite of her finger (CWSL Chungjo 21 1526.7.15 PyЕЏngsin/2). In an ideal scenario envisioned by the court, virtue restrained transgression all while the principal objective—healing—was still achieved. Page 94 →Institutionalized for centuries, excesses of filial cannibalism came under scrutiny of renowned scholarofficial ChЕЏng Yag-yong, who produced a large body of political essays on governing practices in the latter half of the dynasty. In a section critiquing what was by then an irrepressible cult, he listed extreme expressions of filiality including self-mutilation as a sign of virtue gone awry. People reported their wildly filial acts genuine and imagined simply to court awards, and officials hardly questioned the claimants about these improbably miraculous

occurrences, with no one stepping forth to uphold truth; all that remained was ignorance and deceit.11 Evidence indicates that ChЕЏng was raging against a regrettable reality: informing superiors of exemplary subjects was a routine duty of low-ranking administrators in the late nineteenth century, so much so that a standard formula for reporting model figures, with a blank for the name of the individual being praised, was made available as part of a late-ChosЕЏn collection of essential documents for bureaucrats.12 With rampant official complicity, filially motivated mutilations only won exaggeration and normativity, luring yet more subjects into the practice. The rise of filial cannibalism in ChosЕЏn illuminates how ritualization could exist in tandem with transgression as an effective mechanism for taming the existing impulse to test social taboos. Hunger for human flesh existed, but cannibalism was a highly regulated affair accompanied by a palatable explanation bringing the practice into the sphere of order and respectability. The court’s willful reimagining of cannibalism as a ritual of filial piety and sometimes wifely dedication made human parts less gross and created moral space for the practice to persist, though the scandalous air associated with consuming them did not fade entirely. This was not the first instance when the early ChosЕЏn court purposely appropriated the grotesque and embedded it within official ritual aesthetics. As Chong Daham has written on early ChosЕЏn warfare, Korean soldiers routinely cut off ears and noses of vanquished enemies in battles with Jurchen forces to the north and those of Tsushima to the south. The purpose was to gather these human parts and transport them to the court as offerings for the state rite marking the end of a complex ceremony known as chЕЏngbЕЏl—ritualized military conquest and punishment of those who disrupt celestial order (Chong 2010; 2011). Such was the state ideology of ChosЕЏn, to embrace transgression and reconfigure it into what was humane through an elaborately constructed framework. Cannibalism was no exception to this rule. Page 95 →

The Chinese Are Coming, the Chinese Are Coming: A Contemporary Parallel On October 10, 2012, Taiwan’s national holiday, a strange rumor circulated the South Korean Internet space. It alleged that the Chinese (Chungguk saram: a term inclusive of the Taiwanese) were coming to South Korea for their annual human meat shopping-spree. Improbable as it sounded, it was contended that South Korean meat, less contaminated from pollution and better nourished, was superior to the Chinese kind and therefore more attractive to Chinese human meat consumers (YЕЏnhap NyusЕ- 2012b). Within a span of one week, panicky mothers openly worried on a popular cybercafГ© about an anonymously authored story describing a Chinese nanny who had kidnapped her charge to China, discarding the empty shell of a baby for local police to find after all the organs had been harvested. “I specifically chose a South Korean nanny. I heard many bad stories, so I couldn’t trust a ChosЕЏnjok [the Chinese of Korean descent],” declared one Korean mother interviewed by SBS, a major broadcasting network (Kim Chong-wЕЏn 2012). Cannibalism has resurfaced in contemporary South Korea, echoing five century-old fears of flesh eaters and organ thieves. What differentiates the present situation is, however, a less discernible concern with the ethical implication of this gruesome trade among the South Korean people. If ChosЕЏn was characterized by a cognizant policy to distinguish and regulate different forms of cannibalism within its realm in the name of virtue, the overall approach of the Sixth Republic to that same problem has been to evaluate it based on efficacy, and to project it onto the outside world as a phenomenon that victimizes, rather than implicates, South Koreans. Take for instance shipments of health supplements, commonly known as human meat capsules (inyuk k’aepsyul), which the South Korean authorities have discovered at various ports of entry for the past two years. Investigative reports by the media have traced them back to China where they are manufactured, in the process implicating South Korean citizens as likely consumers of this mysterious medicine. The capsules, made from aborted fetuses that are first dried and then pulverized into powder, are accompanied by a claim that they possess a power to revitalize an aging or ailing human body (Kim Min-ji 2012).

Efforts have been made to situate this highly transgressive phenomenon outside South Korean borders, casting non-Koreans as its main actors.Page 96 → Even prior to the aforementioned rumors identified perpetrators of cannibalism as Chinese, the Korean Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) issued a special warning that it was conducting an extensive investigation to dismantle the distribution network with the ChosЕЏnjok areas in mind.13 The idea was that cannibalism would cease if the inflow of such goods, made possible by the Chinese, were halted before reaching domestic consumers. Fear of the outside world, symbolized by China, manifests prominently in contemporary tales of cannibalism. A crucial incident cementing the imagined complicity of China in human consumption occurred in April 2012: a highly publicized murder of a young woman in the provincial city of SuwЕЏn at the hands of a ChosЕЏnjok daylaborer named O WЕЏn-ch’un, who became doubly notorious for the manner in which he attempted to dispose of his victim’s body. O allegedly cut the corpse into numerous small pieces, in the process neatly separating the flesh from the bones and keeping the organs intact in separate plastic bags. His deliberate methods and calm demeanor in the course of committing the crime fueled many conspiracy theories that O was a professional procurer acting with assistance from a major Chinese criminal network for the purpose of supplying a flourishing human part trade from South Korea to the continental mainland (YЕЏnhap NyusЗ” 2012a). That O is of Korean descent in actuality and that he may therefore be as informed by his Korean roots as by his upbringing in China have not registered with a nation bent on ascribing cannibalism to forces outside its territory. On the contrary, suspicions of foreign cannibals have been amplified by contemporary South Korean moviemakers, who have popularized tales of organ thieves and dismembered bodies to much public sympathy for their art and to great outrage against those allegedly perpetrating this crime. When the movie KongmojadЗ”l (“The Traffickers”) was shown at the Pusan International Film Festival in September 2012, it became an instant sensation on the popular Internet search portal Naver, where many viewers praised the movie for what they considered to be a gripping portrayal of illicit organ trade between South Korea and China. KongmojadЗ”l came on the heels of two films from 2010, AjЕЏssi (“The Man from Nowhere”), which spoke to anxiety over illegal and forcible harvest of human organs, and Hwanghae (“The Yellow Sea”), chronicling the misadventure of a ChosЕЏnjok hired killer let loose in South Korea. Each of these works gave prominent space to depictions of commodified human parts and associated criminality, offering a dual experience of revulsion and pleasure Page 97 →to South Korean viewers. Though the practice of trading in human parts itself continued to be deplored in such cinematic renderings as a real problem, the graphic depictions found enthusiastic reception as entertainment as well as an edifying medium for viewers who may be ignorant of this particular danger in society.14 Public fury serves to conceal the uncomfortable fact that South Korea is the market destination for inyuk k’aepsyul, made of Chinese fetuses and sold to the South Korean public whose familiarity with human products goes beyond these capsules. The refusal to dwell on the ethics of this consumption practice is echoed in the attitude of the kЕЏn’gang sikp’um (health food) market and of the medical industry, which have seen a spike in demand for human placentas, notably as cosmetics, health supplements, and injections. The South Korean government officially banned manufacture and sale of cosmetics using human placentas for health reasons in April 2006, following numerous complaints of side effects by consumers (ChЕЏng 2006), but products containing human placenta are available once they acquire state approval. In 2009 and again in 2011, the KFDA pulled certain injectable placenta products from the market, citing “inefficacy,” but many others have been allowed and continue to be sold to the public (Ministry of Food and Drug Safety 2011). The same agency announced in early 2012 its intention to remove human placenta from the list of ingredients requiring official permission in the manufacture of traditional medicine (hanyak), thus expanding the pharmaceutical application of the organ (Ministry of Food and Drug Safety 2012). The move for full-scale commercialization of placenta was seen as early as 2005, when the Korean Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement that there was an urgent need for the government to clarify laws concerning reuse of placentas harvested from mothers giving birth, so that these organs could be recycled “safely and ethically” for pharmaceutical production. It alluded to the reality that many placentas were being illegally sourced for commercial applications to meet domestic demands, and demonstrated the position of the medical establishment in support of human parts consumption in a more controlled, expansive manner (Sin 2005).

The appeal of the placenta-derived merchandise to consumers partly has a historical origin, going back to medical texts at the foundation of traditional medicine. But that historical belief is now corroborated by an industry that liberally sells placenta goods for a host of problems stemming from aging. Medical professionals and aestheticians who transact in the products widely advertise their use for all manner of bodily conditions Page 98 →despite knowing that placenta injections are permitted under the law for moderating fatigue and symptoms of menopause, but not for restoring youth to one’s physical appearance.15 Clients cling to their belief of the human body as panacea, and as a result an ethical objection to consumption of placentas has been expectedly muted. The cosmetics ban, when it was enacted, arose only after health-related complaints were registered, and when such complaints died down, the product returned to the market. The lack of explicit moral concerns on the part of the Korean population in utilizing human parts reflects the general failure of bioethics in delimiting contemporary Korean behavior, notably in the area of abortion. As The New York Times reported in 2010, the South Korean government has maintained severe restriction on termination of pregnancy since six decades ago, but it rarely enforces the law and allows a high rate of abortion to proceed, many in the hands of licensed doctors.16 Unlike the dearth of controversy surrounding domestic consumption of human placentas, the popular rage at foreigners—the Chinese—as the locus of cannibalistic desire has been most intense. Worryingly for the officialdom, the anti-Chinese narrative is inextricably linked to trenchant antigovernment sentiments. As an example, a highly popular video montage circulated via the Internet—unsuccessfully investigated by the police as to the source—detailing how the Chinese allegedly infiltrate Korea in order to source and export human bodies back to their homeland. Titled “The Truth about Sales of Humans, Their Organs, and Flesh: Do Not Dismiss as an Urban Legend!,” the fifteen-minute-long clip connected pertinent social issues such as the rise in sex crime, frequent disappearances of women, illicit organ trade in China, international criminal syndicates, the discovery of fetus pills, and the increase in immigration to South Korea, advancing a theory that South Korean women were being kidnapped and killed so their organs and flesh could be sold. The conspiratorial tone of the video, especially in placing much of the blame on the Chinese, could have been amusing for some, but its seemingly convincing argument did not lead to much amusement in South Korea, where sex crime, human trafficking, organ trade, passion for dubious health supplements, criminality, and increasing immigration both legal and illegal are spoken of as serious social realities requiring serious state intervention. The public recognized cannibalism, in its uncontrolled criminal incarnation, as a signifier of misrule. The officials declared the video a form of malicious gossip, but their evident concern only with finding the person responsible for disseminating the Page 99 →“truth” confirmed for the public the failure of the political class to prevent heinous crimes committed by outsiders.17 The obstinate call to equate cannibalism—a sign of barbarity that, at most, briefly and marginally overlaps with Korean civilization in domestic discourse—exclusively with China speaks to anxieties felt by South Koreans over an interstate relationship found less than equitable. To say that the Chinese are the only ones capable of gross transgression is to lessen the inequity between the two nations, if not economically or politically, but moralistically. The state’s shortcoming lies not only in failing to keep that outside world at bay but also in being complicit in forces that render debordering—or globalization—that much more difficult to resist. China’s most visible representatives in South Korea—the Chinese economic migrants of Korean heritage—bear the brunt of growing popular anger, as do other types of recent arrivals similarly accused of undermining existing social order.18 One is told that there is no Korean cannibalism, only that Г la chinoise. South Korean buyers of fetus capsules were never publicly shamed, and human placenta consumption does not figure as a form of cannibalism in local imagination. Seemingly little different from purchasing any other health product in its manifestation as an economic activity, receiving a dose of placenta cells has become so generic as to merit outcry in few South Korean discursive spaces. On the contrary, it has found celebration and promotion in a culture that increasingly values the physical over the ethical. Whereas a desire to violently consume human parts is conveniently attributed to Chinese or Chinese-Koreans—outsiders and ready objects of hostility—within South Korea’s borders,

commercialized cannibalism, cinematic or pharmaceutical, is, however, condoned and made legal in the name of promoting a new virtue, one of consumption for the sake of entertainment, health, and beauty.

Conclusion While many South Koreans today may gravitate toward fetuses and placentas under the influence of unethical vendors and doctors, cannibalism—ethicized, medicalized, or commercialized—has appeared in a number of different contexts throughout Korean history, out of the conviction that it is an efficacious substance.19 One explanation for its enduring appeal may be found in the ambiguity inherent in materials harvested from a human Page 100 →source. Mary Douglas’s classic theory on ritual pollution posited that objects that transcend categorization attract equal fear as disgust (Douglas 1966). In keeping with her analysis of impurity, a human part in a dismembered state resonates neither as quite human nor entirely as an object onto itself, unlike other animal meat that can stand ontologically independent of the animal even while remaining conceptually linked to it. Defying easy categorization in its state of divorce from the whole body of a person, a human part compels abject horror as something grotesque and unspeakable, reminding the viewer of the human it is harvested from; but in the very evocation of the source it also possesses an efficacy superior to that of things more permissible and immediately available, such as conventional medicine.20 But out of the awareness that cannibalism cannot take place in an unvarnished form, ritualization /commercialization functions as the means to normalize transgressive practices within specific temporal and spatial confines, much as neurologists have sought to argue based on scientific studies. Sex is an example of how disgust can be temporarily suspended in presence of mediating cues. After all, the human body, with its gross fluids and odors, is not only tolerated but savored in the course of sexual arousal because the brain suppresses our ordinary reaction to such undesirable stimulants. When called an exchange of fluids and odors, sex is not an appealing prospect. But under the spell of hormones and the preconception of the act as a ritual of pleasure and/or reproduction, one responds to the same objects with excitement rather than revulsion (Borg and de Jong 2012). Similarly, human flesh and organs, inspiring disgust under a normal circumstance, is objectified as the consumable, nonhuman other in the approaches of both ChosЕЏn and contemporary Korea where the impulse to eat another human becomes embedded in codes of the state for moral, medical, or economic reasons. What marks the current age is a far more acute sensibility against cannibalism as an act and an idea, due to the assumption of rational thinkers both in academia and elsewhere that the human act of eating a human is an anomaly, if not a myth. That reluctance to believe cannibalism informs the contemporary South Korean understanding of the trade in human organs and flesh. Because it is not “possible” that such could exist within the community, it can only be attributed to those outside, as a justification for xenophobia as well as an expression of concern over the present political and economic order. The profound distrust of the state, whether it be the government with its inability to police the realm or institutional experts who issue edicts on when human parts can be consumed and for what Page 101 →purpose to no avail, is at the heart of the contemporary cannibalism discourse that feeds, and feeds on, the anxieties of contemporary existence. In defying those impotent powers, sharing tales of cannibalism and partaking in the illicit elixir comprise another form of transgression.

Notes This article has been made possible by the generous support of the Korea Foundation, and with the assistance of the Centre de Recherches sur la CorГ©e (CRC) at the Г‰cole des Hautes Г‰tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Epigraph, see Butler 1912. 1. For the kind of rebuttal that studies of cannibalism must confront, see Arens 1980. 2. Ages are noted as in the original text and based on the Korean way of counting. 3. The first edition of Samgang haengsilto appeared in 1434, but there were numerous subsequent editions compiled under different kings, some expanded to include additional virtues. In this chapter I do not refer to a specific edition, but consider the entire corpus as having a specific aim in common. 4. Whether filial cannibalism conformed to orthodoxy was much debated, even as the practice gradually

moved to the center of “normalcy.” See Wang 2012. 5. CWSL 2.411 (Sejong 2 1420.10.18 Kyech’uk/3) 6. Wang notes the emphasis on sincerity as that which heals a dying parent, as opposed to any intrinsic property of the human body to affect a medical outcome. See Wang, 22. 7. See the renbu section of Li 1973, 1597. 8. Ginseng also morphs into a human being in a number of tales, further blurring the boundary between the root and human flesh. See No 2012. 9. A similar charge of rumormongering was brought against three subjects in 1448 for claiming knowledge of cannibalistic events. Punishment was discussed even before facts could be verified because rumormongering over cannibalism itself constituted a serious offense. The Grand Secretary Yi Kye-jЕЏn defended the accused by arguing that though cannibalism might be fictitious, the rumors spoke to the truth of famine in the region and their perpetrators should not be so vilified. See CWSL 5.49 (Sejong 30 1448.1.16 kyemyo/1). 10. See the discussion of Samgang haengsilto’s production and dissemination in Pettid 2011. 11. ChЕЏng’s ideas on filial cannibalism are available in his Hyoja ron. See ChЕЏng 1983. 12. I thank Dr. Vladimir Glomb at Charles University for pointing me to this late ChosЕЏn text, YusЕЏ p’ilchi, of which several editions exist. 13. A detailed report on measures by the national food and drug administration to curb the trade in human meat capsules can be found on its website under the title “SЕЏlmyЕЏng charyo: вЂInyuk k’aepsyul’ pulbЕЏp yut’ong kЗ”njЕЏ rЗ”l wihan kamsi ch’egye kadong” (“Explanatory Material: The Activation of a Constant Monitoring System for Preventing the Illegal Distribution of вЂHuman Meat Capsule’”). See Korea Food and Drug Administration 2012. Page 102 →14. AjЕЏssi, the highest-grossing of the three, sold more than six hundred million tickets according to the Korean Film Council. 15. According to one survey endorsed by the government, 42.1 percent of those who had received a human placenta injection did so to improve and brighten their skin, a use unsanctioned by law. The second- and third-most common objectives, attested to by a combined 36.2 percent of respondents, were elimination of fatigue and moderation of menopausal symptoms, both legalized uses. A quarter of previous users had visited a professional after seeing advertisements by medical clinics. Nearly a third of potential users mistakenly thought that placenta injections for aesthetic improvement were legal. See Yi 2009. 16. One argument against abortion gaining traction among the public is that the declining national birth rate must be offset by a stricter enforcement of antiabortion laws, emphasizing the contributory potential of birth to the nation-state over any ethical quandary present in termination of pregnancy. See Choe 2010. 17. It is available for viewing at: “Insin maemae, changgi maemae inyuk maemae З”i silch’e!! koedam З”ro mult’agi hajimara!!” (“The Truth about Sales of Humans, Their Organs, and Flesh: Do Not Dismiss as an Urban Legend!”), YouTube, September 15, 2012. Accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Ky9AN3Wxo 18. Multiculturalism, a government-sponsored paradigm for articulating the changing racial/cultural landscape of South Korea, has also come under xenophobic attacks for not putting the interest of natives before that of foreign migrants such as ChosЕЏnjok and foreign brides from Asian developing countries. See one fringe civic organization, Oegugin PЕЏmjoe Ch’ŏkkyЕЏl YЕЏndae (Alliance for Combating Crimes by Foreigners), which has been vocal in fighting immigration, especially marriage between Korean men and foreign women. Accessed at http://cafe.daum.net/antifakemarriage 19. Colonial-period literature is another fruitful source for studying cannibalism in Korea, though the political situation under Japanese rule complicates a straightforward reading of the materials. See Koo 2011. 20. The perception of ambiguity as a source of extraordinary power has also been documented in Tanzania, where albinos attract the scrutiny of sorcerers seeking otherworldly ingredients for spell-making. African albinos, being “blacks” who are white in complexion, transcend conventional racial categories. See British Broadcasting Corporation 2013.

Works Cited

ChosЕЏn wangjo sillok (noted as CWSL in citations) Arens, William. 1980. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press. Borg, Charmaine, and Peter J. de Jong. 2012. “Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken Following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women.” PLoS ONE 7 (9): e44111.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044111. British Broadcasting Corporation. 2013. “UN’s Navi Pillay Condemns Tanzania Attacks on Albinos,” March 5. Accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21675536 Page 103 →Butler, Samuel. 1912. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Accessed at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs /etext04/nbsb10h.htm Choe, Sang-hun. 2010. “South Korea Confronts Open Secret of Abortion.” The New York Times, January 5. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/asia/06korea.html?pagewanted=all Chong, Daham (ChЕЏng Da-ham). 2010. “Rhetoric of a Lesser Suzerain: War as a Ritual in the Making of 15th-Century ChosЕЏn” for the panel “Reflecting Heaven, Ritualizing Below: Early ChosЕЏn Rituals and Politics.” Presented at the Association for Asian Studies General Meeting in Philadelphia. ChЕЏng Da-ham. 2011. “ChosЕЏn ch’ogi З”i вЂchЕЏngbЕЏl’: ch’ŏnmyЕЏng, sigye, tallyЕЏk kЗ”rigo hwayak mugi.” YЕЏksa wa munhwa 21: 45–80. ChЕЏng Yag-yong. 1983. “Hyoja ron.” In Tasan simunjip vol. 5., 146–50. Seoul: Minjok munhwa ch’ujinhoe. ChЕЏng YЕЏng-hyЕЏn. 2006. “вЂSaram t’aeban’ hwajangp’um wЕЏllyo ro mot ssЕЏnda” (Human Placenta Forbidden for Use as Cosmetics Ingredient). SЕЏul kyЕЏngje, April 12. Accessed at http://economy.hankooki.com/lpage/news/200604/e2006041218212470300.htm Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge. Kim Chong-wЕЏn. 2012. “Han’guk e inyuk sanyangВ .В .В .В ? KЕЏmgЕЏ doen saram ch’ugung haettЕЏni.” SBS nyusЕ-, October 2. Accessed at http://news.sbs.co.kr/section_news/news_read.jsp? news_id=N1001409981 Kim Min-ji. 2012. “вЂManbyЕЏng t’ongch’iyak’ inyuk k’aepsyul sЕЏ syup’ŏ pakt’eria kЕЏmch’ul.” NyusЕ- ei, April 26. Accessed at http://news.ichannela.com/tv/newsa/3/all /20120426/45826996/1 Koo, Se-Woong. 2011. “In the Shadow of the Light: The Formation of вЂSuperstition,’ 1880–1960.” Chapter 4 of “Making Belief: Religion and the State in Korea, 1392–1960,” 115–68. PhD diss., Stanford University. Korea Food and Drug Administration. 2012. “SЕЏlmyЕЏng charyo: вЂInyuk k’aepsyul’ pulbЕЏp yut’ong kЗ”njЕЏ rЗ”l wihan kamsi ch’egye kadong,” May 9. Accessed at http://www.mfds.go.kr /index.do?mid=57&seq=17754&cmd=v Kutcher, Norman. 2006. Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, Shizhen. 1973. Ben cao gang mu (Ponch’o kangmok). Seoul: Komunsa. Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. 2011. “Int’aeban yurae Е-iyakp’um imsang chaep’yЕЏngka

kyЕЏlgwa,” January 14. Accessed at http://www.mfds.go.kr/index.do?mid=56&seq=13960&cmd=v Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. 2012. “Hanyak (saengyak) cheche tЕ-ng Е-i p’ummok hЕЏga sin’goe kwanhan kyujЕЏng ilbu kaejЕЏng kosi (an) haengjЕЏng yego,” January 26. Accessed at http://www.mfds.go.kr/index.do?mid=54&seq=16953&cmd=v No YЕЏng-gЗ”n. 2012. “Insam soje han—chung sЕЏlhwa pigyo yЕЏn’gu.” Kukche ЕЏmun 54: 209–44. Pettid, Michael J. 2011. “Confucian Educational Works for Upper Status Women in ChosЕЏn Korea.” In Women and Confucianism in ChosЕЏn Korea: New Perspectives, ed. Young Min Kim and Michael J. Pettid, 49–70. Albany: State University of New York Press. Page 104 →Sin Chae-kyЕЏng. 2005. “Chaehwaryong t’aeban kijun myЕЏnghwakhi pЕЏpchehwa haeya.” MedWorld, October 13. Accessed at http://www.medworld.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=8929 Underwood, Lilias Horton. 1908. Fifteen Years among the Top-knots, or, Life in Korea. New York: American Tract Society. Wang, Sixiang. 2012. “The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan: Finger Severing, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early ChosЕЏn.” The Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 25 (2): 175–212. Yi Е¬n-suk. 2009. “вЂT’aeban chusa’ onamyong pangji rЕ-l wihan sobija Е-i insik kaesЕЏn mit hongbo chЕЏnnyak yЕЏn’gu.” Ch’ŏngwЕЏn: National Institute of Food and Drug Safety Evaluation. Accessed at http://rnd.mfds.go.kr/switch.do? prefix=/documentReport&page=/documentReportResult.do?method=get&vo.resultReportFileManageSN=100545 YЕЏnhap NyusЗ”. 2012a. “HЗ”idae З”i sarinma O WЕЏn-ch’un, inyuk mokchЕЏk sarin?,” June 15. Accessed at http://http://news.nate.com/view/20120615n18144 YЕЏnhap NyusЗ”. 2012b. “вЂSsangsipchЕЏl inyuk koedam’ hwaksanВ .В .В . kyЕЏngch’al вЂsasil mugЗ”n,’” October 12. Accessed at http:// http://news.nate.com/view/20121010n21655? mid=n0411

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4 Suicide, “New Women,” and Media Sensation in Colonial Korea Jennifer Yum At approximately 4 p.m. on April 8, 1931, two young women committed a sensational act of double-love suicide, jumping in front of a train in YЕЏngdЗ”ngp’o, a bustling district in the capital city of KyЕЏngsЕЏng. Twenty-one-year-old Hong Ok-im was then a student at Ewha Women’s Professional School, while her accomplice, nineteen-year-old Kim YЕЏng-ju, had recently terminated her studies to marry the eldest son of a wealthy family from Tongmak.1 The death of these two women provided fodder for a media frenzy. The premier woman’s magazine of the time, Sin yЕЏsЕЏng (New Woman), published over a dozen articles occupying more than ten pages of the May 1931 issue. Headlines made their way into newspapers such as the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) and ChosЕЏn ilbo (Korea Daily), as well as other monthly journals such as Samch’ŏlli and PyЕЏlgЕЏn’gon. Personal diaries and novels from the period also made note of this event. Overwhelmed by the amount of commentary elicited by this incident, a Tonga ilbo writer prefaced an article about the suicide noting: “We are no longer accepting your letters on this topic. Too much has already piled up. We will try our best to publish submissions we have already received” (Tonga ilbo, April 21, 1931). To a certain degree, sheer fascination fueled such public interest in the incident. The suicide, carried out in broad daylight at one of the busiest train stations in Seoul, involved two young women, making it all the more provocative. In their letters, writers conveyed their confusion about the women’s motives for suicide. Certainly, they were not driven to death by Page 106 →discomfort or desperation. Both women were healthy and hailed from remarkable socioeconomic backgrounds. Hong’s father was a professor of medicine at Severence Union Medical College while Kim’s father operated a successful printing press. To add to the mystique, the only clues for the women’s motivations lay in a vague suicide note penned by Hong, addressed to her father. Indeed, the attention elicited by this incident is peculiar in the context of suicides in colonial Korea. Reports of suicides, even those involving young Korean females, were far from rare during the 1920s and 1930s. A few years earlier, an eighteen-year-old woman had jumped in front of a train to die in the same manner as Hong and Kim. As the report indicated, she had been sold as a concubine for 120 wЕЏn.2 Allegedly oppressed by her husband’s first wife, she leapt to her death to escape her misery. Just three days before the Hong-Kim suicide, an elderly woman in Hwanghae-do had taken her own life by drinking poison. In the words of a journalist, “Intolerable poverty made life too difficult for this wretched woman to handle.” Heart-wrenching stories like these abounded. In total, over thirty thousand references to suicide appeared in colonial Korean newspapers from 1920 to 1940. A glance at the titles alone captures the material and physical suffering experienced by ordinary Koreans during this era. “Lifestyle difficulties” (saenghwallan), “domestic tensions” (kajЕЏng pulhwa), and illness (pyЕЏnggo) topped off the list of explanations for suicide in major newspapers. Such incidents, though, received but a fraction of the attention that Hong and Kim in the days and weeks following their deaths (Tonga ilbo, August 6, 1924). As Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy have noted in their study of suicide and the media in early modern England, “suicide has a history,” and the social attitudes reflected in their aftermaths make the study of suicide a “historically interesting topic” (MacDonald and Murphy 1990, 2). Drawing on reports published in the wake of the Hong-Kim suicide, this article approaches the media response as part of an ongoing public discourse on women and their social positions in colonial Korea. During the 1920s and 1930s, young, educated women such as Kim and Hong represented the core of a lively and controversial dialogue on the “New Woman” (sin yЕЏsЕЏng). The primary contributors to these conversations were nationalist male journalists and intellectuals who saw gender reform as key to the liberation of the nation. Analyzing the double-love suicide of Hong and Kim demonstrates the ways in which two people’s decisions to end their lives served as a

platform for their contemporaries to publicly Page 107 →grapple with the contradictions inherent in the historical transformations they encountered. Ironically, their voluntary deaths deemed them transgressors of the very agenda that had been so key in the creation of their identities. Embedded in the writings of those who survived them are signs of a public’s fascination as well as disgust toward this ambivalent reality.

Woman’s Emancipation in Colonial Korea The March First Movement of 1919 represented the largest nationalist uprising in Korean history, including over one million Koreans from all regions, religions, and walks of life to protest against Japanese rule. Well executed but ultimately unsuccessful in realizing its goal of political independence, the March First prompted Korean nationalist intellectuals to look inward for explanations.3 From the 1920s onward, Korean writers used the newly accessible medium of the vernacular press to overturn gender ideals that had been in place since the ChosЕЏn period. The “new woman” was presented in stark contrast to the “old woman” characterized by her subordination to men, lack of education, and absence of individual spirit. The momentum for their efforts grew out of the “cultural nationalist” movement in the wake of a momentous event during the colonial period. Soon known as “cultural nationalists,” these intellectuals embraced a self-strengthening movement premised on the belief that Korea’s premature state of social, economic, and cultural development had precluded it from national independence in 1919. While the March First may not have led to Korea’s political independence, the Japanese colonial government responded to the protests by allowing Koreans to publish their views ending a decade of forced silence. While censorship was in place, publication permits for vernacular publications allowed cultural nationalists to use the new medium of the mass press to pursue their political agendas.4 The following quote by Mun Il-p’yЕЏng (1888–1939) exemplifies the stance of a cultural nationalist who took modernization as a prerequisite for Korea’s survival in the face of stronger nations in the West and Japan: “The situation has greatly changed today.В .В .В . Korea today is facing the challenge of a new culture. Will it score high marks with the new scientific culture as it did with the old Confucian and Buddhist culture? The score on this test will determine the future of Korea” (Lee 1997, 320).5 It was within this context that nationalist writers turned their attention Page 108 →toward the construction of a “new woman” (sin yЕЏsЕЏng). The characteristics of the “new woman” was a cosmopolitan construction. It spoke directly to the cultural milieu of the 1920s that was influenced by the inflow of feminist literature from Western authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Ellen Key that appeared in translation for the first time (Hyun 2004, 9). It was also one that was rooted in local realities, however. Korean nationalist writers equated women’s status in society to a barometer for measuring the advancement of civilization. The country’s colonial situation indeed added a sense of urgency to their endeavor. As one cultural nationalist, Yi Е¬n-sang (1903–82), a historian and journalist trained at Waseda University wrote, History shows that the rise and fall of a civilization (munmyЕЏng) depends on the women of that civilization. Its advancement and development, its fate, is directly connected to women” .В .В . You cannot but notice that our current society is struggling. This is because our women are inadequate, their social outlooks are lacking. (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, June 1925, 2–6)6 The discourse on the “new woman” placed emphasis on terms such as “self” (cha), “selfawareness” (chagak), and “individual personality” (kaesЕЏng), as they were to be the defining characteristics of “new womanhood.” Terms such as “woman student” (yЕЏ hakseng) or intellectual woman (chisik yЕЏsЕЏng) were coterminous with “new woman” in colonial Korea. Slogans like “women are people too” (in’gan) were used to highlight the importance of female education. Without education, women would never be able to emerge from their male dependency and could never become full human beings. For example, an article in Sin yЕЏsЕЏng magazine read: “To all households with daughters old enough to enter school: man versus woman is no longer an acceptable distinctionВ .В .В . the schools are asking you to enroll your daughters.

Education will enable women to become human beings (in’gan) (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1924, 15). Another journalist drew attention to the noble sacrifices made by a father, nearly fifty years old, who moved with his daughter to school to educate her. While living in the city, he performed tasks such as ironing and carrying others’ baggage. He also gave up pleasures such as drinking and smoking. The author’s admiration of a fathers’ sacrifice for his daughter’s education conveyed his belief that females were no longer bound to serve their fathers or husbands (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1924, 26–29). Page 109 →Other male writers such as Kim Ki-jЕЏn, a chief editor of Sin yЕЏsЕЏng magazine and one of Korea’s leading figures in the Ch’ŏndogyo movement, invoked feminist arguments that targeted the “evil” (aksЕЏng) of patriarchy. He criticized men, who, even with their educated backgrounds, “still expect women to submit themselves to them, as seen in their great antagonism toward fellow women students” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1926, 2–4). Kim proposed a progressive alternative, writing: “relations between men and women should be defined by “co-dependency and equality” (p’yЕЏngdЕ-ng).В .В .В . In today’s society, women must be free of men’s oppressionВ .В .В . in today’s world, men cannot exercise complete control over their lives” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1926, 2–4). Furthermore, writers supported reforms in dating and marriage practices, enforcing the notion that women, not family members, should choose their marriage partners. While supporting the practice of “liberated dating” (chayu yЕЏnae), those writers also encouraged women to think critically before agreeing to marry their suitors, asking female readers, “Do you know if he possesses a strong sense of character? Is he intelligent? Is his judgment sound? If something is wrong, by all means it is acceptable to break the engagement” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1924, 23–24). Simply by their educated backgrounds, then, both Kim and Hong fit the criteria for “new women” in Korea. It is important to note that the majority of women in colonial Korea remained illiterate. Women who attended high school were seen as mini-celebrities, with their trademark uniforms and bobbed hair.

Citizenship and the “New Woman” Yet these messages about education, equality and personal choice comprised only the first of a two-step process becoming a true “new woman.” According to the writers responsible for her construction, the “new woman” also had to be an individual with social consciousness, and even more important, a nationalist agenda at heart. This was not a “Nora” that would walk out of the doll’s house, leaving family, home, and society behind. For instance, articles that noted that women could only be “angels” or “adorable” figures were not based on the premise that “Women cannot be dolls, for they too are citizens” (simin) (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1924, 73–76). In an open forum held on the occasion of women’s graduation from high school in the spring of 1924, contributors reminded students: “In order to Page 110 →be a sin yЕЏja (new woman), you must, above all else, become a person who is of use to ChosЕЏn (Korea) (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1924, 18). Male intellectual Yi Ton-hwa made a key distinction that female graduates should not settle for becoming “wives and mothers” (hyЕЏnmo yangch’ŏ) but instead stand on the front lines of social reform (sahoe kaejo) as “fighters.” Frequent usage of the terms such as “new outlook” (sin sasang) also marked writers’ efforts to stress simultaneously the values of personal cultivation and public consciousness. While offering various definition, writers reached a basic consensus that the key to a “new outlook” lay in a “realistic and grounded mindset” (kЕ-nbonjЕЏgin sasang). As one journalist wrote, a “new outlook” entailed more than education, modern clothing, or knowing the ABC’s.В .В .В . A “new outlook” could not be demonstrated through such superficial displays (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1924, 30–31).7 Finally, an article by political activist Pak YЕЏng-hЕ-i (1896–1930) neatly joined the concepts of education, liberation, and direct action in greater society in his following sequence of comments.8 According to Pak, “new women must be literate and educated; new women must be able to engage men in dialogue and have the abilities to process theories and ideas; third вЂnew women’ should be energetic and lively when they approach their daily tasks; fourth, вЂnew women’ must understand the current state of her society and have

the desire to address the situation” (Sin yŏsŏng, Summer 1925. Emphasis mine). Given the context of the cultural nationalist movement, one can assume that the “situation” that Pak had in mind was the broad goal of social development and eventually national liberation.

The Critique of the “New Woman” Yet a closer look at the discourse on the “new woman” suggests that the optimistic and empowering descriptions of “new womanhood” represented only one side of the story. As Jiweon Shin has remarked, the discourse on the “new woman” was distinctly two sided (Shin 2003, 247). If one set of characterizations represented the hopes of writers who envisioned a woman citizen who would lead her country out of despair, the other was marred by an ambivalent, if not forceful, attack against the thoughts and actions of “new women” well into the mid-1930s. Critiques launched against the “new woman” pointed to unmistakable similarities between that and the discourse on the “modern girl” that unfolded among writers in Japan. As social activist Kodera Kikuko asserted Page 111 →during the mid-1920s, “I have never met a real modern girlВ .В .В . it is not enough to just look modern. They have to have some substance to them” (Sato 2003, 57–59). Like the “modern girl” whom Japanese writers constructed as a mindless young woman or the “quintessential icon of consumerism,” Korean writers lashed out against a “new women” that they accused of succumbing to superficiality and vanity (Sato 2003, 45–48). Cartoon images of the “new woman” featured in the media mocked “new women” for their irrelevance. Senseless and completely unable to function in her flashy Western garb, the “new woman” spent her day in front of a mirror molding her hair (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, June 1925, 31). Embedded in these messages of frivolity was a wider economic component that targeted the luxurious lifestyles of Korean “new women” during this time. Writers emphasized the self-centeredness that arose from their social oblivion and suggested that they led lifestyles that most could only dream about. ”There is so much waste and extravagance. Some Koreans refuse to eat a single meal without meat,” a Sin yЕЏsЕЏng writer noted. “Yet look at our suffering brothers and sisters eating no more than corn kernels.В .В .В . Feel remorse for your selfish behavior.В .В .В . Summer may be a great time for some, but think of the less fortunate. It’s not such a great time for those who are not living in luxury” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1923, 30–31). Noting that “Everything around us is vanity!” another writer passed off the “new woman” as nothing more than a “bundle of extravagance” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, July 1924, footnote). If education had the central role in defining “new womanhood,” the female student (yЕЏ haksaeng) was also at the center of equally prevalent attacks that emphasized the multiple faults of women students. Writers showed great concern for the corrupting environment of the school, waging debates about the negative impact of popular songs on students’ minds, while others argued that their reading of literature turned them “too emotional.”9 Education was also linked to moral corruption, as writers pondered the “tragic social dilemma” in current society in reference to the tendency for women to enter into relationships with married men. “New women,” according to the author, were more likely to become concubines than ordinary women because they had sexual relations that ruined their bodies early on in life, precluding their chances of having normal marriages. He blamed education for drawing women down this “slippery path of temptation.” “Stuck in the romantic worlds that they read about in Western novels, they made themselves the target of men’s trickery” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, April 1924, 40–56). In Jiweon Shin’s words, the “woman Page 112 →student” by the end of the 1920s came to be equated with the likes of a “high-class call girl” (Shin 2003, 247). In effect, social responses to the double-love suicide of 1931 collided directly into a highly controversial discourse on the “new woman” that had existed since the early 1920s. In the eyes of the contributors, Hong Ok-im and Kim YЕЏng-ju were iconic figures who represented a select group of educated, privileged “new women, ” and as figures from this period show, membership in this circle alone established grounds for their high profile status. Hong and Kim lived lifestyles that most could only dream about, as they were part of the 8 percent

of Korean women during the early 1930s who were literate, and included in an even smaller minority, 1.2 percent to be exact, that had the opportunity to attend high school.10 As discussions in the aftermath of the suicide suggest, speculations about the relationship between Hong and Kim, as well as fresh information about mental worlds that they inhabited, pushed the boundaries of the discourse even further, offering new topics for writers to address.

Same-Sex Love (tongsЕЏngae) A survey of the commentary surrounding the incident indicates considerable interest among contributors regarding the gender and sexuality of the victims. As one reporter noted, “the train suicide incident of two women of the same sex was not only rare in Korea, but has shaken up the people of their times” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 30). Another writer, Kim Chang-jae, noted that the incident was in fact the first in Korea to be sparked by samesex love (tongsЕЏngae). In the days and weeks following the incident, writers speculated about the exact nature of the relationship between Kim and Hong, invoking the term “same-sex love” in their discussions. If there were those who insisted that “same-sex love” was a key influence in the death of the women, others like Kim Cha-song, a female student at Ewha Nursery School, contradicted this view, insisting that other factors outside of “same-sex love” should be sincerely investigated (Sin Yosong, May 1931, 34–35). In the process, writers unearthed detailed information about the private lives of the women.11 PongmyЕЏna (Masked Man), a male writer who wrote for PyЕЏlkЕЏn’gon, for example, wrote that Hong was said to have other female lovers before Kim, noting her tendency to give gold rings as presents. Hong’s latest relationship with a man, however, had recently ended in a traumatic breakup Page 113 →that was said to have shaken her up significantly. Kim at this point was already two years into a marriage that was forced upon her by her parents. Life for Kim only grew worse, as her husband fell into a life of decadence and rarely paid her any attention. It was under these circumstances that Hong and Kim came to find solace and companionship in each other. During the months before the suicide, the author noted that the two grew “unbelievably close.” So strong was their affection for each other that Kim, according to a direct witness, asked Hong to come into her household as a second-wife so that they could be together. They said that they could not die without each other (PyЕЏlgЕЏn’gon, May 1, 1931). Speculations about the sexual orientation of these two women carried broad social implications for the writers, as descriptions of the two women’s daily lives awakened the lingering suspicions about same-sex love that had been voiced since the early 1920s. In 1923, for instance, So Chun had referred to same-sex marriage as a “pop phrase” (yuhaeng ЕЏ) of the times while criticizing the practice severely. The writer called it a “dirty practice” that should be eliminated, as it served no purpose other than fulfilling sexual desires (sЕЏngyok). Moreover, the article isolated women’s higher schools such as Ewha High School as critical in facilitating these peculiar relationships, mentioning that women were brought to live with each other in dormitories.12 Given this growing concern in the unprecedented formation of same-sex bonds and its link to the new site of the women’s high school, it is worth noting that Hong and Kim too met for the first time as students at TongdЕЏk women’s higher school in Seoul, three years before their deaths. Usage of the term “same-sex love” was relatively recent in colonial Korea, as it was a direct translation of the Japanese neologism dЕЌseiai, coined during the late Meiji period. As Gregory Pflugfelder has noted in his study about schoolgirl intimacy in Japan, female students also became targets of public debates about the social and cultural consequences that resulted from the proliferation of women’s education at the turn of the century. Rising cases of same-sex intimacy, according to Pflugfelder, were particularly prevalent among female students, and what came to be categorized as the “S” (sister) phenomenon sparked frequent discussions among sexologists, journalists, and feminists alike as they approached this emerging phenomenon with caution (Pflugfelder 2005).13 Furthermore, cases like the Itoigawa shinjЕ«, a double-love suicide in 1911 involving two schoolgirls who tied themselves at the hip and jumped into a river, incited a peak in social anxieties about the dangerous effects Page 114 →of education on Japanese youth (Pflugfelder 2005, 151–55).14 In colonial Korea, twenty years later, the

Hong-Kim suicide sparked equally controversial reflections about changes in women’s relationships that grew out of the secluded world of the women’s high school. In other words, women’s education not only raised literacy rates and created confidence in students but changed the ways in which women interacted with each other. In colonial Korea, journalistic discourse had played a central role in convincing the public that women’s education was a social necessity. Yet occurrences of same-sex love challenged these positive assertions. Would Kim and Hong have become lovers had it not been for their education? The suicide of Hong Ok-im and Kim Yŏng-ju was a disturbing reminder that education could have real impact on the everyday lives of women students in ways that no advocate of “new womanhood” could have foreseen.

Nihilism and Pessimism: Shifts in Subjectivity In addition to the sexual orientation of the two women, another factor that received a great deal of attention in the aftermath of suicide was the parting note (yusЕЏ) left by Hong at the time of her departure. It was published for the public to view in the May issue of Sin yЕЏsЕЏng magazine and read: Father! Please forgive the unfilial acts of this daughter who leaves before you. I can no longer bear this futile (hЕЏmu han) world and I am leaving in search of an eternal paradise. Please forgive all of my faults. My only request is that you continue to walk the path of righteousness before you. (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May, 1931, 32) Conveyed through this letter was a strong sense of disappointment regarding her surroundings at the time of her death, and in the following days and weeks the mental and emotional states of the two women came to be widely discussed. An introductory article summarizing the Hong-Kim incident noted that “Kim was unsatisfied with her married life. She was unhappy in particular with the unruly ways of her husband.” The journalist then noted that Hong had a “pessimistic” outlook (pigwanjЕЏk) on the world. Other than that, no other information is known (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 30–31). This particular expression of “pessimism” reappeared in multiple reportsPage 115 → regarding the death. An unnamed writer for Samch’ŏlli magazine wrote in an article titled “Paradise Lost” (Sil nagwЕЏn) about the “ennui” (yЕЏmsae) of the two women as a key cause of suicide. (Samch’ŏlli, May 1, 1931). In a diary entry on April 10, 1931, the influential intellectual Yun Ch’i-ho (1864–1945) wrote in a critical tone that two female students had “committed a double suicide by rushing against a fast going train. The cause of the tragedy―pessimism.”15 In yet another article titled “Nihilists on Life” (Saeng Е-i kwЕЏnt’ae ja), a male writer named Kim Chang-jae commented on the parting letter, noting that from it one could detect a great deal of ennui (kwЕЏnt’ae) on the part of the writer. Describing Hong as a mediocre student with only average grades, he pointed to her privileged background that granted her a comfortable lifestyle. According to the author, it was this “happy life” that instilled in her a dark (yЕЏmsae jЕЏk) mindset that prompted her death (PyЕЏlgЕЏn’gon, May 1931, 34–35). In a similar vein, other authors linked their deaths to a flawed mindset that was too lofty and removed from reality. For example, a contributor named Im Hyo-jong mentioned that Kim had been too idealistic, setting her standards too high and seeing her future as an “oasis.” Moreover, Hong’s constant reading of novels that encouraged self-destructive ideas had led her to see the world as “dirty and lonely.”16 Yun Ch’i-ho also linked their bitterness to their readings of “excessively sentimental novels of Japanese writers” that filled minds of “educated Korean girls” with morbid notions of heroism and suicide.”17 Departing from the Hong-Kim case, a look at other suicide cases throughout the mid to late 1920s relays a strikingly similar set of terms used in reports to describe the mental states of suicidal women. In a feature titled “Student Suicide” (haksaeng chasal) in July 1925, the Tonga Ilbo reported the death of a twenty-threeyear-old woman in Taegu who had killed herself after living separated from her husband for some amount of time. During their time apart, it was said that she began to feel pessimistic thoughts (pigwanjЕЏk) toward the world (Tonga ilbo, July 17, 1925). Just a year before in 1924, the same source publicized an attempted suicide by another twenty-three-year-old student that failed when people found her trying to hang herself with a towel. Her

suicidal attempt was in protest of an arranged marriage that she could not extricate herself from. This woman student (yЕЏ haksaeng) was said to have had feelings for a man that had studied in Tokyo. When her parents forbade it, the author noted that she began to feel pessimistic (pigwanjЕЏk) toward the world (Tonga Ilbo, April 13, 1924). Indeed, such repeated occurrences of women’s suicide suggestsPage 116 → that actual events informed the observation made by male intellectual Yi Ton-hwa (1884– ?) that the “youthful period of women” (ch’ŏngch’un’gi) was an exceptionally difficult time for women as they shed an abnormal amount of tears. In this article, he referred to the serious challenges that women had to undergo in youth, as they were bombarded with changes in all aspects of their lives. It was in this stage of transition (kwado gi) that women grew completely lost, with “some even driven to suicide” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, August 1924, 2–6). Stepping back, one can see that writers confronted a grave social dilemma by the time of Kim’s and Hong’s deaths. The hints of ennui, nihilism, and pessimism relayed in reports of suicidal young women were anything but the “new outlook” that the writers had envisioned for a Korean “new woman.” At the same time, public discussions about the mental states of Hong and Kim prompted thorny questions about the origins of their unhappiness. It is often said that discourse is not an accurate representation of social reality, and Kim YЕЏng-ju’s final years neatly exemplified this disconnection. Despite her exceptional status, both economically and intellectually, even Kim was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen. Yet Kim’s unrelenting discontent regarding her situation speaks to broader changes in mentalities that grew out of messages of freedom and individual agency echoed in Korea from the 1920s. Seen from the vantage point of “new women” such as Kim YЕЏng-ju, the period of the late 1920s and early 1930s was indeed a kwado gi (“transition phase”). Education and literature opened the eyes of Korea’s first female students to newfound expectations that had yet to manifest themselves in everyday life. The death of two women students in 1931 presented writers with the task of addressing the now undeniable link between the “new woman” and the unintended consequences of same-sex love, nihilism, and death. The following responses to the incident present the ways in which these writers dealt with this dilemma.

The Discursive Aftermath of Suicide The Hong-Kim suicide was not a simple matter of two women and their personal decisions to kill themselves. From the first time the “woman question” was raised in the early 1920s, writers had expressed underlying doubts about the positive and negative aspects of “new womanhood,” and in 1931 a widely publicized death involving two “new women” further Page 117 →deepened the ambivalence about the social impact of changing women’s identities in colonial Korea. As the publications from April and May 1931 suggest, a diverse group of individuals ranging from female students to social reformers to male journalists expressed their opinions, pondering the motives behind the deaths while at the same time assessing its affect on those that Hong and Kim left behind. In some cases, those like Kim Ki-jЕЏn, a journalist who had consistently advocated marriage reform, used the deaths as his case in point. Kim relayed his sympathy for Kim and her unfortunate arranged marriage. According to Kim, the suicide exemplified “A Tragic Sacrifice” that reminded observers of the urgent need for social reform, asking “How long will this system of forced marriage initiated under the oppression of parents continue?” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1925, 30–31). Writing for Tonga ilbo, Pak Е¬i-bung, a male writer, also sympathized with Kim YЕЏngju’s unfair circumstances, noting that her marriage partner should have been determined by the individual herself. He noted that “it is indeed ridiculous that women are brought to marry men whose faces they have not even seen. Even in buying clothes one is allowed to try it on several times” (Tonga ilbo, April 21, 1931). The majority of the assessments, however, shifted the blame toward the women themselves. For example, a male contributor named Pang ChЕЏng-hwan began his critique in a feminist tone, remarking that Kim must have felt inhibited by a rigid social system that saw her as a woman who was no longer a virgin. He noted that the oppressive notion that Kim was tied to her husband’s household until death contributed to Kim’s decision. And yet he reinforced his belief that the preservation of “chastity (chЕЏngjo) was not so important that one should be driven to die as a result of losing it.” Noting that such strict adherence to chastity was “a

patriarchal practice of the past,” he stressed that Kim should have been able to pick herself up and find her own path (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 37–38). In fact, Pu MyЕЏn-yae went so far as to capture his sentiments in a Shakespearean quote: “Frailty thy name is woman.” Hong and Kim, according to Pu, symbolized the catastrophes that could arise out of this distinct group of problematic women in Korea who were tried emotionally and yet did not think to respond appropriately (PyЕЏlgЕЏn’gon, May 1, 1931). This notion that unhappiness was not worth dying for, regardless of its severity, came across in the following account as well in which Yi Man-gyu, referring to the love affair between Kim and Hong, called their suicide “A Passive Death.” While accepting that the two women must have Page 118 →felt a lot of anxiety in their lives, Yi argued that their critical mistake lay in the bad example that they set for their fellow Korean women. “If all Korean women in their predicaments did what they did, Korea would witness a great number of suicides,” he noted. According to Yi, the women should have resisted the temptation to die, especially “within a society like Korea faced with ongoing problems of family, marriage, and thought.” As the title of his article suggests, he argued that the “suicide is a passive way of resolving problems personally” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 36–37). Pak Е¬i-bung offered a similar comment, writing that, instead of detesting their circumstances by themselves, instead of taking their lives, they should have “stepped out into society as warriors (yongsa)” and fought to bring down the irrational (purhamni) elements of the social system (Tonga ilbo, April 19, 1931). A female writer named Yi YЕЏng-hui offered an even harsher assessment regarding their decision to die in an article titled “Forgotten Responsibility,” in which she conveyed her feelings of disappointment after hearing about the suicide from her teacher. Describing their actions as idealistic and careless, Yi remarked that they did not think in the interest of their family members. Ultimately, however, Yi noted that their families were not the only ones affected by their death. “We can never forget our responsibilities under any circumstances, ” she noted, invoking her status as a female student. “They have done a disservice to fellow women in society,” she wrote, by not bravely dealing with their issues (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 36–37). This belief that the women’s deaths carried negative implications for all of society appeared repeatedly. Yi Kwang-su (1892– 1950), perhaps one of the most well-known Korean nationalist intellectuals from the colonial period, felt compelled to comment on this case, writing about what he saw as the “Two Sins” of the women. The first sin was committed to their parents who had to cope with their deaths. The second sin, as noted by the writers discussed earlier, pointed to their self-centeredness: “They should not have put their personal pleasures first, but instead have thought in terms of the minjok (nation)” (Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 31–32). This concept was emphasized once again in an article by Im Hyo-jong, in which the writer argued that “The women lost their sense of responsibility. They did not carry out their duties as daughters of Korea.”18 Lastly, Pak Е¬i-bung, in agreement with the contributor that had cast off Hong and Kim as frail and weak creatures, closed by noting that instead of pursuing an “ivory tower and crying tears of despair,” the women should have “fought to the end, take on the callings Page 119 →of societyВ .В .В . youthful women and men had to take on the problems of ChosЕЏn (Korea) under the period of distress” (Tonga ilbo, April 21, 1931). In effect, the responses at this point can be grouped into several loose categories. The first is the message of feminism. Focusing on Kim’s unhappy marriage, writers brought this case to the fore of their ongoing mission to transform gender dynamics in Korean society. The second, however, is the criticism that these deaths were somehow selfish, passive, or devoid of responsibility. The key reasons writers pointed to when citing this was the selfish decision of the women to commit suicide. Their anxieties, be they circumstantial or philosophical, may have been made public, and yet for the authors it did nothing to help Korean society. Placing the final blame on the two women, and offering the nation as the ultimate concern, contributors followed a thought process that strikingly paralleled the discourse on the “new woman.” As the social responses to the Hong-Kim incident suggest, messages of gender reform, citizenship, and nationalism reappeared in the aftermath of the Hong-Kim incident in 1931, confirming the ongoing efforts of

writers to approach the “woman question” in conjunction with the betterment of society and nation. Thus the suicide of two “new women” did not dismantle the discursive project of nationalism and feminism in colonial Korea. Authors dodged what at first appeared as a critical connection between education, individuation, and death by highlighting a different trajectory of individualism, pessimism, and suicide. The following excerpt from an editorial titled “A Reckless Death” effectively captures this tendency. One can’t completely deny the fact that an individual (kaein) can choose to take his/her life.В .В .В . But from the point of the “citizen” (sahoein) with a point of view that is rooted in society, one can not shed tears for this decision of the individual. Within a recent group of young people there is a new set of ideas (chisik) which emphasizes the notion of “freedom” (chayu). What is a free action? Who is to block free action? I believe that it is important that we understand what the real meaning of freedom is. Be it the sadness from failed relationship or disappointment with the marriage partner.В .В .В . It is the weak people who grow pessimistic about the world (pigwan) and decide to take their lives through suicide. (Tonga ilbo, April 18, 1931) Page 120 →

Conclusion In 1931, Hong Ok-im and Kim Yŏng-ju brought their lives to an abrupt end when they threw themselves headfirst into a train. In doing so, the two sparked a heated discussion in the mainstream newspapers of that time that fed directly into a decade-long struggle to define the “new woman” in colonial Korea. For those who had aimed to remake the “old woman” into a “new woman”—a woman that was educated, independent, and socially conscious—the suicide agitated preexisting fears about the social consequences of changing gender identities. In particular, the shocking notion of a double-love suicide and hints of women’s depression gave new force to discussions fueled by growing apprehension and social anxiety. The discourse on the “new woman” appeared to be at a crossroads, its weakness seemed clearly exposed. Yet the good news for the writers was that matters were in their hands, and the conclusions were theirs to draw. From emphasizing Kim’s unhappy marriage, to publicizing their same-sex relationship, to detecting flaws in both women’s outlooks on life, writers made it clear to readers that Kim and Hong were anything but ordinary Korean women. Most important, they were certainly not “new women.” A study of media responses to the Hong-Kim suicide illustrates how unexpected occurrences in everyday life can be used to steer public opinion in strategic ways. By sensationalizing the suicide, writers had the opportunity to reinforce the essence of “new womanhood” in colonial Korea, turning obstacle into spectacle.

Notes 1. See Tonga ilbo, April 10, 1931, or Sin yЕЏsЕЏng, May 1931, 30–31 for factual information on the incident. 2. This in colonial Korean times was the equivalent of an average laborer’s earnings for 80–150 days. 3. For information about the March First Movement and its connection to cultural nationalism during the 1920s, see Robinson 1988: 48–77. 4. In 1920, a policy shift in Japanese rule from “military rule” (budan seiji) to “cultural rule” (bunka seiji) granted publication permits to Korean vernacular newspaper for the first time since annexation. For more on the Newspaper Law of 1920 see Robinson 1988: 4–5. 5. All biographical information about the authors featured in this paper was obtained from Han’guk inmul tae sajЕЏn 1999. Page 121 →6. Yi Е¬n-sang was a historian who studied at Waseda University during the 1920s. Upon returning to Korea, he was involved in various journalistic activities, working on the editorial boards for publications such as Tonga Ilbo, Sin KajЕЏng, and ChosЕЏn Ilbo.

7. The writer wrote under the pen name “So Chun (Small Spring).” The gender of the writer is unknown. 8. Pak was active contributor to the anti-Japanese movement and spent most of his time in Manchuria. 9. For debate on popular songs, see Sin yŏsŏng, May 1924, 48. For comment on emotional instability, see December 1923, 50. 10. Education figures obtained from Kim 2003: 272–76. 11. Tongsŏngae was a feature topic of Tonga ilbo in 1932 (find email footnote) in which the Hong-Kim incident was mentioned in the preface. 12. Sin yŏsŏng, October 1924, 58. Another article, “Yŏ hakseng kwa Dongsongae Yŏnae Munjae” was published in Sin yŏsŏng, November 1924, 20–21. 13. Incidentally, Korean schoolgirls during the 1930s also expressed their closeness in the term ŏnni or “sister.” 14. Itoigawa, in Niigata prefecture, refers to the location of the suicide. 15. Yun Chi-ho ilgi (The Diary of Yun Chi-ho), Volume 9, April 10, 1931. 16. Yim, A worthless death: Yim XY, May 1931, 33. 17. Yun Chi-ho ilgi, April 10, 1931. 18. Sin yŏsŏng, May 1931, 32–34.

Works Cited Han’guk inmul taesajЕЏn. 1999. Seoul: Jung’ang M&B. Hyun, Teresa. 2004. Writing Women in Korea. Honolulu: University of HawaiвЂi Press. Kim KyЕЏng-il. 2003. “Singminji ChosЕЏn Е-i yЕЏsЕЏng kyoyuk kwa sin yЕЏsЕЏng.” InSin YЕЏsЕЏng, edited by Mun Ok-p’yo. Seoul: ChongyЕЏnsa. Lee, Peter H., ed. 1997. Sources of Korean Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. MacDonald, Michael, and Terrence R. Murphy. 1990. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Pflugfelder, Gregory. 2005. “вЂS’ Is for Sister: Schoolgirl Intimacy and вЂSame-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Robinson, Michael. 1988. Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Sato, Barbara. 2003. The New Japanese Woman. Durham: Duke University Press. Shin, Jiweon. 2003. “Social Constructions of Idealized Images of Women in Colonial Korea: The вЂNew Woman’ Versus вЂMotherhood.’” In Decolonization, edited by Prasenjit Duara. London and New York: Routledge.

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5 The Cat’s Cradle Middle-Class Optics of Desire in Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid Se-Mi Oh I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. The window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straight-away a gaze. —Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique Kim Ki-young (Kim Ki-yЕЏng)’s The Housemaid (1960) is a domestic horror film that interweaves suicide, murder, rats, cigarette, and piano into a psychological drama surrounding a middle-class family in their newly built two-story house. In this space of excess, women vie for affection from Tong-sik—the husband, the father, and a piano teacher—and display the kind of monstrosity that leads everyone to destruction as their sexuality runs rampant. This Hitchcock-like psychological thriller was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, and since then has garnered critical acclaim that helped to reintroduce Kim Ki-young to the domestic and international audience.1 The rediscovery of Kim quickly made him a singular figure in Korean film history, and the audience and critics alike celebrated his untamable rebelliousness evident in stylistic brilliance and peculiar sensibility that set him apart from his fellow golden age filmmakers. After all, Kim Ki-young presented a film about sex and violence to be a conversation about postwar industrialized South Korea on the eve of Park Chung-hee’s military coup d’état. Page 124 →While today’s audience tout his fierce creativity for handling a subject matter of family and consumption through the lens of perverse pleasure and grotesqueness, the same recognition was not easily found at the time of the film’s release. Despite its success at the box office, critical responses from its contemporaries appear to be rather confused and controversial. The disagreement was, in part, purely a stylistic matter. Korea had not seen a film like this before Kim came along. While some critics welcomed Kim’s style in cinematography and sound effects as “experimental,” many others saw Kim’s unfamiliar style as “grotesque,” “excessive,” “vulgar,” and “repetitive.” The treatment of the film was so horrifying that some critics commented that it only showed the director’s “grotesque hobby” that “overproduced grotesqueness merely for its own sake so much so that he left the theme shrouded in the mist.”2 However, the theme of the film did not go unnoticed. A unison response arose in response to his subject matter, and a strong sense of discomfort was noted toward the sexually predatory housemaid pushing the family into infidelity, murder, and double suicide. The plot was too radical for the moviegoers during this time, especially when the majority of the audience was comprised of middle-aged women called the “rubber shoes audience.” It is well known that these women sided with Tong-sik and his wife, and furiously screamed “kill her!” at the housemaid at the end of the screening.3 Such a strong reaction from the audience may also have stemmed from the difficulty of distinguishing reality from the fictional world onscreen. Kim based this film on a highly publicized murder case called the KЕ-mch’on murder.4 Perhaps due to the film’s affinity to reality, Kim Ki-young took a very deliberate approach of employing a story-within-a-story structure for this film, through which the tragedy unfolding around the family becomes a mere fantasy created out of a murder story that Tong-sik read from the newspaper. The horror of the husband’s affair with the housemaid, the murder of the son, and the double suicide of Tong-sik and the housemaid is therefore framed by a peaceful gathering of the family in the piano room in the beginning and at the end of the film. Kim Ki-young explained his choice in an interview: “During this time, a movie was supposed to present a hopeful message to the audience. It must have been so disappointing had I destroyed a model family

who has built a culture house by needlework at home and individual piano lessons. вЂI also worked very hard to build a culture house, but a housemaid ruined it all’ would have been a futile conclusion. So, instead, I had to make it into a nightmare of a man who aspired for happiness and to have him regain his hope in the end” (Kim 2006, 61). Page 125 →Tong-sik’s regaining of hope and happiness in the conclusion of the film is achieved through his restored masculinity. The very first sequence of the film shows a fist opening into a palm to suggest that the question of masculinity is under great duress. Throughout the film, Tong-sik acts indecisively toward the femme fatale-like behaviors of the housemaid and admiration from the factory girls, and relegates decision making to his wife. But in the ending sequence, as normalcy resumes after the nightmare, the wife of Tong-sik criticizes his arrogant reaction to the newspaper murder story by saying, “all men are beasts.” Tong-sik gloats in his resounding laughter with his cigarette firmly planted in his hand. The housemaid is now simply a “flesh thrown to the mouth of a tiger,” according to the wife, as her monstrosity is replaced by the primitive bestiality of men and their insatiable sexual appetite. If we take Kim Ki-young’s claim that the story-within-a-story structure was meant to assuage fear and terror that the audience experienced, something remains unsatisfactory. Why, then, did the audience shout “kill her” at the end of the film? Why were they not able to take comfort in Tong-sik’s laughter and accept that what they had just witnessed was just a bad dream? I search for an answer in the manner in which this ending scene is composed. Shortly after the wife’s remark about the bestiality of men, Tong-sik turns toward the camera and speaks directly to the audience: “As men age, we spend more time thinking about younger women. This is why we become prey to women or sometimes lead the whole family to destruction and embarrassment.” And he points his finger at the camera, and says, “Yes, you too, and you who is shaking your head.” Then he flashes an obnoxious wink and bursts into loud laughter, as the camera rapidly zooms out through the glass window in the same way that it zoomed in to the piano room in the beginning sequence of the film. With a faint reflection of the crew on the glass window, the screen turns blank and the film ends. This is a curious intervention made by Kim Ki-young. What did the critic mean when he said that Kim Ki-young left his theme shrouded in the mist? Has Kim not attempted to laugh at his own monster-in-creation as a dream? Did Tong-sik not sound moralistic enough when he told the audience that men should refrain from their sexual desire? There is something very jarring about the fourth wall being broken for the audience to take the film simply as a didactic story. Even when Tong-sik glosses it over with laughter and humor, he did not seem to have succeeded in undoing the haunting images of the dead bodies of the housemaid and Tong-sik grandly displayed on the staircase. The realization that it was just a dream, presented by the actor himself, must have confused an Page 126 →audience that was accustomed to take the fantasy-reality on screen from a safe distance. And for the audience to see the fantasy world of the film revealed to them in such a crude manner, it must have felt like they were being trapped between the fictionalization of reality and the reality-making of the fiction. What the critics said about Kim Ki-young—his failure to give an adequate treatment to the subject matter of his film—might have to do with the excessive, deconstructive, and grotesque nature of the film, which does not easily translate itself into the kind of realism that is required for social commentary. The film seems to have also failed to foster self-reflection, even as Tong-sik jokingly pestered the audience to do so, or to produce an affective tie between the characters and the audience as Kim Ki-young himself wanted. Many interpretations of the film thus far have placed the burden of horror on the figure of the housemaid and discussed gender dynamics between the two opposing poles of the predatory female and emasculated male. Transgression, in these readings of the film, is deemed an act of crossing a boundary—the housemaid violating the domestic sanctuary of Tong-sik’s family. It seems to me that the issue at hand is not actually about the housemaid’s transgression of this morally charged space but about the capacity of the cinematic medium to allow for a particular element to run against the grain of the larger narrative structure of the film. The narrative structure of the film to which I am referring is the story-within-a-story structure. And transgression lies, as in the ending scene, in the ways in which the film carefully weaves the subject of the gaze and the object of the gaze in the maze of the optical field of seeing and being seen. Therefore, my analysis is grounded in the ways in which objects are used in the film, and how they become optical devices that produce a way of seeing in which the other

becomes part of the recognition of the self. Throughout the film, Kim Ki-young masterfully presents the entanglement of objects and situations that are seemingly of opposing poles by using doubles, copies, and mimicry. The Housemaid is a story of a young nuclear family that moves into a newly built two-story house. This quintessentially Western-style house is what Kim called a “house of culture” (munhwa chut’aek), which helps to cement the family’s middle-class identity. But the house also becomes a disaster spell for the family because the financial burden required the wife to work at home and hire a housemaid to help her with the housework. This is a bizarre portrayal of a middle-class family because domestic labor is performed both by the wife who has to make supplementary income for the family and the housemaid who Page 127 →replaces the wife’s domestic role. Tong-sik, on the other hand, is a music teacher who teaches factory girls at a textile company. He earns adoration from factory girls for his mastery over the piano, a symbol of bourgeois refinement, but ironically enough, this instrument of leisure is his source of income from, of all people, factory girls. He light-heartedly invites requests for private lessons from factory girls, saying that it would help him make payments for his new piano. So, when a factory girl named Cho KyЕЏng-hЕ-i visits the house for her lesson, the domestic mother works at the sewing machine downstairs while the factory girl enjoys her music lesson upstairs. Here, the spaces of domesticity and work are interconnected through objects and situations that traverse that boundary. Tong-sik’s piano blurs the boundary between work and leisure; the sewing machine prepares the factory labor to be performed in the domestic space; and the noise of the sewing machine and spinning mills at the factory meshes with the music of the piano through the same mechanical precision. The linked spaces of domesticity and work bring together women of different classes and create a structure of desire that also links women’s labor and sexual reproduction. All women labor in this film, thereby making a reference to female productivity mirrored in their sexuality. By the same token, while the film focuses on women’s sexual desire gone awry, desire in the film is not simply a matter of sexuality. In fact, the film connects sexual desire to material desire and to desire for class elevation. Anxiety about female productivity, therefore, is not simply an anxiety about uncontrolled female sexuality but an anxiety about women’s labor, domestic and otherwise. At a glance, the housemaid is represented as the ultimate intruder who would eventually threaten the wife’s status as the female master of the house. The audience in the 1960s would have certainly received her as the other to everything that middle-class aspiration stood for. However, if we use the lens of the linked relationship of sexuality/commodity and female reproduction/labor, the wife’s middle-class dream and the housemaid’s lust for Tong-sik do not seem too far apart from each other. That is, the housemaid’s destructive and monstrous pursuit of the ownership of Tong-sik only mirrors the wife’s relentless pursuit of material possession. After all, the wife laments after the death of Tong-sik: “Had I not wanted a new house, none of this would’ve happened.” In fact, the housemaid develops her desire by mimicking the others—KyЕЏng-hЕ-i and the wife. On one level, the housemaid identifies the factory girl and the wife as objects of desire. This is an act of a self who perceives Page 128 →a lack in herself and seeks to overcome it by identifying herself in the image of the other. On another level, mimicry is a tactical choice made by the housemaid who faithfully replicates the methods that KyЕЏng-hЕ-i used to seduce Tong-sik through the piano lessons. She then relies on pregnancy, after the wife’s own pregnancy, to overturn the hierarchy between the wife and herself as a mistress. The housemaid’s mimicry is not simply a matter of wanting to become like them, but in her ruthless quest for class elevation via sexual advance, she masters mimicry as a tactic of overcoming the boundary between the self and the other. The grave danger of the housemaid in this regard may lie not in her uncontrollable sexual desire but in the fact that she mimics continuously, putting her objects of desire in danger of transgression. The housemaid learns how to smoke from the factory girls; she plays the piano with painfully cacophonous noise to imitate KyЕЏng-hЕ-i; and she even revenges the wife who manipulated her into abortion by taking the life of the couple’s son. What was at stake here is the danger of transgressing (not crossing) the boundary that was so needed for maintaining a stable identity of a superior middle-class family. Mimicry, therefore, is a tactical maneuver through which this film produces horror. The balance between the opposites hangs precariously in this film, creating a delicate dance of dialectics amounting to suspense and horror.

In this formulation, fear lurks behind things that appear completely benign, turning the ordinary house into a theater of horror. Similarly, objects around the house create an uncomfortable juxtaposition of similarity and difference, illustrative of the unsettling equilibrium between women of different classes competing and clashing in this closed space. For instance, the piano and the sewing machine both require a person to sit next to them for operation, but one makes music and the other makes a monotonous mechanical sound. Rats and chipmunks are both rodents, but rats are treated in the film as filthy animals that need to be exterminated by poison, whereas chipmunks are presented as a gift given to motivate the polio-stricken daughter to exercise continuously. Rats and chipmunks are not treated the same, but in semblance and proximity to each other, one serves as the double of the other. Through the repetition of the representation of the rodent, the rat and the chipmunk grow uncomfortably close to each other. One of the criticisms about Kim Ki-young had to do with his repetition of the same motifs, but far from being redundant with no purpose, such repetition proves to be the motor for producing fear and horror in this film. The death of the son, Ch’ang-sun, is a case in point. It occurred Page 129 →when he fell down the stairway to the first floor just the same way that the housemaid lost her fetus by throwing herself down the same stairway. But more importantly, it is worth noting that the death was triggered by the same kind of horror created by repetition mentioned above. Ch’ang-sun hysterically ran to the stairs and fell to his death when he found out to his great shock that the water that the housemaid gave him is poisoned. This was untrue. To suspecting children who demanded water to be fetched for them, the housemaid drank the water with them to ensure its safety and spit out her water into the glass, then lied to Ch’ang-sun that his water was poisoned. It was fear, not poison, that led him to death, but an accident became a murder through the housemaid’s lies. The housemaid had found out earlier that the wife attempted to kill her with rat poison. The housemaid had replaced the poison in the bottle with sugar water, so when her soup tasted sweet she realized the criminal intent of the wife. Since then, the film shows different scenes of the family eating and children drinking water with unspoken fear that the housemaid might have similarly poisoned their food and drinks. Previously, the family was seen enjoying the curried rice that Tongsik made for them, creating one of the happiest moments in the film. But whenever food or water is shown afterwards, the tension intensifies each step of the way. Such grave matters like life and death, in this way, are interwoven into everyday objects such as rice or water. And they create a horror not for the calamity of an extraordinary sort but for a possible deviation in the repetition of the mundane. It is not for the fear of an invasion from outside but the terror that lurks from within. Similarly, the stairway, the site of Ch’ang-sun’s death, becomes an ultimate place deciding life and death for the family. It functions as an important medium that connects the space of the everyday downstairs (the bedroom, kitchen, and sewing room) and the space of fantasy upstairs (the piano room and the housemaid’s room). Therefore, when reality and fantasy collide on the stairway, through upward and downward movements, the collision comes to represent class elevation and downfall, as well as life and death. It is not an accident that the deaths of Ch’ang-sun, the unborn fetus, and the housemaid all take place there. The confusion between signifiers rising out of endless repetition is also noted in the ways in which mimicry is made through the failure to decide between the self and the other. But the inability here is not simply a matter of misperception caused by the play of signifiers. Rather, the misperception arises out of a process of the other being part of the recognition of the Page 130 →self. Therefore, Kim Ki-young’s most remarkable artistry in The Housemaid is achieved through the ways in which he moves back and forth between seeing and being seen. Kim drops an important clue in the very beginning. The beginning sequence of the film takes place in a cozy living room on a rainy day. It shows Tong-sik who is reading about a scandal involving a housemaid in the newspaper, as the wife is tending to her needlework (not on the sewing machine) and the children are playing along their side. The game that the children are playing is a string game called the cat’s cradle. The camera zooms into their hands for the remainder of the introduction, and shows threads delicately and precariously moving about making different shapes.5 The duration in which the game of the cat’s cradle is shown is not insignificant. Throughout, a dissonant musical score led by aggressive piano music plays in the background. The fact that the innocent child’s play is an ominous foreshadowing of this family’s future is unmistakable. The dance of four hands moving about precisely and mechanically is what makes the shapes possible, but it also

suggests the impending breakup of the shapes by one wrong move, just as in the ways in which one wrong note in the meticulously composed music will disrupt the harmony and turn it into noise. The film critic Yi YЕЏn-ho also says the following about the cat’s cradle: “Kim Ki-young always considered the opening sequence independent. It is a cinematic introduction and also a hint or a suggestion. The opening of The Housemaid is a close-up of cat’s cradle. A cat’s cradle divides into shapes and makes solids when you catch and unite the string. It is the core of this game that once you go wrong, the string becomes entangled. Then, does it anticipate the thriller genre of The Housemaid, which moves according to strict rules? Or does it anticipate the family’s destruction, which is rooted in a mistake by the head of the family? All is revealed soon enough.”6 Symbolism abounds here, but if we think about the cat’s cradle in visual terms we can gain more insights. The child’s play, cat’s cradle, is also a term that appeared in W. J. T. Mitchell’s explanation of the theory of gaze by Jacques Lacan. To describe Lacan’s theory of the scopic field as a dialectical intersection with a screened image at its center, Mitchell employs an idea of vision as a “cat’s cradle of crossing lines of sight”: “The two hands that rock this cradle are the subject and the object, the observer and the observed. But between them, rocking in the cradle of the eye and the gaze, is this curious intermediary thing, the image and the screen or medium in which it appears” (Mitchell 2002, 175–76). For him, as for Lacan, vision is Page 131 →“a psycho-social process” in which the gaze and the optics of the object form multiple intersections. Therefore, the cat’s cradle represents a kind of game of being caught in the optical field, forcing us to think about objects not merely as things that we see but things that are returning the gaze. Lacan thought of seeing as a reciprocal process. The gaze arises with the desire to look, but this desire is completed through the other. Thus, Lacan explains that the gaze does not belong to the subject but to the object of the gaze: “On the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel. They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them” (Miller 1998, 109). According to Mitchell, this theory of vision explains “why it is that images, works of art, media, figures and metaphors have lives of their ownВ .В .В . why it is that objects and images look back at usВ .В .В . why the questions to ask about images are not just what do they mean, or what do they do? But what is the secret of their vitality—and what do they want?” (Mitchell 2002, 176). The optics of the cat’s cradle, therefore, says that vision is never a one-way stream, or objects are never passive before our eyes. But we the observers become the recipient of objects and images looking back at us. The subject is always simultaneously seeing and being seen. In other words, in the optical field of the cat’s cradle, the subject’s sense of self hangs precariously for realizing (or simply fearing) that he or she is a visible object. When the objects before our eyes come alive, the fear of the unseen observer grows, and the desire to see turns into an anxiety of being seen. In The Housemaid, Kim Ki-young demonstrates masterful skill in visual storytelling by using mise-en-scГЁne, especially through the placement of objects and arrangement of the space. The excess and repetition for which Kim was so praised and reviled make the familiar space and lives of the characters reappear as different and incongruous. For instance, the main wall of the piano room directly across from the window is covered with a plaster that mimics the texture of a rough tree trunk or roots with vertical lines, and on top of its disordered patterns, not one but four clocks are hung next to each other in a straight horizontal line. In a similar manner, several Korean traditional dance masks are hung above the piano on the wall that is covered by a heavy drape, which is again gathered with vertical creases. The thick texture of the walls makes the house feel stifling, and the harsh composition of the vertical and horizontal lines creates discomfort. And the placement of similar items on the walls and misplaced Page 132 →curtains on the wall disorient the viewers. Such creation of a disparate interior of the house is characteristic of a carefully calculated design seen in the genre of Kammerspielfilm, a 1920s German expressionism that emphasized the gaze, facial expression, and body language of the actors for psychological descriptions. Thus, storytelling is done through visual images rather than words, and objects, clothing, and other tools become more than functionary to express the psychological state of the characters. The onscreen space created through mise-en-scГЁne is turned into a psychological metaphor in this way. It is well known that Kim Ki-young was an avid reader of Freud, and his decision to spatialize desire and narrativize psychoanalysis through space is not surprising. In his choice of mise-en-scГЁne, the house becomes a narrative

device enabling the reading of psychology through space (Kim 2013). If we take this reading of space as a text a step further, we can see that the modeling of the space produces a structure of meaning particular to the film itself, and space produces a language of its own. That is to say, the film does not speak through space, but space becomes an interlocutor (Kim 2006, 205). This is not too different from the ways in which Lacan speaks of the enlivened objects, things that look back at us. The objects—the piano, television, bed, dining table, dishes—are all fetishistic objects for the family’s middle-class desire. The family strove to have those objects fit for their bourgeois cultural sensibility in this two-story Western house, and celebrated in joy when a new television arrived. However, just as the ways in which everyday objects came to doubly signify something utterly strange, those carefully collected objects by the family assumed an uncomfortable relationship with their cooccupants. In his discussion of Lacan’s gaze and paintings, Peter Schwenger describes the precarious existence of domestic objects: “Toys, pebbles, flowers, crockery, and such—these are the accompaniments of daily life, but their domestic status does not mean that they are domesticated; there is something unheimlich, uncanny, about them. Obscured by their very familiarity, they are fundamentally unknown, not at home with us nor we with them. We may own objects, but we cannot possess them; indeed, in many cases it would be more accurate to say that things possess us, for the emotional attachments that bind us to certain objects are driven by forces of which we are largely unconscious” (Schwenger 2002, 55). Indeed, the wife and the husband turning their domestic space into a work space just to support having those objects reverses the relationship of ownership, but another thing that is suggested here is the fact Page 133 →that the objects possess the subjects not simply through attachment but also through gaze. This is where the real horror of this film lies, not in death but in the precarious relationship between the objects and people because the house mise-en-scГЁne creates a tense atmosphere where objects consumed harbor secret lives. In reference to Hitchcock’s films, Slovoj ЕЅiЕѕek says: “Let us recall the archetypal scene from Hitchcock: a heroin (Lilah in Psycho, Melanine in The Birds) is approaching a mysterious, allegedly empty house; she is looking at it, yet what makes a scene so disturbing is that we, the spectators, cannot get rid of the vague impression that the object she is looking at is somehow returning the gaze” (Salecl and ЕЅiЕѕek 1996, 90). What ЕЅiЕѕek is referring to here is a kind of a blind spot, not a subjectivized gaze, “a kind of empty, a priori gaze that cannot be pinpointed as a determinate reality” (Salecl and ЕЅiЕѕek 1996, 91). Kim Ki-young creates this effect of the gaze that constantly eludes the subject and heightens the fear of the undomesticated objects by creating a mood that suggests that there are silent gazes all around the house. On one level, he achieves this by visualizing the gaze through anthropomorphic objects. There are unusual numbers of masks and human figurines that appear in this film as constant fixtures in the house. As mentioned, what decorated the heavily draped wall behind the piano are Korean traditional masks. With their mouths half open and faces frowned, these masks show exaggerated facial expression of traditional masks that were meant for satirical purposes. Just underneath them, miniature figures of various sorts are lined up on top of the piano. Their placement makes them look like they are looking down at the housemaid and Tong-sik as the saga of sexual dreams and promiscuity unfold in the piano room. Another figurine is a tall female doll dressed impeccably in a dark velvet dress placed next to the master bed downstairs. In addition, a grotesque looking statue of a disembodied head is placed on the foyer desk as if to greet those who enter the house, and a death mask of Beethoven is hung on the wall at the top of the stairway. When Tong-sik tries to strangle the housemaid, the camera zooms back and forth between Beethoven’s frowning face and Tong-sik’s face. And the more we look at them, the more alike they appear in their expression of pain. Is the film suggesting that inanimate objects of human shapes are actually breathing life in this house? When the family welcomes a new television, it shows hula dancers dancing to festive music on the screen. Ch’ang-sun cheerfully mimics the dance by moving his hip left and right, and then the scene transitions into the wife slowly awakening from Page 134 →her rest in the bedroom. As she wakes, her gaze turns to the corner of her left eye and guardedly looks at the doll looking down at her. The nagging feeling that one is being watched is also created by the ways in which constant traffic of people makes the atmosphere of the house hectic and its walls porous. The factory girl’s visit to the house had to be when the family is eating the curried rice for dinner that Tong-sik so proudly prepared. In fact, privacy does not

seem to be the most protected value as people move about freely, whether it is Ae-sun interrupting a romantic moment that her parents are enjoying, or the housemaid disrupting the family huddled around a newborn baby. Sliding doors are ingenious ways of connecting and dividing spaces by Kim in this film, as they do not require a physical disruption of the boundary to make an entrance into the room. The wall simply opens and disappears while exposing those in the room to the eyes of the intruder. Or is it that the gaze was always there? The film also heavily relies on diegetic sounds such as rain and thunderstorm in moments of tension and horror, and the sound of a train, sewing machine, or spinning mills to indicate temporal transitions. The sound of the spinning wheels is the sound of progress, whose mechanical precision of rhythm is interrupted by the sound of unruly nature. The housemaid also contributes to the disruption of the mathematical perfection of sound by producing horrible dissonance with her piano playing that is more like violent drumming on the keyboard. Tongsik comments that she plays the piano as if she is going to break it, using the musical instrument to produce only a dissonant cacophony. This unarticulated noise is so jarring that it always provokes guilt consciousness in Tongsik. So, whenever Tong-sik is confronted with the question of intimacy and infidelity, the raucous sound of the housemaid playing the piano fills the house. More importantly, however, the piano is a diegetic sound that is often heard without the object made visible to the characters and viewers alike. It is haunting, not only because of its disharmonious sound, but also because the we cannot make out who is playing the piano. Most of the diegetic sounds in the house—the sewing machine, piano, scream—are heard in such a way. These sounds are heard without their subjects seen, and therefore exist as a spectral voice and a disembodied object. In this way, it achieves a degree of autonomy, omnipresence, and omniscience, enabling us to hear what we cannot see. It is a kind of power that reminds us of the gaze that eludes our vision and continuously haunts other senses. As the tragedy unfolds in the house, Tong-sik and the wife decide to Page 135 →keep their horrific secret to themselves, so when KyЕЏng-hЕ-i frantically flees from the housemaid’s assault, Tong-sik pleads with her not to speak about it so that people do not talk about them. While we hardly see those “people” in the film, Tong-sik and his wife constantly remind each other how people will talk about them (as in the newspaper story). It is as if Tong-sik and his wife could hear what we do not see, and those “people” have a constant watch over what is happening in the house. For the first and only time we get a clue who these people might be when the neighbors are gathered around Ch’ang-sun’s funeral hearse. They are not an impressive (or malicious) crowd, and certainly do not seem to be the focus of the scene. Rather, the central object in this scene is the unconventional funeral hearse. Its top, as well as its windows, are made out of glass, allowing Tong-sik to be visible from the outside of the hearse. When the camera zooms into Tong-sik’s grim face, his private emotion is also visible to the neighbors around the hearse, as well as to the housemaid who gives a scornful look at Tongsik from the second floor balcony of her room. It is an important moment in the film when the camera focuses on the housemaid because glass as an optical device is most poignantly used in the window of the piano room for the housemaid (fig. 14). On the second floor of the house, the housemaid’s room is located next to the piano room, separated by the hallways in-between, but strangely connected by the balcony. This is where the housemaid watches KyЕЏng-hЕ-i seduce Tong-sik. The housemaid’s desire for Tong-sik begins through this distanced voyeurism, as the glass window makes her objects of desire at once visible and inaccessible. Here, the housemaid on the balcony, not quite inside or outside the house, stands at the image-screen where the gaze and the subject meet. Then she transforms from being a commodity that the middle-class desires to an object that has entered the fantasy frame, which in turn can undo the whole fantasy. Thus, we can summarize middle-class optics as follows: on the one hand, middle-class desire is to be looked at (and desired) for their material possession, but in doing so it also becomes the very source of the anxiety of being seen. The Housemaid in the end shows two sides of class mobility—desire and anxiety—as they are interwoven in the exchange of the gaze, and in the crossing between phantasm and realism. “What, then, is fantasy?” asks ЕЅiЕѕek. “One should always bear in mind that the desire вЂrealized’ (staged) in fantasy is not subject’s own but the other’s desire. That is to say, fantasy, phantasmatic formation, is an answer to the enigma of вЂChe Vuoi?’ [What do you want?], which renders the subject’s primordial, constitutive Page 136 →position. The original question of desire is not directly вЂWhat do I want?’ but

вЂWhat do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for the others?’” (Salecl and ЕЅiЕѕek 1996, 117). The transgression of the boundary between the subject and the object through the cat’s cradle is what constantly haunted Tong-sik’s family either by pushing them into fetishistic consumption or into the fear of gossip. The two divergent paths to the family’s fate were in fact intertwined in the same logic of the gaze. Figure 14. The housemaid watches KyЕЏng-hЕ-i seduce Tong-sik through a glass window.The Housemaid (1960). For this reason, while the transparent hearse creates an intense feeling of Tong-sik being watched, it also offers a moment of relief because we finally see the invisible voices only inferred by Tong-sik and his wife. The same cannot be said about the fourth wall being broken by Tong-sik when he turns to speak to the audience at the end of the film. It creates an unsettling sense of anxiety because the object of the spectacle speaks back at the audience. In this way, the audience comes to partake in this dialectical maze created by the cat’s cradle as they realize that they were also being looked at by the object that they were looking at. Yet, curiously, Kim uses the same window through which the housemaid developed her voyeuristic desire to accomplish this goal, so the full participation of the audience in the cat’s cradle makes them realize that they may have also been the Page 137 →subjects of voyeurism. “I wonder if it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime?” This is the question that Jeffery asks in Rear Window (1954) by Hitchcock. However, this question of ethics might just prove to be futile in The Housemaid as the audience members themselves become the ultimate subject of transgression, caught inbetween the elusive gaze and unable to decide whether they were complicit in the creation of horror or horror was forced upon them. The breaking of the fourth wall was supposed to tell them that the horror they witnessed was just a dream, but it might have just failed to convince them that it was unreal. With the aura of fantasy (and fear) persisting, the audience just might have had to find their scapegoat for all transgressions—moral or optical—and scream, “kill her!”

Notes 1. Recently The Housemaid has been included in the Criterion Collection. Kyung Hyun Kim’s accompanying essay, “The Housemaid: Crossing Borders,” explains its production, reception, and rerelease. (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2993-the-housemaid-crossing-borders) 2. See “Han kajЕЏng Е-i ch’amgЕ-k: Kim KiyЕЏng kamdok” and “Ch’imirhan yЕЏnch’ul, koegi Е-i namjo,” respectively. 3. See Yi 1998, 243. Kyung Hyun Kim also notes difficulty of transforming a masculine orientation even in a genre of melodrama, and Kim So-yЕЏng explains how The Housemaid captured class struggle in the sexuality of femme fatale and showed an anxiety of a nouveau riche class toward the newly emerging other. See Kim 2004 and Kim 2000. 4. A review in Tonga ilbo states, “This film cannot be called fiction, and we are not satisfied with its reality due to rough psychological descriptions” (“Misu haessЕ-na chumokhal sirhЕЏm” 1960). 5. It is interesting to note in light of the previous discussion of colluding signifiers, the origin of the name “cat’s cradle” may have come from a corruption of catch-cradle, or manger cradle. Also, in an 1858 Punch cartoon it is referred to as “scratch cradle.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat% 27s_cradle) 6. Lee goes on to ask if cat’s cradle is a game of space or a game of time: “Therefore, is it a game in which to make diverse space? Is it a game of time in which order matters?” He offers an answer, saying that The Housemaid is a film that privileges space over time and points to the synchronicity of asynchronicity, the coexistence of disparate times in one space, as the main source of division among the characters who occupy the same space. “Creation and Evolution Over 50 Years,” The Housemaid, DVD Booklet (Korean Film Archive, 2009), 29.

Page 138 →Works Cited

“Ch’imirhan yЕЏnch’ul, koegi Е-i namjo: HanyЕЏ.” 1960.SЕЏul sinmun, November 10. “Han kajЕЏng Е-i ch’amgЕ-k: Kim KiyЕЏng kamdok.” 1960.Han’guk ilbo, November 4. Kim Ho-yЕЏng. 2006. “Kim Ki-yЕЏng yЕЏnghЕ-i konggan’gujo e nat’ana nЕ-n kЕ-ndae wa chЕЏn’gЕ-ndae Е-i kaldЕ-ng yangasang.” Kihohak yЕЏn’gu 20: 199–299. Kim KЕ-m-dong. 2006. “Kim Ki-yЕЏng Е-i hanyЕЏ e nat’ananЕ-n jangrЕ- yЕЏn’gu.” Munhak kwa yЕЏngsang 7, no. 2: 37–67. Kim, Kyung Hyun. 2004. “The Housemaid: Crossing Borders.” The Housemaid. Criterion Collection. (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2993-the-housemaid-crossing-borders) Kim, Kyung Hyun. 2004. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Kim So-yЕЏng. 2000. KЕ-ndaesЕЏng Е-i yuryЕЏng dЕ-l . Seoul: SsiasЕ-l ppuri nЕ-n saramdЕ-l. Kim Е¬n-ju. 2013. “YЕЏngsang naerЕЏt’ibЕ- e issЕЏsЕЏ inmul kwa p’Е-rodЕЏksyЕЏn tijain Е-i kwan’gye e taehan Е-imisaengsЕЏng.”Tijain yungbokhap yЕЏn’gu 41: 23–36. Miller, Jacques-Alain, ed. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. “Misu haessЕ-na chumokhal sirhЕЏm” 1960.Tonga ilbo, November 9. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2: 165–81. Salecl, Renata, and Slavoj ЕЅiЕѕek, eds. 1996. Gaze and Voice as Love Object. Durham: Duke University Press. Schwenger, Peter. 2002. “Red Cannas, Sardine Cans, and the Gaze of the Object.” Mosaic 35, no. 3: 55–71. Yi YЕЏn-ho. 1998. “Kim KiyЕЏng kamdok 1955–1998 nyЕЏn tЕЏt’ŏm nЕ-n jakpyЕЏl insa.” Kino 38.

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6 The Political Turn as an Act of Transgression The Case of Left-Turned-Right Christian Activists Myung-Sahm Suh In the 1970s, Kim Chin-hong was definitely among the most prominent progressive Christian activists in the liberal-ecumenical Protestant circle. Inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Community Organizing movement and Paulo Freire’s pedagogical method of raising critical consciousness among the oppressed, Kim’s now famous ministry at the Ch’ŏnggye Stream involved distributing relief goods to the poor, helping them cope with the tough urban environment, and organizing the community to stand against gentrification and forced displacement (Kim 1999, 2002). At times, his social engagement went beyond community organizing at the local level. In January 1974, Kim joined a group of young pastors from the Urban Industrial Mission to publicly condemn the Park Chung-hee (Pak ChЕЏng-hЕ-i) regime’s infringement of human rights and political freedom (Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe In’gwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe 1987, 311–12). For this daring act of civil disobedience, Kim Chin-hong was accused of being an agent linked to North Korea—as were most political dissidents at the time—and served his time as a political prisoner. When his congregation and the neighboring slum area were completely cleared out by the municipal gentrification program in the mid-1970s, Kim led his followers to settle in barren reclaimed land along the western coast. Once there, he set up a cooperative village commune and ran it according to the utopian-socialist principle “from each according to Page 140 →one’s ability, to each according to one’s needs” (Kim 1999, 3: 206–8). By the 1980s, Kim’s commitment to social justice, combined with his unwavering allegiance to Christian faith, even influenced a number of hitherto politically inactive young evangelicals. As a result, Kim Chin-hong became a pivotal figure in the emerging evangelical social concern movement, which later developed into what might be called the Evangelical Left (Suh 2015; Tizon 2008).1 A few decades later, this modern-day prophet of social justice bewildered many people who knew about his progressive past. Beginning in 2004, Kim Chin-hong publicly started to denounce the liberal-left position and express his support for the conservative political force, along with several other ex-progressive Christian leaders—most notably SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk—who travelled the similar path from the left to the right. Driven by the characteristic zeal commonly found among converts to a newly acquired faith, these Christian leaders made it their new mission to reenact a McCarthy era-style witch hunt to attack the liberal-left force as pro-North Korea. At the same time, they brought together a group of ex-socialist converts and anticommunist liberals to organize the so-called New Right movement,2 which professed to forgo what they perceived as the state-centered frame shared by both the old left- and right-wing forces, and instead advocated a neoliberal variant of conservatism in favor of privatization, market deregulation, postnationalism, and globalization (Sin 2006). As leading spokespersons or representatives of this conservative reform movement, the left-turned-right Christian leaders like Kim Chin-hong and SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk played a crucial role in reviving the embattled right-wing camp from 2004 onward. As might be expected, the New (Christian) Right’s transgression (in the sense of changing political allegiance or parties as in the original Latin word, “transgredior”) evoked some visceral, disapproving reactions from both ends of the political spectrum, as if the two opposing sides “jealously patrol[led] their own boundaries to prevent the contamination of one by the other” (Jenks 2003, 29). For instance, from an ultra-conservative standpoint, Chi Man-wЕЏn called for keeping vigilance on the New Right movement, as he reminded his fellow conservatives that Kim Chin-hong used to be a major protagonist of the antigovernment, democratization movement and an advocate of socialist principles (Chi 2006). As an ex–military officer and self-claimed authentic conservative patriot, Mr. Chi could not tolerate the idea that someone who previously strived to undermine conservative values had suddenly changed his mind and tried to hijack what paleo-conservatives had

championed for decades. Page 141 →In a similar but different way, the New Right’s political conversion infuriated a number of their former associates in the Christian movement circle such that they not only severed their personal relationships but also came to confront each other on a number of occasions (Yun Hwan-ch’ŏl, pers. comm.). This is exemplified in a public dispute between SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk and a group of left-leaning Christian activists at the Ch’ŏnggye Plaza, Seoul, in June 2008. At that time, SЕЏ was staging a counter-demonstration in reaction to a countrywide mass protest against the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement. From the anti-FTA protesters’ side, Kim Chong-hwan, who identified himself as a former admirer of Sŏ’s dedication to social justice, rebuked the senior Christian activist for turning against the progressive Christian tradition and pleaded him to again put on the prophet’s mantle to reprimand the incumbent Lee Myung-bak (Yi MyЕЏngbak) government (Kim 2008a; Kim 2008b). Obviously, the political crossover of the New Christian Right offended many who thought that there had been, and, perhaps, should be, a fixed boundary between the left and the right, a boundary that had been crucially shaped through historical conflict between the right-wing authoritarian force and its left-wing democratic counterpart throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, what is missing from such cacophonic reactions to the conservative turn of these ex-progressive Christian activists is the answer to the question of why and how they left their progressive roots to become champions of neoliberal conservatism over the last few decades. More often than not, the debates on their conservative turn have revolved around ad hoc and ad hominem accounts in such terms as: opportunistic “treachery” of social climbers pursuing success in life (Ch’a 2011); the wily disguise of socialist agents posing as conservatives to infiltrate the right-wing camp (Kim SЕЏng-gwang, pers. comm.); or the natural sign of “maturity” necessarily accompanied by biological aging (Kim 2003).3 While acknowledging that these accounts might be applicable to some individual cases, I argue that their transgression of the extant left-right divide is a distinctively sociohistorical phenomenon, which is not infrequently found in the life trajectories of former democratization movement activists in the Christian faith. Therefore, I suggest considering their conservative turn as a “historisches Individuum” (Weber 2002, 8),4 which represents the way in which a generation of religiously inspired activists of the pre-1980 years responded to the radicalized progressive movement of the 1980s as well as the growing influence of neoliberalism and globalization in the 1990s. Page 142 →

The Emergence of the New Right and Its Resentment toward the ’80s generation Before exploring how these ex-progressive Christian activists made an ideological crossover from the left to the right and ended up organizing the New Right movement from late 2004 onward, let me briefly discuss the nature of this movement and how it emerged when it did. First of all, a distinction needs to be made between the Old and the New Right. In many (left-leaning) discourses of current South Korean conservative politics, these two distinct streams of conservatism have often been lumped together as if they constitute a monolithic whole; even when they are differentiated, the distinction is generally considered a matter of degree, rather than kind (e.g., Yi 2006; Sin 2008; Yun 2008). By the same token, the New Christian Right is often reduced to auxiliary “brokers” bridging the gap between the religious and the political realm (Kang 2007, 39). This is presumably because the Old and the New Right largely formed a strategic alliance to stand against what they called the “Pro-North Left” and collaborated to reclaim political power from the two consecutive liberal-left governments of Kim Dae-jung (Kim Tae-jung) and Roh Moo-hyun (No MuhyЕЏn), during what conservatives call “the lost ten years” (1998–2008) (Han’gich’ong sinmun 2012). However, I argue that the genealogy of the New Right can be traced to the centrist reform movement of the 1990s—mainly spearheaded by the nongovernmental organization KyЕЏngje chЕЏngЕ-i silch’ŏn simin yЕЏnhap (Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice; CCEJ hereafter). The CCEJ was itself an offshoot of the antiauthoritarian, democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s. With their liberal or progressive ideological

backgrounds, proponents of the New Right movement, from the moment of its inception, took pains to distinguish themselves from what they called “the Old Right” (Sin 2007). Holding aloft the banner of (neo-)liberalism, the New Right characterized the Old Right as being immersed in the illiberal orientation of the Cold War era, an orientation that gave utmost priority to the state’s authority and favored having big government put the private sector under state control. By contrast, the ideologues of the New Right further pushed their past antiauthoritarian stance and espoused a neoliberal or libertarian variant of conservatism, preferring a smaller government that would stay away from private affairs. As a New Right ideologue aptly puts it, “whereas the New Right is founded upon liberalism, the Old Right takes its root in statism” (Sin Page 143 →2006). Although the Old and New Right are often confused, I stress that each has travelled very distinct historical paths and has a fundamentally different political orientation and outlook. At the same time, it is important to note that, before its actual development into the New Right in late 2004, this moderate conservative group generally took an ambivalent stance vis-Г -vis Roh Moo-hyun’s newly launched liberal-left government (2003–2008)—which would soon become the New Right’s sworn enemy—as well as the opposing right-wing Hannara (Grand National) Party. At that time, this independent centrist group, which then clustered in organizations like ParЕ-n sahoe rЕ-l wihan simin hoeЕ-i (Citizens United for a Better Society; est. March 2002) or the Internet-based news media, UpKorea.net (est. August 2003), publicly held a “centrist-right” or “reformist-conservative” position and tried to bridge the gap between the left and the right (An 2003). Such a bipartisan stance stemmed, on the one hand, from their suspicion about remnants of the Old Right from the predemocratization years, who were characterized as corrupt, inefficient, and reactionary forces resistant to any social change (SЕЏ 2004). On the other hand, the political ascendance of the ’80s democratic movement generation in the Roh Moo-hyun administration was no less serious a concern for this center-right circle, since these former student movement activists seemed determined to bring about radical social change in terms of both generational and sociopolitical relations.5 Nevertheless, in the early phase of Roh Moohyun’s presidency from early 2003 to mid-2004, the independent center-right group tried to present themselves as an impartial mediator between the opposing sociopolitical forces. It was not until spring 2004 that the center-right group began to change its attitude toward the existing left- and right-wing forces, as they were embroiled in heightened political tensions over the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun by the conservative-dominated Congress on March 12, 2004.6 For almost two months, Roh’s presidency was suspended until the motion was overruled by the Constitutional Court on the 14th of May. For our present concern, what is relevant is that there was a strong backlash against the right-wing Hannara Party that conspired to impeach the president. Upon hearing the news, hundreds of thousands of Roh’s supporters stormed into the streets and decried the motion as a “coup d’état” of the conservative-dominant National Assembly (Larkin and MacIntyre 2004). Soon after, this outburst of public anger turned into organized support for the liberal-left force in the general election held on April 15, 2004. In Page 144 →this election, President Roh’s Uri Party nearly tripled its congressional seats from 52 to 152 and took majority control in the parliament. Moreover, the more progressive Minju Nodong (Democratic Labor) Party managed to make inroads into the parliament for the first time, garnering ten seats in the same election. One way or another, the outcome of this election ascertained a power shift in politico-generational relations, as the number of younger lawmakers from the ’80s generation (who were in their thirties and forties) almost doubled from that of the previous Assembly. In the process, the number of senior representatives (fifties and above) decreased by more than 20 percent (ChЕЏng 2004; Yun 2004). Significantly, such a power shift allowed the liberal-left forces to initiate several legislative reforms that might have given a serious blow to the conservative political base. It was precisely at this juncture that a number of right-leaning liberals and moderate conservatives, who stressed the importance of keeping balance between the left and the right, reached the conclusion that something needed to be done in order to “restore the equilibrium” (Pak 2004). One obvious method was to empower the embattled right-wing force in the political domain. Accordingly, a number of individuals from the center-right circle joined the right-wing Hannara Party, which entrusted them with key positions to reform and reinvigorate the beleaguered party. At the same time, from the spring of 2004, their colleagues active in the realm of civil society

began to discuss organizing a new type of conservative reform movement, and their plan was actualized into several New Right organizations in November 2004 and thereafter. In short, their decision to embrace the label of conservatism was driven by their assessment that South Korea was “on the brink of crisis” due to radical reforms of the Roh Moo-hyun administration and its supporters of the ’80s student movement generation (Sŏ 2005).

The Kwangju Uprising and the Generational Rift in the Democratization Movement Granting that the emergence of the New Right was a reaction against the political ascent of the progressive ’80s student movement generation and the leftward swing in the broader society, we still need to ask what made these religious leaders develop such a deep resentment against the ’80s generation that they decided to change their political affiliation. To solve Page 145 →this puzzle, we need to go back to the turbulent period of the 1980s, when there was a significant rupture in the tradition of the antiauthoritarian, democratization movement. In a parallel with the Korean War, the Kwangju Uprising in May 1980 marks a significant turning point in modern South Korean history, since it fundamentally altered the ways in which the post-Korean War generation viewed relations between the United States and the divided Korean nation. Born in the late 1950s and 1960s, members of this generation spent most of their youth under Park Chung-hee’s rule (1961–79) and were largely influenced by government propaganda presenting the authoritarian political structure as an inevitable measure to defend South Korea against the communist menace within the Cold War context. However, after the Kwangju Incident, the majority of this postwar generation became increasingly disillusioned with the Cold War authoritarian status quo, as they learned about the naked cruelty of the military junta in suppressing political dissidents. The United States’ connivance of, if not full support for, the military government’s brutal suppression of the popular uprising at Kwangju only added fuel to their fiery indignation (ChЕЏng 1990; Peterson 1988). First, the United States’ apparent, two-faced attitude of promoting democratization in South Korea while simultaneously approving the right-wing authoritarian regimes brought forth such an especially great indignation among the Kwangju-Democratization Movement generation that youth activists began to regard American imperialism as “the main source of power sustaining the anti-democratic, anti-nationalistic, military fascist regime” in South Korea (Mun 1982, 65). In his famous statement submitted for the final court appeal in 1982, Mun Pu-sik, then a twenty-three-year-old seminary student charged with arson of the United States Information Agency in Pusan, condemned the American government’s complicity in sustaining the authoritarian structure in South Korea as follows: At first, I vaguely thought that the United States came to this land in order to block the North Korean communist threat and support the development of our democracy by playing the role of the elder brother nation of liberal democracy. But I came to the realization that it is more concerned about gaining economic profits than promoting our democratization in this country by supporting and controlling the authoritarian structure. For the 20 years of [Park Page 146 →Chung-hee’s] Yusin rule, has not the United States backed up the military regime that refuses to give in to demands of democratization? .В .В .В I firmly assert that the essence of America’s policy toward Korea, since the Independence [from Japanese colonialism], is to supportВ .В .В . any kind of political structure, even if it is a militaristic, fascist regime suppressing the Korean people, as long as it claims to uphold “anti-communism.” (Mun 1982, 68) That such a bluntly anti-American statement was penned by a young seminary student in 1982 is itself a sign of a radical rupture within the democratization movement in general and its Christian variant in particular. In 1977, only five years before Mun wrote the court appeal to condemn the United States as an accomplice to the authoritarian political structure, the National Council of Churches in Korea, the most prominent liberalecumenical Christian organization in the antiauthoritarian movement at the time, issued a public statement that the United States had played an indispensable role as a strong ally of South Korea in warding off the communist

menace as well as promoting liberal democracy. Therefore, the Council insisted that the United States should maintain its military presence on the Korean Peninsula (Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe In’gwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe 1987, 1049–59). This statement was endorsed by the majority of Christian democratization movement leaders of the pre-Kwangju generation, who maintained the belief that the American government would help them achieve democratization in South Korea. Obviously, such an explicitly proAmerican stance by the National Council of Churches is in stark contrast with the main slogan of the ’80s student movement, “Yankee, Go Home!” In other words, the democratization movement in South Korea had undergone a dramatic shift from pro- to anti-Americanism at the turn of the 1980s, largely because of actions or, in a sense, inaction of the United States amid the tragic social upheaval of this turbulent period. Second, as the Kwangju-Democratization Movement generation became increasingly disillusioned by Cold War propaganda, there was a surge of nationalistic impulses among members of the student movement, which developed into a growing sense of identification with North Korea. This fostered an ardent passion among young student activists for the (re-)unification movement and the emergence of the so-called Juche Sasangp’a, an underground group adhering to the North Korean version of communist ideology tinged with a strong antiimperialistic, nationalist sentiment Page 147 →(see Pang 2009; U 2005). Once these activists made a link between the United States and the oppressive, undemocratic political structure in South Korea, they redefined the latter as “a neo-colonial, vassal, capitalist society,” where a coalition of the foreign power (i.e., the United States), its puppet authoritarian regime, and the “maep’an (comprador)” capital had perpetuated a twofold social contradiction in both class and international relations by exploiting the Cold War rhetoric of proAmericanism and anticommunism (Korean Student Christian Federation 1987, 26). In order to bring an end to “the fascistic violent oppression and the authoritarian system,” the protagonist of the Juche ideology, Kim YЕЏng-hwan—who also made a conservative turn in the 1990s and later joined the New Right movement in the 2000s (see Kim 1998)—contended that the student movement should strive to mobilize people to “drive out the Yankee invaders” by following the lessons of Kim Il-sung (Kim IlsЕЏng)’s revolutionary guerilla warfare against Japanese colonialism and the subsequent establishment of a self-reliant communist state in North Korea (Kim 1989, 56–60). To be sure, not all student activists followed the ideology imported from North Korea and its interpretation of modern Korean history as one subjugated by the American imperialist power (U 2005, 142, 176). Even so, it is a fact that North Korean messages of antiimperialism and communist visions appealed to a significant number of the Kwangju-Democratization Movement generation. For instance, in my interview with a former student activist in the Christian circle and self-claimed “follower of Juche ideology” on September 5, 2010, Kim Chin-ch’ŏl (pseudonym) confided in me that his admiration for the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, or the communist system in the North has not completely subsided since his student movement years in the 1980s: Personally, I want to remain faithful to Premier Kim Il-sung until the day I die. To the present day, I still commemorate his birthday [the 15th of April] by having a drink by myself. No matter how disillusioned I have become [with the revolutionary visions of my youthful years], I still think it was a remarkable feat [for Kim Il-sung] to self-reliantly implement a socialist, communist experiment in the Korean Peninsula apart from the influence of Marx or Lenin, when Korea was rebuilding itself after the Independence [from Japanese colonialism].В .В .В . That North Korea now lives in poverty is solely because of the United States. Page 148 →It is all too obvious. North Korea may not be too pretty a society, but it has conducted a great experiment of people co-existing with one another and preserving the self-respect of the nation. I admire the greatness of such an experiment. And I guess my view on this will never change. Notably, such an unequivocal admiration for communism, including its North Korean variant, by young Christian activists in the 1980s was a significant departure from the anticommunist stance of the pre-1980s democratization movement. Often accused of being “indigenous communists” by the right-wing authoritarian government throughout the 1970s,7 the Christian social activists of the pre-Kwangju years repeatedly tried to refute that charge based on the argument that Christians could not in any way accept communism due to its materialistic, atheistic nature (e.g., Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe In’gwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe 1987, 372). Therefore, in

1976, the National Council of Churches in Korea made it clear that religiously inspired sociopolitical activism should be different from revolutionary visions of communism: Our churchВ .В .В . tries to establish a community of cosmic love, consisting of humans sanctified in God, and accomplishing social justice and holistic mission by liberating the oppressed, impoverished, and alienated masses by way of repentance, love, devotion, and voluntary service. This is fundamentally different from communist ideas of historical materialism, class struggle, [proletarian] dictatorship, personality cult, and social change by means of violence and revolution. (Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe In’gwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe 1987, 931) Just as there was a deep rupture in the democratization movement’s attitude toward the United States at the turn of the 1980s, the anticommunist stance of the pre-1980s’ antiauthoritarian movement was largely replaced by the radical students’ acceptance of, or at least favorable attitude toward, communist visions and revolutionary social change. In sum, the tragic events of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising marked a significant historical rupture that gave rise to a new generational consciousness. Disenchanted with the right-wing authoritarianism of the Cold War, the ’80s generation assumed as their primary tasks the achievement of a stable democracy, autonomy from foreign imperialistic influences, and a once-and-for-all Page 149 →incapacitation of anticommunist propaganda through reunification of the divided nation. As a result, the democratization movement was, to risk a generalization, largely split into two groups along generational lines. These were namely, the anticommunist, pro-American liberal group of the older Korean War generation and the procommunist, anti-American revolutionary group of the younger Kwangju-Democratization Movement generation.

Disintegration of the Democratization Movement If the Kwangju Uprising and its sociopolitical implications engendered a new social generation distinctively marked by the anti-Cold War ethos, what were the responses of the senior antigovernment movement leaders of the Korean War generation to this widening generational gap within the camp in the 1980s? How did the senior progressive Christian activists—especially those who later joined, or lent their support to, the New Right’s crusade against the ’80s student movement generation in the 2000s—react to the Kwangju Uprising and the ensuing radicalization of the ’80s social activism? First of all, the reaction of these ex-progressive Christian activists to the Kwangju Massacre was significantly different from that of the ’80s generation. Whereas the younger generation developed a radical progressive political consciousness and developed revolutionary visions in response to the Kwangju Uprising, the same historical event brought a deep sense of frustration to these future ideological converts who, since the late 1960s, had devoted their entire young adulthood to the democratization movement. For instance, the following is how SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk (1996, 89–90) describes his reaction to the tragedy at Kwangju, while he was incarcerated for his involvement in labor disputes in early 1980: Upon hearing the news about the Kwangju Incident, I felt as if all energy left inside me was completely sapped away.В .В .В . I fell into a state of lassitude in the face of the shocking incident at Kwangju. A deep sense of frustration threw me into a lethargic state, as if I could not even move a finger. I thought, “I will continue being part of the movement, but not at the moment.” I felt like I should take a break, at least for a few years. I also thought I needed some fresh start in my life. Thus, when I was in prison, I decided to become a pastor. Page 150 →In this way, the Kwangju massacre marked an important turning point in SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk’s life, transforming him from a progressive activist having relatively little interest in his Christian family heritage to a prospective seminary student seeking to become an ordained pastor.8 At this point, it is interesting to note that SЕЏ was not the only one who decided to take a step back from the antigovernment movement in response to the Kwangju Incident. In one way or another, a number of Christian progressive activists of the 1970s, who would

later adopt the New Right position, also felt the need to take a break and have time to reflect upon what they had been doing (e.g., Kim 1990; Son 2003). They found ways to leave the movement scene by going abroad through church-related transnational networks, when there were severe governmental restrictions on overseas travel. Significantly, it was during their stays abroad in the 1980s that these activists began to reappraise from afar South Korea’s economic advancement under the authoritarian structure—which, in effect, seemed to undermine the economic dependency theory exercising great influence in the progressive circle at the time—, and to contrast their Christian faith with godless communism after encountering Christian refugees from communist countries, who fled their homeland for religious freedom (Son 2003; SЕЏ 1996). In relation to the spiritual-conservative turn of these Christian activists in the 1980s, we should take note that their faith-based sociopolitical activism developed in directly the opposite direction from that of the younger KwangjuDemocratization Movement generation. During my interview with a former Christian labor movement activist, In MyЕЏng-jin, on August 29, 2010, he told me that the major reason he decided to put an end to his thirteen years of ministry to factory workers at the YЕЏngdЕ-ngp’o Industrial Mission and take a “repose” in Australia for two years in the mid-1980s was because he had difficulty dealing with the radicalization of the faithbased labor movement as influenced by the ’80s student movement: As the student movement grew stronger, [student activists] incited workers to sever their relations with [the Urban-Industrial Mission], because our movement was allegedly “romantic” and not “scientific” enough. Our labor movement, from their perspective, did not assume a social scientific approach [of Marxism].9В .В .В . Meanwhile, the government’s sanction against the Industrial Mission was intensified, and workers were forced to leave us, because it Page 151 →became increasingly difficult to openly organize labor unions. Thus they had to go underground, where the bond between the labor and student movements was created.В .В .В . In this situation, the older generation like us had to step back, and the younger generation largely took over the leadership of the labor movement.В .В .В . Even [the Christian movement] was embroiled in the ideological debate, and many young Christian activists questioned whether the church had any significance in their struggle for social change.В .В .В . I told my junior colleagues that: “The church should return to the Bible, to Jesus’ teachings. How could Jesus be less significant than Marx, Lenin, or Mao Zedong for us? We should re-launch our movement by raising the name of Jesus.” This was my position at the time, and, because of this, I was in discord with many of my junior associates. The conflict In MyЕЏng-jin had with his younger associates is the so-called Identity Debate that took place within the Christian-based movement circle concerning the relevance of Christianity in progressive social activism during the 1980s (Yun 1992; Zoh 2003). On the one side was a group of faith-based activists—the so-called Christian Identity circle—who insisted that the Christian sociopolitical engagement should ground its activism on faith and biblical injunctions. Their involvement in the labor and democratization movement should be, in a sense, an extension of Christian mission and a practical application of biblical teachings of neighborly love in the world (SЕЏ 1990). On the opposite side was the Non-Identity position, giving priority to the twofold historical task of achieving democratization and driving out American imperialism from the Korean Peninsula. For this group, these sociopolitical issues were more important than any specific religious concerns of Christians (Kang 1990; Pak 1987). When taken to its logical extreme, this position asserted that the church should serve merely as an “oep’i (outer shell)” for the movement, providing human and material resources as well as employing its broad appeal to the masses for the causes of the progressive social movement (KSCF 1987, 31). Caught in this debate, the future New Christian Right activists all took up the Identity position that put Christian faith at the center of their social activism. From the generational perspective, the debate on the relevance of Christian identity in the ’80s social movement can be seen as a manifestation of an intergenerational conflict. In the 1970s, the Christian Identity position would hardly have caused any scandal in the progressive movementPage 152 → circle. Before the vitalization and radicalization of student and labor movements, “the church served as a protective coat against the external, authoritarian system and assumed a leadership role in the democratization movement” (KwЕЏn et al. 1989, 32). It was a time when there were few social spaces where voices of the oppressed could be raised and

heard, and Christian organizations like the Urban Industrial Mission or the National Council of Churches played a central role in representing and organizing the voices at the margins. However, as the student and labor movements grew stronger and began to form their own representative organizations in the 1980s, the hegemonic status of the church within the democratization movement was significantly reduced, and Christian activists were asked to address questions of how to reestablish the relationship between Christian and non-Christian social movements. Against this backdrop, there emerged an increasing demand to overcome the limitations of the previous democratization movement within the Christian circle and its preoccupation with theological concerns, especially among the Kwangju-Democratization Movement generation. The pre-Kwangju democratization movement, particularly its Christian variant inspired by the first generation of Minjung theology,10 was criticized for its indifference to “scientific analysis of the objective reality” and a lack of clearly planned strategy or concrete tactics to bring about substantive social change (Kang 1990a, 105). It was essentially characterized as an elitist social movement headed by a cadre of human rights activists and university professors of high social standing, who stooped down to witness daily struggles of the oppressed but failed to provide practical guidance for organizing a mass social movement, even though the changed circumstances in the 1980s required “a theology of practice and social movement” rather than “a theology of witness” (Kang 1990b, 289). In the midst of all this, those who came on strong with their Christian identity in the social movement were dismissively characterized as “Christian imperialists,” who purported to “plant the flag of вЂChristianity’ in every corner of the society” (Pak 1987, 368–69). After all, the dominant discourse within the progressive faith-based movement circle was that the Christian movement, with all of its specific concerns for religious confession, should situate itself within the broader progressive movement for the sake of democratization and the re-unification of the nation, as opposed to furthering any specific Christian agenda. By the end of the 1980s, the Christian Identity circle was increasingly accused of being “kaeryang juЕ-ija (reformists)” for putting a damper on Page 153 →the revolutionary fervor of the mainstream, progressive movement (SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk, pers. comm.), which began to move beyond the democratization cause, instead focusing on national reunification in the postdemocratization context.11 In such an inflammatory sociopolitical atmosphere, the charge of being reformist was serious enough within the progressive circle that some current key proponents of the New Christian Right were pressured to withdraw, or, in worse cases, publicly ostracized, from the mainstream movement scene, where they had spent most of their young adulthood. Seen in this light, it should come as no surprise that these ideological converts still recollect their experiences of this expulsion as “the most painful memory” of their lives, even “more painful than incarceration” under the Park’s authoritarian regime during the 1970s (SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk, pers. comm.). To this date, they hold a strong resentment against the radical, progressive activists within the Christian movement circle, calling them “crazy bastardsВ .В .В . who abandoned Jesus and followed Mao Zedong, Marx, and Lenin instead” (In MyЕЏng-jin, pers. comm.). If the consolidation of the New Right was a reaction against the political rise of the former ’80s generation of progressive student activists during Roh Moo-hyun’s presidency, I argue that the source of grievances for the ex-progressive Christian activists can be traced to their previous confrontation with, and painful defeat to, the radicalized progressive student movement at the end of the 1980s.

March to Neoliberalism However, the future New Christian Right’s animosity toward the progressive youth activists of the 1980s provides us with only half of the reason for their conservative turn. For it was one thing to have a dispute with their radical counterparts but quite another to disown their previous convictions and espouse the very ideologies they used to oppose. To complete their political conversion, they had to take yet another step to enter the conservative fold. After leaving the progressive movement circle, the ex-progressive Christian activists found their home in the aforementioned nongovernmental organization CCEJ (Pak 1995; Wŏn 1993). Having resigned from his office as acting director of the Han’guk kidokkyo sahoe munje yŏn’guwŏn (Christian Institute for the Study of Justice and Development), Sŏ Kyŏng-sŏk managed to gather a large number of people from among his

church Page 154 →contacts and the nonprogressive, liberal wing of the democratization movement and established a social movement of, by, and for “pot’ong simindЕ-l(ordinary citizens),” with the goal to replace the class-based “minjung (the people’s)” movement (CCEJ 1989). By creating a set of binary oppositions—e.g., the middle-class citizens versus the lower-class minjung; peaceful, law-abiding civil resistance in contrast to violent-illegitimate street demonstration; the pursuit of the common good instead of scoring particular class interests; and, finally, liberal democracy as opposed to authoritarian socialism (See Chu and SЕЏ 1994)—SЕЏ and his associates averred that what South Korean society needed in the postdemocratization and post-Cold War context was to foster gradual social reforms through democratic procedures rather than violent revolution (SЕЏ 1993).They thereby hoped that the minjung-based, antigovernment movement would be superseded by a middle-class-centered civil movement. In the post-Cold War 1990s, it did not take much time for the CCEJ to emerge as a potent social force that quickly eclipsed the minjung movement, as the latter significantly lost its vitality after the Marx-Leninist experiment of communism exited the center stage of modern history. In fact, the whole political climate was turning in favor of the right, which was secured by the appearance of the conservative reformist government of Kim Young-sam in the mid-1990s. As a man of Christian faith, former president Kim had been an influential opposition party leader during the authoritarian years. However, three years after the 1987 democratization, he surprised many by merging his party with remnants of authoritarian forces, reportedly justifying his coalition with his former opponent with a quip that “one should enter the tiger’s den in order to catch one” (ChЕЏng 2005, 248). Regardless of whether he actually caught tigers therein or turned into one of them, the merger of authoritarian and democratizing forces created an unprecedented chance to produce a hybridization of previously opposing political forces, as the newly merged party sought to recruit former antigovernment movement activists in order to expand the scope of conservatism (Kang 2011). In this process, a fair number of progressive activists—most notably, Yi Chae-o and Kim Mun-su, both of whom are Christians—responded to the call by justifying their political reaffiliation as a way to reform the conservative camp from within, since, by that time, they had given up any hope for progressive forces to independently make a foray into mainstream politics in the post-Cold War context (See Kim 1995; Yi 2009). Amid such a convergence of the left and the right, a number of liberal Page 155 →thinkers in the CCEJ began to draw a discursive link between their past antiauthoritarian stance and neoliberalism by conflating political with economic freedom (Kang and Pak 1997). Originally, the founding members of the CCEJ declared that it was their primary task to achieve “economic justice,” defined as “a harmony between economic efficiency and social justice” within the boundary of capitalism (SЕЏ 1992, 189), and they tried to pursue a kind of Third Way social democratic politics beyond the deadlocked opposition between the left and the right. By the 1990s, however, its key members, following the lead of economists within the circle, began to develop a greater interest in neoliberal policies—for instance, deregulation, privatization of public enterprises, freedom of capital flow, and so on—as a way to eliminate any remaining governmental interference in the private sector during the predemocratization years (See Na et al. 2001). While acknowledging the economic achievements of previous authoritarian regimes, they argued that state-directed, mercantile development, which had worked well until the 1980s, would not be efficacious anymore, because the private sector had grown too big to be controlled by state authority, and, more importantly, “segyehwa (globalization)”—which was an official catchword for the Kim Young-sam administration (1993–98)—emerged as a universal trend among increasingly competitive, interrelated global economies. In a world where free trade and limitless competition are a given reality, what South Korea needed for economic success was “to implement liberalization of [its] economy until it could resolve the accumulated failures of [big] government” (Na et al. 2001, 155). In short, this group began to entertain the notion that “[neoliberal] reforms and the opening of the market [were] the zeitgeist of the time” (Kim 1995, 191–92). Significantly, all this discourse about global competitiveness and neoliberal reform caught the ears of the future New Christian Right activists, who by the early1990s had already given up their progressive stance. For instance, when the Kim Young-sam administration founded the Segyehwa ch’ujin wiwЕЏnhoe (Committee for Promoting Globalization) in 1994, SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk (then the secretary-general of the CCEJ) was invited to

serve on this committee as one of twenty-four civilian advisers (SЕЏ 1995b). By this time, SЕЏ began to accept neoliberal reforms as a necessary measure to boost South Korea’s slowing economic growth. Developing “an increasingly more flexible mindset,” SЕЏ started to compartmentalize his conception of Christianity being a religion “for the poor and the marginalized” from his political and economic view (SЕЏ KyЕЏngsЕЏk, pers. comm.). He Page 156 →concluded that in the midst of a faltering national economy, economic growth should be the top priority over social equity or distribution of wealth, until economic advancement was fully achieved, that is, when South Korea’s GDP per capita reached at least forty thousand dollars per year (SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk, pers. comm.). In other words, the ideological void created by his separation from progressive politics was filled with neoliberal developmentalism, which gradually overshadowed his faith-based concern for the poor and the oppressed.12 A similar but different response to globalization is found in the half-political, half-religious remarks of Kim Chinhong, who developed a kind of Christian, expansionist nationalism. Commenting on controversies surrounding the opening of South Korea’s agricultural market in accordance with the Uruguay Round in 1994, Kim strongly scolded trade protectionism as spiritless and faint-hearted. According to him, Christians should “accept this external pressure as a whip, which God, the Lord of history, wields upon the Korean nation out of love,” because “it is time for the Korean nation to be at the forefront of world historyВ .В .В . rather than to cower insideВ .В .В . a cramped land” (Kim 1994, 13–14). To evade this divine trial is to doubt the providence that “God will help this nation to be rich and powerful” (Kim 1994, 16). The only precondition to this divine promise was allegedly to recover the spiritual root of democratic capitalism, as expounded by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis (Kim 1993), and such religio-ethical virtues would, in quite inexplicable ways, not only bring peace to the divided nation but also turn it into a spiritually and economically advanced country: “if our homeland is to be unified in the 21st century, and the unified nation is ruled by the truth of the Bible, it will develop into an advanced country respected by the entire world” (Kim 1994, 38–39). While unabashedly welding his religious and political views, Kim Chin-hong welcomed free trade and globalization as a God-given chance for South Korea to enter the center stage of world affairs and become a fully developed nation. In sum, the neoliberal turn of today’s New Right ideologues was induced by a broader sociopolitical atmosphere of the 1990s, when a weakening of the state and increased globalization appeared to be an inevitable course of events in the postdemocratization and post-Cold War context. Still, it is important to note that, by promoting neoliberal reforms as a continuation of their previous antiauthoritarian movement and a necessary measure to jump-start the weakened engine of economic growth, they managed to portray themselves as a new social force that could impartiallyPage 157 → arbitrate the recurring confrontation between the left and the right. In one way or another, their bipartisan stance allowed them to be assigned to important posts under both the center-right and the center-left governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Only when such a vantage position became untenable in the face of increasing politico-generational conflict from 2004 onward did they take a step to the right by organizing the New Right movement.

Conclusion In this chapter, I explored how a group of former progressive Christian activists transgressed the left-right divide and refashioned themselves as key proponents of the New Right in contemporary South Korean politics. Since each of their political metamorphoses seemed quite abrupt and unexpected to both their past associates and thirdparty observers, there has been a tendency to explain away their conservative turn as isolated episodes of powermongering or individual success-seeking. Stepping back from such individualist-subjective approaches to their conservative turn, I have taken a sociohistorical perspective focusing on the collective life trajectory of a generation of Christian social activists from the 1970s to the present. Their historical paths reveal that the New Christian Right’s conservative turn was induced by a generational rupture in the democratization movement after the radicalization of the student and labor movements in the 1980s. This change was further solidified by the New Christian Right’s acceptance of neoliberal ideologies and practices as a required step to transform South Korea into an economically advanced country in the era of globalization. Therefore, the New Right movement can be said to be motivated, on the one hand, by the deep resentment of the older, liberal democratization movement activists toward the ’80s radicalized student movement generation and, on the other, by the former’s

obsession with economic advancement by way of neoliberal reforms. Regardless of whether one agrees with the ideological agendas of the New Right activists, it is difficult to deny that their political transgression has allowed them to assume a vantage position in polarized political climates in contemporary South Korea. True, they are still suspected of being crypto-socialists by some far-right Old Right groups. However, the converts of the New Christian Right have managed to turn their progressive pasts to their own advantage in carving out a space in the conservative Page 158 →circle, as they refashioned themselves into a kind of born-again proponents of conservatism, after having given more thought about conservative values than those who have never changed their sides. In a similar but different manner, the New Christian Right activists incur a great deal of hostility from their past associates and present adversaries on the liberal-progressive side for abandoning and attacking the position they used to hold altogether. Nevertheless, in a war of political propaganda, the New Christian Right converts indeed serve as “persuasive models and embodied arguments” to discourage their opponents on the other side (Waisanen 2011, 228), since their conversion experience adds extra weight to their claim that, knowing all pros and cons of both sides, they are singularly positioned to make informed decisions about which side is right or wrong. If this group has played a key role in subverting the (short-lived) political dominance of the liberal-left force (1998–2008) and helping conservatives to score victory after victory in political battles since then, this is in large part due to their crossing over the fixed boundary between the left and the right. While the transgressors, so to speak, of the existing sociopolitical boundary often incur repulsion and derision from the opposing political forces that confront each other and jointly guard the border between them, the political converts have occupied a vantage position to obtain and solidify their ground by manipulating such polarized political situations.

Notes 1. By the Evangelical Left in South Korea, I mean those who embraced the Lausanne movement’s affirmation of sociopolitical commitment as an essential part of Christian duty and developed their public engagement in collaboration with liberal-progressive forces (Tizon 2008). 2. The phrase “New Right” was originally coined by the conservative media to describe new emerging conservative organizations such as ChayujuЕ-i yЕЏndae(Association for Liberalism), Kidokkyo sahoe ch’aegim (Christian Social Responsibility), or the New Right Union, all of which appeared in late 2004 and 2005. Nevertheless, some individuals or groups often classified as the New Right refused to accept this label and described their ideological stance as center-right. 3. According to Norval D. Glenn (1974), the problem inherent in this assumption is that it is difficult to discern whether becoming conservative is induced by biological aging, a distinctive cohort experience, the sociohistorical trend of a given period, or a combination of two or more of these factors. Following Bourdieu (1993), I would also Page 159 →point out that this hypothesis is implicitly based on the premise that each age group is clustered on its own as an independent social entity and does not take into account the fact that it often develops its distinctive identity and ethos in interaction with other generational groups. 4. In Weber’s usage of the term, “hisorisches Individuum” refers to “a complex of configurations [ZusammenhГ¤nge] in historical reality which we group together conceptually from the point of view of their cultural significance to form a single whole” (Weber [1905] 2002, 8). 5. A significant number of Roh Moo-hyun’s presidential office staff members had the so-called “UndongkkЕЏn” (progressive-activist) background. Among them, more than 60 percent (31 out of 51) belonged to the ’80s student movement generation who were key leaders of the progressive social movements in the 1980s (see Maeil KyЕЏngje Sinmunsa ChЕЏngch’ibu 2003, 36–43). 6. To make a long story short, Mr. “Outsider” Roh Moo-hyun and his followers encountered fierce resistance when they attempted to challenge the existing region-based, oligarchical political structure. By the end of 2003, their aspirations for political reform were substantiated in a new political party, called the YЕЏlin Uri. Disturbed by President Roh’s open support for the new Uri Party, his adversaries across party lines joined forces in parliament to remove him from office on March 12, 2004 (Kang 2008).

7. The phrase “indigenous communism” was invented by the Park Chung-hee regime, when it arrested the antigovernment movement leaders on the charge of violating the Anticommunist Law but failed to find their link to North Korea (see Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe InkwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe 1987, 1219). 8. SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk’s great-grandfather, SЕЏ KyЕЏng-jo, was one of the first seven native Koreans to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church in the early twentieth century. 9. Such a distinction between the “romantic” and “scientific” progressive movements comes from the Marxist critique of the so-called utopian socialism as essentially grounded in the bourgeois conceptions of universal reason, equality, and property of rights (see Engels, [1880] 1978; Cf. Buber [1946] 1958). 10. Here, “generation” refers to a theological paradigm dominant during a certain historical period (see Ch’oe 1990, n. 9). 11. Within the Christian movement circle, the marching call to the unification movement was the NCCK’s 1988 Declaration, which explicitly condemned the “idolization” of “anticommunism” in the South and confessed as sin the mutual hostility between the two Koreas (Yi 2010). 12. Interestingly, SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk contends that his concern for social justice is still practiced in areas of his ministry to Korean-Chinese immigrants as well as his active involvement in human rights issues in North Korea. However, he refuses to work with progressive groups within South Korea.

Works Cited An PyЕЏng-yЕЏng. 2003. “InyЕЏm poda munhwajЕЏk k’odЕ-ro sЕ-ngpu kЕЏlgetta.” Interview by Sim Chae-sЕЏk. Taejabo. August 28. Accessed at http://www.jabo.co.kr/sub_read.html?uid=2403§ion=sc5 Page 160 →Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications. Buber, Martin. (1946) 1958. Paths in Utopia. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Boston: Beacon Press. CCEJ. 1989. “Inaugural Declaration.” Accessed at http://www.ccej.or.kr/index.php? mid=page_org_7&type=aoa Ch’a ChЕЏng-sik. 2011. “KaehyЕЏkchЕЏk pogЕ-mjuЕ-i wa kongdongch’e undong Е-i kulgokchin haengno.” In PogЕ-m Е-ro sanghwang Е-l parabon 4-in Е-i sisЕЏn , edited by PogЕ-m kwa Sanghwang, 194–96. Seoul: Pogum kwa Sanghwang. Chi Man-wЕЏn. 2006. “Lee Myung-bak k’ingmeik’ŏ Kim Chin-hong moksa Е-i chЕЏngch’e.” Newstown. September 10. Accessed at http://www.newstown.co.kr/news /articleView.html? idxno =35313 Ch’oe HyЕЏng-muk. 1990. “KЕ-risЕ-dogyo minjung undong esЕЏ pon minjung sinhak.”Sinhak sasang 69 (2): 323–47. ChЕЏng Ho-yЕЏng. 2004. “YЕ-ktae chongsЕЏn kyЕЏlgwa Е-i t’Е-ksЕЏng pigyo.” Kukhoe tosЕЏgwanbo April: 8–12. ChЕЏng Sang-yong et al. 1990. Kwangju minjung hangjaeng. Seoul: Tolbegae. ChЕЏng T’ae-hwan. 2005. “Kim YЕЏng-sam chЕЏngkwЕЏn Е-i tЕ-ngjang paegyЕЏng kwa chuyo chЕЏngch’i seryЕЏk Е-i yЕЏkhak.”Han’gukhak YЕЏn’gu (Research in Korean Studies) 22 (2): 237–66. Chu Tae-hwan and KyЕЏng-sЕЏk SЕЏ. 1994. “Simin undong: вЂilban iik’ Е-n kwayЕЏn chonjae

hanЕ-n’ga? (Citizens’ movement: does a вЂgeneral interest’ really exist?).”Chinbo P’yЕЏngnon: Iron 8 (April): 70–93. Engels, Friedrich. (1880) 1978. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 683–717. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Glenn, Norval D. 1974. “Aging and Conservatism.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 415 (1): 176–86. Han’gich’ong Sinmun. 2012. “IrЕЏ pЕЏrin simnyЕЏn.” Christian Council Network Korea. December 11. Accessed at http://www.ccnkorea.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1329 Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe InkwЕЏn WiwЕЏnhoe. 1987.1970-nyЕЏndae minjuhwa undong. Seoul: Han’guk Kidokkyo Kyohoe HyЕЏbЕ-ihoe. Jenks, Chris. 2003. Transgression. London and New York: Routledge. Kang Chun-man. 2008. AutsaidЕЏ k’ŏmp’Е-leksЕ. Seoul: KaemagowЕЏn. Kang In-ch’ŏl. 2007. Han’guk Е-i kaesin’gyo wa pan’gongjuЕ-i . Seoul: Chungsim. Kang MyЕЏng-gu and Pak Sang-hun. 1997. “ChЕЏngch’ijЕЏk sangjing kwa tamnon Е-i chЕЏngch’i.” Han’guk Sahoehak 31 (1): 123–59. Kang Sam-jae. 2011. Interview by Tong SЕЏng-hye. Daillian. July 14. Accessed at http://www.dailian.co.kr/news /news_view.htm?id=253943&page=&code=&gubun=sh&search=%B0%AD%BB%EF%C0%E7# Kang WЕЏn-don. 1990a. “Minjung hyЕЏnsil Е-i palgyЕЏn kwa uri kЕЏt e taehan ch’ugu.” In1980nyЕЏndae han’guk minjung sinhak Е-i chЕЏn’gae, edited by Han’guk Sinhak YЕЏn’guso, 84–107. Seoul: Han’guk Sinhak YЕЏn’guso. Kang WЕЏn-don. 1990b. “SinhakjЕЏk haesЕЏkhak Е-i saeroun mosaek.” In1980-nyЕЏndae han’guk minjung sinhak Е-i chЕЏngae, edited by Han’guk Sinhak YЕЏn’guso, 256–95. Seoul: Han’guk Sinhak YЕЏn’guso. Page 161 →Kim Chong-hwan. 2008. “Kim Chin-hong, SЕЏ KyЕЏng-sЕЏk moksanim. chajung hasipsio!” Ecumenian. June 18. Accessed at http://www.ecumenian. com/news/ articleView.html?idxno=5203 Kim Jin Hong (Kim Chin-hong). 1993. “Munmin kaehyЕЏk sidae Е-i todЕЏksЕЏng hoebok kwa kyohoe Е-i yЕЏkhal.” Kidokkyo Sasang 414 (June): 30–37. Kim Jin Hong (Kim Chin-hong). 1994. SЕЏngsЕЏ han’guk. t’ongil han’guk. sЕЏn’gyo han’guk. Seoul: Ture Sidae. Kim Jin Hong (Kim Chin-hong). 1999. Hwangmuji ka changmikkot kach’i. Seoul: Han’gil. Kim Jin Hong (Kim Chin-hong). 2002. A Desert Becomes a Garden: The Autobiography of Kim Jin-Hong. Seoul: YBM/Sisa. Kim Jin Hong (Kim Chin-hong). 2003. “NanЕ-n posujuЕ-ija.”Mirae Han’guk. July 13. Accessed at http:// www.futurekorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=3789 Kim Jin-Hong et al. 1990. Kidokkyo nЕ-n sahoe e muЕЏt Е-l chul su innЕ-n’ga (What can Christianity offer to society?). Anyang: Taejanggan. Kim Mun-su. 1995. Ajikto na nЕ-n nekt’ai ka ЕЏsaek hada. Seoul: Paeksan SЕЏdang.

Kim Е¬n-sЕЏk. 2008. “Naega pyЕЏnjol haettago? SЕЏ moksa. pandae ch’Е-k moksa wa sЕЏltchЕЏn.” Newsnjoy. June 17. Accessed at http:// www.newsnjoy.or.kr/news/articleView.html? idxno=25099 Kim YЕЏng-hwan. 1989. Kangch’ŏl sЕЏsin. Seoul: Nun. Kim YЕЏng-hwan. 1998. “Kangch’ŏl Kim YЕЏng-hwan Е-i pukkyЕЏng sЕЏsin: pukhan Е-i suryЕЏng non Е-n wanjЕЏnhan hЕЏgu ija kЕЏdaehan sagigЕ-k.”WЕЏlgan Mal 143 (May): 72–77. Korean Student Christian Federation (KSCF). 1987. Minju changjЕЏng 7 (November 23). KwЕЏn Ho-gyЕЏng et al. 1990. “Han’guk kyohoe Е-i sЕЏngjang kwa kidokkyo undong Е-i chindan.” In Chint’ong hanЕ-n han’guk kyohoe: kisayЕЏn mЕ-k’Е-, edited I by Han’guk Kidokkyo Sahoe Munje YЕЏn’guwЕЏn, 18–36. Seoul: Han’guk Kidokkyo Sahoe Munje YЕЏn’guwЕЏn. Larkin, John, and Donald MacIntyre. 2004. “Out of Control.” Time Magazine, March 15. Accessed at http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0.9171.600938.00.html Maeil KyЕЏngje Sinmunsa ChЕЏngch’ibu. 2003. Roh Moo-hyun sidae p’awЕЏ elit’Е-. Seoul: Maeil KyЕЏngje Sinmunsa. Mun, Pu-sik. (1982) 1988. “Choguk Е-i hЕЏgijin yЕЏksa rЕ-l nЕЏmЕЏ.” InHangsЕЏ iyusЕЏ, edited by Sasanggye, 61–98. Seoul: Sasanggye. Na, SЕЏng-nin et al. 2001. “Sijang kyЕЏngje Е-i ch’angdal.” InHan’guk sahoe Е-i pijЕЏn 21: KyЕЏngsillyЕЏn, edited by KyЕЏngsillyЕЏn PijЕЏn 21 P’orЕЏm and KyЕЏngje ChЕЏngЕ-i Silch’ŏn Simin YЕЏnhap, 131–56. Seoul: Simin Е-i Sinmunsa. Pak, HyЕЏng-jun. 1995. “Saeroun sahoe undong kwa kyЕЏngsillyЕЏn undong.” KyЕЏngje wa Sahoe 27 (September): 76–105. Pak, Se-il. 2004. “Pak Se-il. yЕЏyagan kyЕ-nhyЕЏng wihae hannaradang e tЕ-ro katta.” Interview by Yi PyЕЏng-hye. Upkorea. March 25. Accessed at http://www.upkorea.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=2986 Pak SЕЏng-jun. 1987. “Han’guk kidokkyo Е-i pyЕЏnhyЕЏk kwa kidokkyo undong Е-i kwaje.” In ChЕЏnhwan: yuwЕЏl t’ujaeng kwa minjuhwa Е-i chillo, edited by Pak HyЕЏn-ch’ae, 345–85. Seoul: SagyejЕЏl. Pang In-hyЕЏk. 2009. Han’guk Е-i pyЕЏnhyЕЏk undong kwa sasang nonjaeng. Seoul: Sonamu. Peterson, Mark. 1988. “Americans and the Kwangju Incident: Problems in the Writing of History.” In The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea, edited by Donald N. Clark, 52–64. Boulder and London: Westview Press. Page 162 →Sin Chi-ho. 2004. “Uri sahoe Е-i kaehyЕЏk inyЕЏm Е-n chayujuЕ-ida.” Interview by Yi Kwang-baek. Sidae ChЕЏngsin (Zeitgeist) 27 (Winter). Accessed at http:// www.zeitgeist.co.kr/2005html/sub /popup/2701.htm Sin Chi-ho. 2006. “Nyu rait’Е- undong Е-i sasangjЕЏk chЕЏn’gae wa t’Е-kchil.” Sidae ChЕЏngsin. Accessed at http://www.sdjs.co.kr/ read.php?quarterId= SD200603&num=31 Sin Chi-ho. 2007. “OldЕ- rait’Е- munje e taehan sogo.”Dailian. July 11. Accessed at http://www.dailian.co.kr/news/news_view.htm?id=22351?id=22351 Sin Chin-uk. 2008. “Posu tanch’e ideologi Е-i kaenyЕЏm kujo 2000–2006.”KyЕЏngje wa Sahoe 78 (2): 163–93.

SЕЏ Chin-han. 1990. “80-nyЕЏndae minjung sinhak Е-i kwahaksЕЏng kwa taejungsЕЏng: 80-nyЕЏndae huban sojang sinhak yЕЏn’gujadЕ-l Е-i chagЕЏp e taehan p’yЕЏngga wa chЕЏnmang.” In Chint’ong hanЕ-n han’guk kyohoe, edited by Han’guk Kidokkyo Sahoe Munje YЕЏn’guwЕЏn, 103–43. Seoul: Han’guk Kidokkyo Sahoe Munje YЕЏn’guwЕЏn. SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk. 1992. “Han’guk kyЕЏngje kwayЕЏn chЕЏngЕ-iroun’ga.”Kyegan Sasang (Spring): 182–205. SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk. 1995a. “Minjung sinhak Е-i wigi.”Kidokkyo Sasang 417 (September): 187–204. SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk. 1995b. Interview by Tang Kim. Sisa ChЕЏnЕЏl 279 (March 2): 44–45. SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk. 1996. Kkum kkunЕ-n cha man i sesang Е-l pak kul su itta(Only dreamers can change the world). Seoul: Ungjin. SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk. 2005. “NanЕ-n wae kidokkyo sahoe ch’aegim Е-k haggye toeЕЏnna?” June 13. (Sŏ’s personal webpage). Col. No.721. Accessed at www.suhkyungsuk.pe.kr Son Hak-kyu. 2003. Interview by Kim YЕЏn-kwang. WЕЏlgan ChosЕЏn 279 (June): 290–306. Suh, Myung-Sahm. 2015. “Glocalization of вЂChristian Social Responsibility’: The Contested Legacy of the Lausanne Movement among Neo-Evangelicals in South Korea.” ReligionsВ 6 (4): 1391–410. Tizon, Al. 2008. Transformation after Lausanne: Radical Evangelical Mission in Global-local Perspective. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. U T’ae-yЕЏng. 2005. 82dЕ-l Е-i hyЕЏngmyЕЏng norЕ-m . Seoul: SЕЏn. Waisanen, Don. 2011. “Political Conversion as Intrapersonal Argument: Self-dissociation in David Brock’s Blinded by the Right.” Argumentation and Advocacy 47 (Spring): 228–45. Weber, Max. (1905) 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited and translated by Peter Baeher and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books. WЕЏn, Chong-ch’an. 1993. “Saeroun sidae Е-i minjung undong kwa simin undong Е-l wihayЕЏ.” Ch’angjak kwa Pip’yЕЏng 81 (September): 8–23. Yi, Chae-o. 2009. Hambak usЕЏm. Seoul: Saenggak Е-i Namu. Yi Na-mi. 2006. “Han’guk Е-i posu tanch’e Е-i inyЕЏmjЕЏk punhwa.” Paper presented at the Han’guk Sahoe P’orЕЏm, Seoul, ROK. March 24. Yi Yu-na. 2010. “88 sЕЏnЕЏn chЕЏnhu sigi han’guk kidokkyo kyohoe hyЕЏbЕ-ihoe Е-i t’ongil undong kwa che seryЕЏk Е-i t’ongil undong chЕЏn’gae.”Han’guk Kidokkyo wa YЕЏksa 32 (March): 263–96. Yun Chong-bin. 2004. “Sipch’il tae ch’ongsЕЏn kyЕЏlgwa p’yЕЏngka: punsЕЏk kwa chЕЏnmang.” ChЕЏngchi ChЕЏngbo YЕЏngu 7: 27–52. Page 163 →Yun Min-jae. 2008. “Nyu rait’Е- Е-i tЕ-ngjang kwa posu Е-i nЕ-ngdonghwa.” Simin kwa Segye 13 (April): 46–65. Yun SЕ-ng-hyЕЏn. 1992. “Ek’yumenikal taehaksaeng sЕЏn’gyo undong Е-i yЕЏksa wa hyЕЏn tan’gye kwaje.” MA thesis. Hansin University. Zoh, Byoung-Ho. 2003. A History of the Christian Student Movements in Korea 1884–1990. Seoul:

Tanggulshi.

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7 Transgressive Academic All-Stars and Conventional Teen Idols School-Age South Koreans and Hakpumo (School Parents) Navigating the System Bonnie Tilland If you guys continue this way, you’re going to live your entire lives being cheated by others until you die. In this society, there’s such a thing as rules. You have to live by them. Who do you think made these rules? Smart guys. Laws, the education system, the estate system, taxes, finance, the wage system—smart guys made them up to suit their tastes, to make their lives comfortable. For idiots like you, fools who think using your brains is a hassle, you’ll live your entire lives conned or endlessly injured by those smart guys, and in the end you’ll be defeated. —Teacher SЗ’kho, KongbuЕ-i sin(God of Study, 2010) I select the passage above, a popular quote from a fictional teacher in a television drama, to illustrate certain cynical Korean interpretations of the contemporary educational system. As anthropologist Jesook Song has written, South Korea’s rapid pace of development and globalization make it an ideal petri dish for studying problems of social alienation and inequality arising around the globe since the gradual and uneven spread of neoliberal logics (2009). The changes in perceptions of the nature of academic ability and artistic ability, and their relationship to paths to success, are not specific to Korea but do illustrate a particular intensification of Page 166 →anxiety surrounding imagined futures. Here I discuss changing ideas about academic ability and creative potential, concluding with a brief discussion of “the fan,” an ambivalent figure that has become intensified in public discourse as a response to unique social phenomena in global South Korea. I begin with ethnographic vignettes of three school-age categories of possibility: the transgressive academic all-star, the conventional popidol-in-training, and the hybrid category of fan. I share with other Korea observers the observation that as the equal opportunity ideal the South Korean education system was founded on becomes increasingly elusive, families, and “education manager mothers” in particular (maenЕЏjЕЏ ЕЏmma, a relatively new maternal subjectivity delineated by Park 2006, 2012), must relentlessly search for new areas in which their children might be successful and happy. Although there are any number of future possibilities children might pursue, I argue that South Korea’s potent combination of a high-stakes education system, the recent investment in popular culture as a source of “soft culture power” for the nation,1 and widespread Internet sociality2 result in an intensification of both desire and anxiety around certain select types of futures for the child. These three pervasive categories of possibility—the top university graduate, the creative artist, and the fan—are invested with different kinds of hope, intersecting in complex ways. Reversing decades (or arguably, centuries, if we consider the ChosЕЏn dynasty civil examination system) of common knowledge about who should pursue which paths, in twenty-first century South Korea academic success is becoming “transgressible,” subject to hacking, and creative pursuits are becoming conventional, a reversal I will soon explain.

Imagining Openings and Closures After a long, rambling interview in our favorite café, MJ, MS, IS, and I grabbed “a quick meal” nearby of green dried radish soup with grilled mackerel, but these three were not the types to wolf down a meal, and after about thirty minutes YG joined us. It was late September but the muggy, blazing summer heat had invaded again, and YG flounced in and dramatically threw her handbag in a chair, collapsing in another chair and vigorously fanning herself. Since she was back in graduate school she had less time to spend around the neighborhood than her friends, but expressed interest in joining in for the next group interview. She asked when we were planning to

see each other again, and IS laughed and answered Page 167 →that she would be seeing me in a couple of hours, as I was coming to have an English conversation lesson with her and MS’s daughters. YG quipped, “This is really ethnography, huh? You’re spending all day with these ajumma (middle-aged woman)!” Although it took a lot of time throughout my fieldwork, tutoring children in exchange for interviews with their mothers gave me the opportunity to better see familial relationships play out. MS’s daughter was a tall, lanky girl in sixth grade when I met her, prone to excitable hand gestures and with a perpetually sun-kissed look. IS’s daughter, in the first year of middle school, was in contrast a solidly built girl with a sleepy expression and pale skin quick to flare into the common condition of “atopy.”3 By the time I had made my way up to the fifth floor Hyundai apartment, the early afternoon heat had given way to a fierce windstorm. I had been tutoring the girls for about six months, and we were all feeling a bit of burnout, as the novelty of having a foreigner give them lessons had worn off and I had exhausted my most entertaining English-teaching resources. As we stabbed with our fruit forks at watermelon pieces on the plate MS had brought in, MS’s daughter suddenly perked up and asked me if I knew about Justin Bieber, a Canadian teenage pop singer rapidly accumulating screaming teen and tween girl fans across the globe. IS’s daughter rolled her eyes playfully and chimed in that she preferred Justin Timberlake (the somewhat older singer who had put in his time in an American boy band in the early 1990s). Bursting with excitement, MS’s daughter ran to get a print-out of lyrics to a song of Justin Bieber’s, and that was the rest of the English lesson. We had several more lessons like this, with the girls giving the English their full attention. Eventually MS’s daughter, who was more open about her pop culture obsessions, also shared with me lyrics and online videos of her favorite Korean pop acts. MS was pleased that her daughter was focusing more on English because of her current pop star obsession (though she wished she would do the same for math, her weaker subject) but lamented the obsessive nature of this interest. She reportedly would play the same song over and over, laying around and singing as if in a trance. Her mother had to put strict limitations on her time online to prevent her from watching video after video of her latest beloved idol (aidol—celebrity pop star), and she seemed to have her cell phone confiscated at least half of the times I came for lessons. IS’s mother had different but related complaints: her daughter was quieter and not as inclined to tell her mother what she was feeling, which meant fewer overt battles of will but more worry on the part of IS. She Page 168 →would write love letters to idols (never sent) and obsess over CDs and MP3 downloads she wasn’t allowed to buy. IS’s mother laughed, not unsympathetically, telling us how her daughter had saved money from relatives at holidays for an expensive CD/DVD set, only to be disappointed in what she had spent her money on. MS similarly rolled her eyes over her daughter’s poring over the Bieber CD set she was finally allowed to purchase. Both mothers said they had learned through discussion with friends and media stories on youth culture that their daughters’ generation desired an unprecedented degree of “privacy” (using the Koreanized English word, p’uraibЕЏsi) and found great solace in music. Knowing these differences between their daughters’ generation and their own, they gritted their teeth and tried to be generous. When I tutored PTH’s daughter, a petite fourth grader in elementary school with long black hair and a feline quality to her face, we met in PTH’s cafГ© and bakery branch, which had Korean pop music playing on a loop, as did most retail spaces in the city. The music was not especially loud and invasive, but PTH’s daughter had a hard time focusing at points, and she would begin mouthing or singing softly the words of a song, her body seemingly moving of its own accord, going through a seated, subdued version of the motions to the dance that accompanies the song.4 At a song’s chorus an arm would sometimes fly out exuberantly without warning, and the girl would retract it quickly, smiling with a mixture of shyness and pride as my face registered amused surprise. PTH told me that her daughter loves dance more than anything in the world, and is also quite good at it. Her love is popular dance and she dreams of becoming a pop star, but her mother says that while she is sending her to pop dance classes at a hagwЕЏn (private educational institute) now, she is working on budgeting to send her to ongoing classes in muyong (traditional Korean dance), of which there are several hagwЕЏn in ChЕЏnju, due in no small part to ChЕЏnju’s increasing attention to its heritage as yangban toshi (aristocrat town)5 and claims to be “the most Korean city in Korea.” PTH’s daughter isn’t excited by muyong, but her mother is working on convincing her that if she can “find her talent” in Korean dance, she will have the option of going to a good university via their traditional

dance department. If she decides not to go to university, muyong classes will at least give her poise if she tries to become a pop star. PTH says that while her daughter is not a bad student at this point, she is not a particularly good student either, and seems resigned that her academic proclivities will probably not change. Her dance ability, on the other hand, is a wild Page 169 →card—it is impossible to look at her petite frame now and envision her as a career backup dancer or, perhaps, the next big star. But, her mother sighs, it is equally as impossible not to envision her dancing in the future, as she is so happy when she dances. I identify two assumptions at work in the two vignettes described above: academic proclivity is fixed and aspirations to pop stardom are increasingly conventional. However, a third ontological category slips in between the cracks, a category that is quite unfamiliar to MS and IS’s generation: the ambivalent value of fandom. The daughters of MS and IS seem unlikely to become academic all-stars in the Korean school system, and their mothers are realistic about their abilities, even if sometimes exasperated by their lack of diligence in studying. At the same time, the girls are not interested in becoming pop stars, only in the active consumption of popular culture products that fall under the category of “fandom.” The girls, with their mothers’ help, are still searching for their areas of talent; as So Jin Park notes, this guided exploration is less “fun” and more stressful, as “it is more difficult for mothers to find their children’s talent than it is to make them study” (2012, 129). The girls’ enthusiastic participation in fan culture is at times troubling to their mothers, but because of MS and IS’s realism, is generally accepted as an activity that enriches their emotional lives. “Fandom” is, as one writer of a popular magazine puts it, “a healthy and sincere outlet for kids’ erupting energy at life’s most pure time” and “a creative activity that produces different cultural values,” even if it has no tangible benefits in an individual’s academic or artistic life.6 Most of the women I interviewed referred to the different degrees of fandom their daughters (and less often, sons) engaged in, particularly during late elementary school and middle school. I surmise that fandom activities engaged in by “good daughters” by the time they began high school were increasingly downplayed to parents, as energies were supposed to be poured into preparation for university entrance hurdles. In contrast, PTH’s young daughter’s activities had exceeded the realm of fandom and entered into the territory of artistic ability as potential future career path. I was surprised by PTH’s resignation over her daughter’s academic trajectory given her young age (myself being a product of an Anglo-American, middleclass upbringing that tends to insist, at least in theory, that the spark of academic interest and proclivity might ignite at nearly anytime within the ever-lengthening period of “youth”), and sympathized with her sense of excitement over the image of a happily dancing daughter in the future, despite her reservations. Sordid descriptions of the Page 170 →cutthroat nature of the entertainment industry in Korea, and the accompanying abuse and corruption that surrounds the young idols-in-training, circulate widely, and yet somewhere along the line aspirations to idol status have become as imaginable or more so than jumping from poor or average student to academic all-star in the competitive South Korean education system (Ho 2012, 475). This view of the university entrance exam system, in particular, as a border to be transgressed, points to a deep societal distrust of the system. What broader changes in South Korean society have led to this reversal in perceptions of possible futures? How is fame as a popular culture phenom7 more possible than success via movement up the ranks in school, a path to success that is an inherently “modern Korean” ideal? Korean social commentators have gone so far as to say that the success possible due to academic diligence and the social mobility this affords is the key component of “the miracle on the Han” of South Korean national development. In the remainder of this paper I wish to explore the ways in which pop culture training and know-how is replacing education as the Korean miraclemaker, given that new transfigurations of the “Korean Wave” continue to be invested with hope from multiple sides. While South Korea remains one of the most credential-obsessed societies in the world, those credentials are increasingly viewed with suspicion, while the singing and dancing pop stars are deemed to be relatively transparent.8 Perhaps there is an element of weariness over the vigilance required to ensure education equality, as Song (2012) suggests in a broad statement about public sentiment after the transition from an oppositional mode (minjung, the people, against the government) to civil society: “The radical ideals of collective social change have been displaced by the liberal pursuit of individual happiness” (251). In contrast, the market decides which pop stars are valuable or useless, and there is recently a nationalist impulse as well; as

Ho (2012) notes, “there has not been such a nationwide jubilation and excitement about having a new possibility for attaining fortune, global recognition and even national pride as K-pop has generated since the IMF bailout” (484). In addition to interviews and observations with mothers, I examine popular media representations of South Korean school-age trajectories through readings of the dramas KongbuЕ-i sin(God of Study, KBS2 2010), TЕ-rim hai (Dream High, KBS 2011), and to a lesser extent, Е¬ngdaphara 1997 (Answer Me 1997, tvN 2012), as well as discourse analysis of popular magazines and newspaper articles. Despite irrefutable evidence that the entertainment industryPage 171 → is even more cutthroat than the university entrance exam and job market for university graduates, and despite prominent media attention to the ebbing of the “Korean Wave” of popular culture in overseas markets,9 the unknown elements of South Korean pop culture’s future invest it with hope. In contrast, the education industry is anxiously unknowable rather than simply unknown, as university entrance exam formats and policies seem to undergo a dramatic overhaul each school year. As the labor market becomes more and more antithetical to stability and requiring of “flexibility” and “creativity” of its workers, the mother’s role in the family becomes that of knowing one’s child, discovering and nurturing talents creatively, and doing the emotional work necessary to maintain family relationships and minimize stress to the child. (There are resonances here with earlier moments in Korean history, such as the early twentieth century, when the extended family came to be critiqued as an “outdated” obstacle to modernization. Instead, more intensive affective parent-child bonds were emphasized.) This emotional work on the part of parents also involves knowing when and how to act on worries about activities that fall neither under academic study nor creative pursuits.

Fandom as Ambivalent Category The magazine article I allude to above appeared in the February 2011 issue of the monthly women’s magazine She’s Mom (the magazine title is in English in the original), with the title of “Kids Who Fall in Love With Stars” (that month’s article in a column called, in English, “She’s Mom Advice”). At the bottom of the first page there is a box set apart with a dictionary-like definition of the term “fandom.” The author begins the article with a vignette of a girl who doesn’t study “and sees her life as something to give to stars,” with the understandable result that her mother is at her wit’s end, trying tactics such as cutting off computer and TV use, but with no real solution to the underlying problem. However, the author argues that mothers need to attempt a more generous attitude to their daughters’ obsession with stars, understanding that fandom activities are “an opportunity for communication with other peopleВ .В .В . [and] a window for actively contributing one’s voice to the world.” She gives the example of Yuna Kim (Kim YЕЏna)’s fans (the Olympic ice-skater, who has had endless advertising opportunities in South Korea since her 2010 Olympic gold medal). These fans act as “an independent social group,” working together to “help Page 172 →alienated classes on which society has turned its back”—in this case Yuna Kim’s fans gathered on the occasion of her twentieth birthday to present her with a receipt of their collective donation to Pakistan flood victims as her birthday gift. Yuna Kim thanked her fans for the meaningful gift and promised to “work hard to become a person who works not just for her own happiness but for all of your [the fans’] happiness.” The author also cites the political lobbying element of fan activities, bringing up the case of “Casiopeia” (Internet username), fan of boyband TVXQ, who learned of the unfair contract of her idol object of affection and rallied to “bring to light the problem of unfair contracts in the entertainment industry, collecting 180,000 signatures.” The examples in the article are meant to reassure mothers of star-smitten daughters that fandom activities can be a productive, positive force in the world, rather than the slothful obsession most mothers imagine them to be. Near the end of the article the author also appeals to mothers’ memories of their own youth: now you’re a mother, but didn’t you also once experience heart-beating excitement in your youth because of some star? If you remember that pure heart, try understanding the sincere and positive energy kids have for stars.В .В .В . When I, who spent my youth in the 1970s, recite the words to Fevers’ (PibЕЏsЕ-) song “If my love leaves when will he return,” or sing along with Namgung Okpun’s “Love, love, who mentioned it?” those difficult math formulas, my school uniform, and my friends all come to mind as one “set.” If, when my

children are my age, Lee Hyori (Yi Hyo-ri, pop singer)’s voluptuous dances and 2PM (t’up’iem, boy band)’s raps, along with English grammar, all come to mind as a common denominator, they won’t remember their youths to be so empty. With a variety of stars glittering in our children’s hearts and heads, the reality will seem less dark. While today’s mothers of teenagers did not have nearly as active a fan culture to participate in during the predemocratic transition 1970s, the author reminds readers that teen escapism is hardly a new phenomenon. While love for a star may not improve English or math test scores now, when these millennial children grow up and reflect on their pressure-cooker-like secondary school days, the songs and dances of stars they loved will flavor bitter memories with a touch of much-needed sweetness.

Fandom as Safe, Pure Love Another reassuring point about fandom as a focus of school-age energies is that it is an example of “pure first love,” a “sincere and positive outlet.” Page 173 →While the “first love” or “puppy love” of teens has carried emotional weight in most postindustrial societies that have developed popular peer cultures operating outside of kinship networks,10 and becomes the stuff of syrupy popular songs the world over, Korean popular culture is typically significantly less cynical than its Western counterparts and the pureness of unfulfilled first love is a pervasive theme. As in Japan, the all-consuming nature of the roles of both “student” and “teacher” lead to relatively greater permissiveness of teacher-student relationships than in the United States, for example (though this is changing as both the “pure motives” of teachers and “purity” of students come under suspicion). The pureness of this kind of first love in particular (which exceeds the United States trope of “crush on a teacher”) is explored in countless TV dramas, manhwa (comics/graphic novels), and films. Love for a teacher may even make for a more diligent student!11 The author of this magazine article implicitly suggests “love for a star” as the next best thing after love for a teacher, because the risk of damage to sexual purity is negligible. In cases in which a teenager’s fandom activities may incline toward crossing the line of sexual propriety (through fan videos posted online, for example), the author simply advocates active parental involvement: “In order to have balanced fandom activities of course a mother’s guidance is necessary. The most effective method is simply mother’s interest.В .В .В . I’m not saying follow your kids to concerts. Start by memorizing the names and characteristics of the stars your child likes, as a basis for discussion.В .В .В . That way you can be involved before your child goes down the wrong road.” What is feared here is some combination of school absenteeism, Internet addiction and online bullying/harassment, and sexual activities with those in the entertainment world or with other fans. Fandom Mitigates Dark Reality A third positive aspect of fandom given is its ability to distract from dark reality. “Some youth right at this moment might well be getting through a difficult time because of a song by a star they like. Singers are the surgeons who provide the fastest remedies for youth pain.” No matter how many classes in “creativitybuilding” are added, and no matter how much the college entrance exam format is tweaked, high school kids have no choice but to live in a temporary state of exhaustion, with third-year students (kosam) automatically the most “pitiable” (pulssanghada) due to their nearly nonstop cramming for the entrance exam. This is the oftreferenced “exam hell” (ipsi chiok). Individual students bear stress more or less well, Page 174 →and better or worse parental involvement and teacher support affect psychological wellbeing. However, despite all these variables, high school is inherently a “dark reality.” The author of this article urges mothers to allow a ray of light into the darkness by permitting children to choose a star. Pop stars are one icon of youth, and in South Korea studying and exam preparation are another: “since вЂstudy’ is not an icon of their choosing, the star operates outside of that realm where choice is not possible.В .В .В . Stars are a fresh wind for heads aching from study, existing as a foundation to avoid doing nothing but study and have a phase of rest.” In other words, stars represent both “choice” and “leisure,” two things in short supply among school-aged youth in South Korea. (Although some boys also actively consume idol paraphernalia or follow stars’ personal and professional activities online, as gender roles become increasingly differentiated throughout middle school, and certainly by high school, boys are more likely to choose online video games as their preferred medium of release.)

While fandom activities can function as a “ray of hope” for stressed youth, they only make up one part of any given student’s day in all but the most extreme cases. For the rest of the day it is the student’s job to study, or in the case of students who are working instead on an alternative pursuit, as PTH’s daughter may decide to do, to log long hours practicing dance routines, singing, practicing instruments, or doing athletic training. Mothers searched for activities their children enjoyed (or at least did not hate) and for which they had a certain amount of aptitude, and invested in these potential futures in the form of special hagwЕЏn programs, tutors, and educational curriculum (self-study books). Depending on family resources and level of anxiety about the educational system, some mothers began investing in these areas in late elementary school (or even tried to push children in a few directions of development in early elementary school), but the majority I spoke with became most focused on this task in middle school, as around puberty children were thought to reveal their “true nature.” Parents of this newly “creative” generation of adolescents who are “in-theknow” recognize fandom not as a dangerous preoccupation, but on the contrary, as an enticement to academic diligence, with the ultimate beauty lying in the fact that they don’t have to nag. A handsome young male star’s televised message to “study hard and follow your dreams,” for example, has a great deal of power: “Watching my kids study harder with one word from a star, [I understand that] through fandom activities stars can also become an extension of myself.” What, then, if a child has aptitude neither for studying nor ideas for alternative routes Page 175 →to success? Under the rapid industrialization paradigm the answer was always to “study harder,” but when teenagers in millennial South Korea hear “study harder” from a star, is this the only message they absorb? After all, new strategies for success, whether imposed by parents or decided by children themselves, include knowing when to cut one’s losses and try another door.

Temporal Considerations of Academic Ability, Creative Ability, and Fandom In the next section I examine discursive constructions of two sides of the same coin: the perceived fixed nature of academic ability (either you’re a good student or you’re not) and the expectation of at least a degree of “flexibility” and “creativity” among this generation of children hypothetically opening the door to pop star success. Flexibility and creativity are social buzzwords widely applied to only nonacademic, alternative forms of success. In a social climate in which the virtually unregulated growth of the private education sector has distorted earlier ideals of educational equality, fighting to move up academically is noteworthy behavior, and becoming a teen idol-in-training has become almost a conventional, though hardly ordinary, goal in twenty-firstcentury Korea. PTH’s incredulity at her daughter’s aspirations to be a pop dancer were mixed equally with pride. Her daughter had interests outside of the academic track, but interests that were easy to imagine and which fit in to a shifting South Korean career hierarchy. As the new millennium progresses, more and more young South Koreans list “dancer” or “singer” as their desired future career on career questionnaires, rather than the traditional anjЗ’ngdwoen (“secure”) careers of lawyer, doctor, or teacher (Park 1997). In addition, the temporality of pop star training has commonalities with everyday life in urbanized South Korea, whereas the temporality of the entrance exam does not. Of course, it is not really possible to generalize about the experiences of temporality of “ordinary Koreans”: are night workers, or online traders and merchants—not to mention the legion of Koreans employed as irregular (pijЕЏnggyujik) workers—“unordinary”? However, it can safely be said that millennial South Korea is a “fast” society, and scores of pop psychology books would agree.12 Koreans and expats alike note South Korea’s unique “delivery culture,” in which food from most restaurants can be ordered at any hour of the day Page 176 →or night, and will reach the customer steaming hot, in a metal box carried by a young man (almost always) on a motor scooter. Koreans like to say they do everything ppalli ppalli, in a rush, though this has positive aspects (efficiency in customer service) and negative (shoddy construction of buildings). While the private after-school education industry has adjusted to keep pace with this temporality, such that students have immediate score reports for the constant quizzes and drills they undergo in the lead-up to exam hell, exam hell itself stretches on for the full year of the final year of high school, and even longer if the student fails to test into a university or department they are willing to attend and opts to become a “re-testing student” (chaesusaeng). The temporality of the third-year high school student and chaesusaeng is notably similar to that of those who aspire to those anjЗ’ngdwoen careers, who must lock themselves away in a kosiwЕЏn (test prep dormitory) for several years to prepare for the grueling teacher’s certification, civil service, or in some cases

bar exams or med school admission exams. The trajectory of an idol-in-training has certain similarities, as the usual path to stardom was to join an idol management and training company following being scouted or emerging from the crowd victorious at a mass audition, and spend years of serious training before one’s “tebwi” (debut).13 However, there are also marked differences in the temporal lives of aspiring stars—children and teenagers can have their talent recognized and be scouted, or seek out audition opportunities, at any time (and not on one stress-filled day of the year, as with the university entrance exam!). Also, in South Korea’s highly “wired” environment, with nearly universal high-speed Internet use, many youth dream of being discovered through nontraditional means, perhaps by posting a clip of a self-filmed cell phone video on an Internet portal, showcasing their beauty and singing or dancing ability and becoming an Internet sensation (the so-called З’lkuljjang, “best face”). In this way the temporality of stardom has much more in common with the popular post-1997-financial-crisis career choice of venture company start-up. In fact, this rhythm of being in the world has been lauded in public discourse in the new millennium as having the potential to save the nation. These youth in postfinancial-crisis South Korea were praised for their quick and nonlinear thinking, their “potential to survive the challenges of continuously changing times,” with their “very bodies [becoming] subject to the autonomous terrain of self-governance” (Song 2007, 333). Venture companies and the entertainment industry are both volatile machines, with great potential risks and rewards,Page 177 → and creative youth are the most efficient fuel. Song notes elsewhere (2009b) that the venture companies, despite their meteoric rise, did not ultimately come to replace the conglomerates (chaebol), but instead the chaebol took up the venture companies’ prioritization of flexibility, making a far greater number of their employees contract workers without benefits. Likewise, idol agencies promise to make stars, all the while increasing competition as a virtue and placing the financial burden of training on families (in the form of these new “pop academies”).

To Become a “God of Study” or to “Dream High” at Art School? I now turn to a brief examination of two “high school TV dramas,” one about a regular high school and one about an arts school (not traditional arts, but one specifically aimed at aspiring pop idols). KBS2’s God of Study aired from early January until late February 2010 and consisted of sixteen seventy-minute episodes. The show became the top-rated Monday/Tuesday show during its broadcast, and after it was through airing the network capitalized on its success by producing a series of “study guides” highlighting study methods used on the show. The plot of God of Study focuses on five under-performing high school students, taken under the tutelage of a teacher who pledges to get them into South Korea’s top university (the fictional Ch’ŏnha University, literally the university of “all under heaven” or “the whole world,” clearly meant to symbolize Seoul National University). In “God of Study” the students transcend their status by catapulting into the ranks of the academic elite, and the program also promotes the “transgressive” message that going to college doesn’t necessarily matter, but getting into the top school is a form of revenge in a credentialobsessed society such as South Korea. KBS2 broadcast Dream High exactly one year later, from early January to late February 2011. While God of Study had been popular with mothers and their teenage children, Dream High was more of a targeted “teen drama” (only one of my interviewees reported watching it with her daughter) and had strong but not particularly high ratings. Dream High begins as a rather typical high school story, in which talented kids at Kirin Arts High School alternately form friendships/relationships and compete with one another. (Despite overlapping temporally with the American high school musical sitcom Glee, the show’s premise has more in common with Page 178 →the film Fame and others in that genre.) The drama takes a dark turn, however, when a storyline involving underage sexual abuse and other kinds of exploitation in the music industry is emphasized. The abused member of the class cannot keep up in the competitive atmosphere of the arts school and plagiarizes a song, beginning a descent into alienation and increasingly desperate attempts to stay in the game. Despite the immature and back-stabbing behavior that landed her in this situation, her classmates and teachers rally behind her and stand up to the corrupt entertainment company. They lose the evil music execs’ sponsorship but retain their pride, a decision that later enables them to achieve success via an alternative route. The differences and similarities between these two youth success narratives offer a glimpse of dominant discourses at work in social imaginings of artistic or academic talent. Both dramas begin with talented students

with problems: the five smart students in God of Study underperform because of poverty at home, lack of emotional support at home, or a combination of the two. The six students showcased in Dream High have similar problems preventing them from achieving artistic success. Both dramas also begin with a teacher on a mission: the music teacher in Dream High is given the ultimatum that he will be fired if he doesn’t get three more students to come to Kirin Arts School, and once he has recruited them he takes on the burden of making a class of “problem students” into top national idols. The lawyer in God of Study charged with dissolving an underperforming high school makes the discovery that its closure would enable a company that ruined his career to profit through land redevelopment. He requests a year’s time to make the failing school into an elite school, promising to get five students accepted to Ch’ŏnha University. The lawyer, like the music teacher, initially has his own self-interest at heart, but the vulnerable high school students at the core of the mission motivate the authority figures to take their trusted positions of “teacher” seriously, in the process accessing raw, as-yet unresolved emotions from their own childhoods, the result of adult betrayal and society’s low expectations of their success.14 It is with the vulnerable teens and fallible-but-good-hearted teachers that the similarities between depictions of the star-making school and academic elite-making school stop. The arts students are training to become idols because of their inherent talent, and also to avoid the soulless ordinariness of study for the university entrance exam. In Dream High, the students are threatened by the prospect of being left to rot in the “academicPage 179 → classroom” if they do not work hard to perfect their singing and dancing. In one scene in an early episode, a visitor to the school is shocked to find desperate messages carved into desks in the academic classroom (“My life is over” and “I still want to sing”). Preparing for the entrance exam is clearly second-best here, a last resort for the untalented. In God of Study, however, the students are not depicted as inherently of superior intelligence; the message rather is that anyone can get into Ch’ŏnha University if they work hard enough. The lawyer-turned-teacher swears by “study secrets” that will turn studying hard into studying smart. As the lawyer makes his rounds around the low-level high school to recruit students for his “special Ch’ŏnha University study class” he is greeted with jeers from underperforming students. He knocks playfully on a boy’s head and proclaims, “Just as suspected: empty. All the more reason to join the study class—it is better to be a blank slate.” The underprivileged students in God of Study are transgressing social expectations by studying to get into Ch’ŏnha University, and their fly-by-night teacher does not hold up the education system as something that can help the wayward students, but instead believes South Korea’s educational system to be deeply broken and only views it in cynical terms. In a speech that is supposed to be reminiscent of the “O Captain My Captain” scene in the film Dead Poet’s Society (a runaway hit in South Korea), the teacher declares that by not trying the students are dooming themselves to a life of serving and being looked down on by others. The long-term teachers at the school are incredulous at the lawyer’s arrogance, and the students are not suitably impressed. Yet, the minimum of five students required to enroll in order for the class to go forward show up, because all have nagging, as-yet unvoiced suspicions that something is wrong with the system and there must be some logical way out of it. To sum up, the narrative of academic success in millennial South Korea is about cracking the code, uncovering the secrets of study, and beating the system, whereas that of pop idol success is about tapping into inherent talent and creativity. While it is certainly true that the successful idol is not the result of true ability, but created through clever marketing around their “look” and personality, there is the general presumption that there is some underlying talent there that can be augmented (through training, or through image manipulation or even plastic surgery to get the “look” right).15 By contrast, academic success has become smoke and mirrors. Academic success and pop idol success as potential futures have been entirely inverted since the high-growth era of the 1980s and 1990s, when Page 180 →academic success was a natural outgrowth of innate ability developed through hard work (or at least was popularly thought of as such). Artistic ability was broadly depicted as residing in the chosen few, but most easily located in the children of the wealthy who could afford dance and music lessons. With the expansion of the private education market, however, gaming the system to climb the ladder of academic success takes considerable resources, whereas “getting scouted” at random is still an imaginable possibility for South Korean pop idol hopefuls who cannot afford to attend pricey “pop dance” academies.16

Earlier I gave the examples of MS’s and IS’s daughters, who are neither academic all-stars nor serious pop idol hopefuls, but instead occupy a kind of “third space” as what is often called prosumers, producing new cultural products in their acts of consumption. I also told the story of PTH’s daughter, who dreams of dancing on the concert stage. What are the dangers, then, for children who perform well academically? MJ spoke with particular anxiety about her eldest son, in the sixth grade of elementary school at the time of our interviews. “What if it turns out that I don’t know my own son?” As her husband spends long weeks and months away in China on business, MJ said that she often felt like a single mother, at least in terms of day-to-day household operations. There is a sizeable gap in academic achievement between MJ’s two sons, ages ten and twelve. Her eldest son excels in all subjects and seems especially suited for the sciences, although he also enjoys speaking English and studying Chinese characters. He very clearly feels himself to be on the academic track, emphasizing that he enjoys the sense of accomplishment that comes with acing a test, but admits that his mother’s expectations make him tired. Many of the times I visited the apartment for tutoring he sighed and complained/bragged that he had been up past midnight studying. MJ knew that her expectations made him tired and often apologized to her son, imploring him to keep studying hard. The structure of the South Korean education system is such that there is little time for rest or regrouping, as even summer and winter breaks are expected to be taken up with school homework and extra work at hagwЕЏn. MJ’s eldest son was about to enter the relatively more intense atmosphere of junior high school. This stress only intensifies as junior high school progresses and leads into preparation for the university entrance exam, but MJ said she tried to tell her son, “Just a little more for now,” creating a psychological space for rest in his mind even as no such break existed in reality. MJ’s second son, in contrast, exhibited developmental delays from an Page 181 →early age, speaking late and having a very difficult time with learning to read and write in Korean, let alone succeed in English classes. His and his brother’s ability were unequal enough that he was relegated to sitting on the sidelines while I tutored his brother, to “just absorb as much as he could.” He was an affectionate child and thoughtful and caring toward others, but he was limited in social interaction at school or hagwЕЏn because of a severe stutter. MJ traveled to her hometown of Kwangju each week to visit a language pathology specialist to work with this son. It was clear that she had invested a great deal of emotional energy and financial resources into fixing the younger brother’s speech problem and helping him find a path that would enable him to be successful in the future (she and her husband talked about sending him to a “master school,” a new type of trade high school based loosely—too loosely, in MJ’s assessment—on public schools in Europe in which students complete apprenticeships to prepare for a trade rather than study for university admission). But now that her eldest was approaching junior high school her anxiety about him had intensified to match or surpass the worry about her youngest son. She felt like she had neglected him in the ongoing search for solutions for his brother, and she felt that there was a greater danger in “not knowing,” on an emotional level, this more academically inclined son. The concern that came up frequently in my discussion with MJ was not whether he could beat out the competition to beat the system, but whether he would have the energy or creativity left at the end of the battle to later “break the system.” It is commonly said by Koreans that the first year of high school is when kids are at their most creative, as by the time they get to the end of high school they are simply memorization machines for the college entrance exam. Many of the women I interviewed had concerns that the onset of “memorization machine syndrome” was beginning to affect even younger students as competition became more intense. If the education system isn’t flexible enough to allow academic mobility for students (such that a poor or middling student, after a certain age, has little chance of becoming a good student), then the pot of gold at the end has also been emptied of value. Whereas for previous generations studying hard was a means to an end, with that end understood to be subject to manipulation by the successful individual, now studying has become “total war” (Cho 1995), limiting its soldiers to still more war even after achieving victory. This is the quintessential neoliberal condition, which Cherniavsky describes evocatively as “a specific resolution to the duplicity of the modern nation-state, constituted in the double-imperative Page 182 →to advance the public good and to secure private property in its myriad and proliferating forms,” but which ultimately chooses profit (2009, 4). Getting into a top university and shedding one’s subpar academic identity, fixed as early as elementary school, is transgressive behavior. But for children like MJ’s son, who have always been good students, the transgression may occur later, when they cannot establish the kind of career deemed acceptable for a top university graduate and

have to make something livable out of second-best. The TV drama God of Study explores what it would mean to engage kids in a study battle that monopolizes only their minds and not their hearts, leaving room (yЗ’yu) at the end for rewarding adult lives. We find parallels in Arai’s discussion of “love” and “heart” in the Japanese educational context. Arai argues that discourses of love/heart “that have (re)emerged so strongly in the recessionary context of Japan are vehicles for subjectification вЂby other means’” (2013, 177). The takeaway message of God of Study is that you can get through the grueling university entrance process without sacrificing your heart. This is a stark departure from the traditional Korean Confucian model of study, which was supposed to engage the whole, morally virtuous scholar. But the God of Study methods are not only a departure from the holistic model of fabled Confucian scholars of yore but also an antithesis to the use-you-up-and-spit-you-out neoliberal ethos. God of Study’s lawyer-cum-teacher advocates a kind of utilitarian humanism. Open your mind to study, but don’t let it consume your heart. The heart’s role is to dream, so that the mind has a reason to study. One’s heart (as the locus of dreams and desires) must be free to roam, but one’s mind and body are a team in the study battle. In an early episode of God of Study an eccentric old “study coach” is called in to play “math pingpong” with the Ch’ŏnha University prep class. This involves serving square roots to students, who must give the correct answer in order to hit the ball back. Numbers flash across the screen video-game style, complete with bloops and bleeps. The coach urges the students not to think but just do, to just “feel with their body.” This kind of academic labor appears quite different when compared to the disciplining required of idols in training depicted on television. Unlike the successful Korean student, the successful Korean idol has not traditionally been expected to be a well-rounded, moral individual. Though the figure of the “idol” is relatively new, traditionally Korean musicians and other kinds of entertainers and performers were not from upper-class yangban backgrounds. Several popular and critically acclaimed Korean Page 183 →films attempt to portray the lives of performers of traditional arts, with varying degrees of realism: the poor family of p’ansori (musical storytelling) performers wanders the Korean countryside searching for opportunities to perform in exchange for food and lodging in Im Kwon-Taek’s SЕЏp’yЕЏnje (1993), and ChosЕЏn dynasty clowns attempt to court the king’s favor in Lee Jun-ik’s Wang Е-i namja(The King and the Clown, 2005). However, during the era of high-speed development, academic study became a target of equalization policies and Western arts education (piano, violin lessons) became the domain of the children of the wealthy, turning the traditional relationship on its head. Now at the turn of the millennium the private education industry’s unfettered growth has inverted the relationship once again (at least in conceptual terms; the spread of “pop hagwЕЏn” to meet social demand for this new field of possibility is quickly putting it out of financial reach for many). As shown in the drama Dream High, those kids on the idol path must train with their bodies and hearts, but their minds are free. When they reach the end of their shelf lives as idols they can embark on other endeavors.17 Well-rounded highprofile pop stars exist, but with the intense training schedule required before an idol debuts as part of a group or as a solo artist, most on this path miss significant amounts of school and later must apply for special consideration for admission from universities. People I talked to complained about young celebrities, from barely C-list nearlyno-names to major stars, for attending university but being too busy with stardom to go to classes, but still somehow graduating. However, the most severe mockery was reserved for the universities themselves, which in South Korea (as in most of East Asia) are notoriously difficult to gain admission to but easy to coast through once matriculated. The mothers of high school and university students I talked to emphasized, though, that kids these days worked very hard in university, drawing a contrast with university students of their own generation, who played and dated through university and cut classes to participate in widespread social demonstrations (temo) against the dictatorship. The difference was that university students in Korea in the twenty-first century don’t study in their majors, but relentlessly add to their “sЕ-pek(specs),”18 always adding value to themselves with extra English classes, various business classes, and job market prep and networking activities. The university idols were gently mocked for not being so bright, and there was sometimes resentment expressed that they were probably admitted into high-ranking schools under special circumstances (including monetary donation to their school), but there was also understanding of their Page 184 →desire to network and gain skills outside of the star industry through university attendance. Idols thus symbolize the new “creative citizen” in South Korea, pouring their hearts into their work, their minds always drifting ahead to the next move, calculating pathways to

future success. What are the social implications of teen idolhood becoming a conventional desire, and academic improvement ever more shrouded in mystery (such that books on “study secrets” become bestsellers)? The danger here is that as young Koreans increasingly opt out of study for study’s sake19 and seek a new up-and-coming area of possibility, often with parental encouragement, the new horizon of possibility also becomes colonized, eventually becoming as rigid as the academic path that was avoided. There are early signs in the entertainment industry of the need to break the system. Young idols have begun publicly questioning the “slave-like” conditions of their contracts with their management companies, and some have formed their own companies or simply become their own managers. Just as the unconventional high school teacher in God of Study questions the prevailing college entrance system, the teachers at Kirin Arts School (in Dream High) stand up to abuses in the corrupt management company contracting with the school. Yet, despite the sinister portrayal of sexual predation on creative youth, standing up to a few wicked adults within a system is still seen as more of a navigable imaginary than the inhuman face of the entrance exam, a matrix of unknowability. Why Be a Success Later When You Can Be a Fan Now? If the heart floats free for diligent university hopefuls per God of Study’s instructions, and the mind projects forward for creative trainees, both acting as placeholders, let us return to the figure of the “fan” for a moment. The fan is most certainly not outside of capital or the dominant neoliberal logics of South Korean society, but in their most fervent practices fans might be said to escape the academic transgressor/creative strategist binary. Returning to the notion of academic striving as temporally “old-fashioned” in a fastmoving society, and pop star aspirations as more in line with a millennial South Korean temporality, I have suggested that these differences in perceived temporality are powerful motivators for making “insecure” paths such as that of entertainer desirable for school-age students and their families trying to game the system. However, whether one suffers through a year or even years (as chaesusaeng) of exam hell or is discovered via YouTube video and becomes a star virtually overnight,Page 185 → the commonality is that there is temporal closure to these pursuits. In the case of the dramas discussed, the students studying in the special Ch’ŏnha University class in God of Study must either resolve their heart/mind split by achieving their stated goal of going to this prestigious university—as three out of five of the students do—or else they must render the split anew by choosing the alternative of creative pursuit instead, propelling their minds ahead as they throw their hearts into art, as the remaining two students do. The students in Dream High all achieve closure by “making it” in the entertainment industry to some degree. This is where “fandom” activities are distinctive: although (as the writer of the advice column reassures mothers) fandom activities will naturally diminish in frequency and intensity as daughters move toward young adulthood, in the fans’ minds there is no end to fan activity. One does not “make it” as a fan, except insofar as affective ties constitute success (a returned letter from an idol or idols’ words of address to their fans at concerts and gatherings, for example). A drama that became a cult hit, Answer Me, 1997 (2012), played with the figure of the fan and its meaning in millennial South Korean society. The show garnered unprecedented ratings for a cable program, and while it was popular across generations, it found its most passionate viewers among Koreans in their early thirties, who would have been in high school in 1997, the year in which the events of the drama take place. While the social upset following the 1997 financial crisis is referenced in passing, the show revolves around high school friends who are largely unaware of broader social forces, spending their days obsessing over stars, developing feelings for one another, and imagining their futures. The two girls in the group are active members of fan groups for boy bands, and their friendship almost comes to an end when they end up in fan clubs for rival groups. The lead character, when asked what she will do with her life in light of her poor grades, only talks of “becoming Tony’s wife” (Tony is a singer in the idol group she supports), much to her father’s dismay. And yet, she is able to secure a spot in university through winning a writing contest—she is persuaded to enter by her teacher, who happens across her over-the-top fan fiction and recognizes greater talent under the surface. Certain scenes in the drama portray the lead character as what has come to be known as a sasaeng fan, a fan who is obsessively concerned with her idol-of-affection’s private life (sasaenghwal) and whose fan activities extend to stalking and other extreme behaviors. After camping outside of “Tony’s” house on several occasions, Page 186

→our lead finally writes a placard declaring her love in her own blood. She is proud of her display of commitment and only realizes later that she has shocked even the most ardent of her fellow fans, and the school hallways buzz with rumors about her crazy fan behavior. As there were frequent media accounts throughout 2012 of even more extreme sasaeng fan behavior in real life, the drama’s portrayal of an otherwise likeable high school girl engaging in disturbing fan activities drew online criticism from some viewers, who worried that the show was glorifying (or at least normalizing) the behavior. However, the heroine’s realization that her own fan behavior is excessive is presented as an important turning point, after which she diminishes her fan activity and finds an outlet through writing. Later episodes of the show, set in the present (2012), playfully engage the idea of the “forever fan,” as several women live productive lives as workers and/or mothers while still going to boy band concerts, buying merchandise, and acting as fan club organizers or moderators of online fan sites. Passion and interest are still there, but the all-or-nothing mentality is gone. As South Korea begins the second decade of the twenty-first century, the difficult decades of the postwar period and industrialization, and more recently the financial crisis at the turn of the millennium, remain as specters. Persistent challenges to entrenched academic hierarchy may bring society closer to the widespread educational egalitarianism that has long been a goal, but education equality advocates are concerned that “gaming the system” and making challenges also requires considerable resources. Moreover, the larger problem of high unemployment rates for university graduates remains untouched. Searching for new vistas to develop creative capital, artistically inclined children and their parents flock to dance academies, but how far can the “Korean Wave” expand to incorporate them? Perhaps the fan, expecting nothing from society but diffuse love, producing only to consume, links minds and hearts in ways that demand further exploration. All across East Asia (as well as the United States), unemployment and underemployment is a growing problem for university graduates, and the competitive nature of the job market means that competition begins earlier, with university entrance preparation (which may begin as early as middle school or even elementary school). The last decade has seen education migration increasing personal contacts across the Asian region: from Korean mothers traveling to Singapore or the Philippines with their children for English-language education, to Chinese students attending Korean universities,Page 187 → or Korean students attending Chinese universities. Fandom plays not a small role in both domestic and transnational contexts. While Western research on fan activities has focused on “fan resistance,” “East Asian scholars propose the concept of вЂintimacy,’ which вЂimpels individuals to act in ways that go beyond the bounds of self to seek greater communion with the object of their adoration’” (Chin 2007, 213). This has connections with Mazarella’s notion of affect, in which affect resonates between a “register of affective, embodied intensity” and a “register of symbolic mediation and discursive elaboration” (2009, 293). Fandom connects these embodied practices and symbols effectively. The three high school dramas discussed in this chapter, alongside my interviewees’ stories about navigating children’s trajectories, highlight the importance not only of the “affective turn” and considering love and intimacy in conceptualizations of fandom and youth; they also bring to the fore the workings of hope, which Miyazaki (2003) argues “lies in the reorientation of knowledge” (149). While the liberatory potential of fandom has perhaps been exaggerated in some kinds of cultural studies scholarship, anthropologists have perhaps not taken seriously enough the complicated possibilities of diverse fan practices in late capitalism. Miyazaki considers the hopes and dreams of his informant, a middle-aged Japanese securities trader, who simultaneously cynically and enthusiastically participates in global capitalism. He is always fully committed, even as he is always looking ahead: “his commitment to work in the present was intimately tied to his hope for an exit from that work in the future” (2003, 162). Although fans have been criticized for living in fantasy and not realistically planning for the future—in South Korea and elsewhere—the portrayal of the teenage fan in Answer Me, 1997 is that of a girl who lives in the present but who knows and hopes that she will live differently in the future, even if the path is not yet clear. There is no end point to fandom, but there is a reorientation of knowledge. Wu and Wang (2008) examine ku (crying) in the context of a televised talent search program in China, finding that government discourse works at “paralyzing emotions and ignoring memories,” but “the commodified ku spontaneously situates the voice beyond the political canon in seeking a compromise between the fundamental pleasure of individualism and the all-powerful market in a post-socialist society” (427). It is this compromise between individual, market, and nation, and practices of hope and love that connect them, that deserve attention in

the South Korean context as well. Page 188 →

Notes 1. The Korea Foundation, the major funder of Korea Studies projects overseas, has explicitly stated their goal of using the “soft power” of popular cultural products to promote a positive image abroad, particularly in countries perceived to have populations less likely to be interpellated by American cultural products (developing countries), and thus more receptive to South Korean products filling a gap in slick production values and cosmopolitan consumption. See http://view.koreaherald.com/kh/view.php? ud=20120510001142&cpv=0 2. South Korea’s early adoption of broadband high-speed Internet has meant a broad and deep online culture with its own peculiarities. Constant connectivity of youth has implications for fan activity (as fans can be continually in contact with one another and an idol or their agency), as well as the intensive Internet gaming for which South Korea is known. See a recent manuscript published on South Korean online culture: South Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. 3. “Atopy” (atop’i) might be more naturally translated as “eczema” or “dermatitis” in English and receives a similar amount of attention in Korean parenting magazines as food allergies do in North American magazines in the 2000s and 2010s. Very few Koreans I talked to said they knew anyone with food allergies, but they were concerned about this skin condition among children and youth. Many speculated that it had to do with water and air pollution, and I saw advertisements for camps in the countryside for children with severe atopy. The community center I attended offered regular one-time classes for making homemade “atopy-alleviating” soap. One friend told me she felt so bad for babies with horribly itching skin that she feared having children herself. 4. In recent years (late 2000s onward), the majority of Korean pop hits are dance music, a sea change from previous generations’ preference for slow, sad ballads. A great attraction of dance music is that each song has an accompanying dance. During my work as a volunteer at the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2010, the other volunteers (all university students in their early to mid-twenties) spent a good portion of their downtime watching popular groups dancing online, and after practicing these dances in the privacy of their own homes, would often perform a song and its dance at karaoke (noraebang). Simply singing the song and not performing the accompanying dance was seen as inexcusably lazy, and rather uninteresting, as the song and dance are so tightly linked. 5. See Moon Okpyo’s chapter in Kendall 2011. 6. She’s Mom magazine (February 2, 2011), “Kids Who Fall in Love with Stars.” 7. Paths to becoming an idol include success following training in an entertainment company and/or the more twenty-first-century route of fame via Internet video (the so-called З’lguljjang, or “best face” video clip). 8. While both the education industry (and with the dramatic rise of the private afterschool education sector in the last decade, it really is an “industry”) and pop culture industry are viewed as corrupt, a series of forged PhD degrees and plagiarized dissertations in the late 2000s set off a debate in Korean society about the nature of academia at all levels. Idol company managers and pop industry executives have lost public trust after a series of sexual assault scandals and other inhumane treatment Page 189 →reported in the media, but idols themselves are not expected to have impressive academic credentials, though they typically still go to university (and are generally allowed to graduate without having attended many, if any, classes). Academically inclined idols are reported about as atypical in the press, and being known as a “smart” idol may do more harm than good (as seen in the case of the artist known as “Tablo,” who was accused of faking a Stanford degree, which ultimately turned into a witch hunt involving his entire family). 9. For an English media report see http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Showbiz/Story /A1Story20100304–202396.html 10. A prerequisite of this kind of love is the possibility of romantic love not necessarily leading to marriage,

and affective worlds in which youth feel supported by family and peers to “practice” love through emotional imagining. Debates over free love emerged alongside discussion of the role of women in the family and in the modern nation during the Japanese colonial period (1910–45). While it is rare for young people to get married through arranged marriage (chungmae kyЕЏrhon) anymore, and “love marriages” (yЕЏnae kyЕЏrhon) are the norm, several of my interviewees in their forties term their marriages “half arranged, half love” (chungmae ban yЕЏnae ban), meaning that they were introduced via a professional matchmaker or family go-between, but subsequently fell in love while dating or early in their married life. Kwon (2005) traces the usage of the modern word-concept of “love” (yЕЏnae) in the first decade of the colonial period in Korea, finding that youth beginning in the 1910s “had no place in the family or state. They had no place in the family because they, being students, had not yet created their own familiesВ .В .В . nor could they secure a stable existence in the country under the Japanese occupation” (201). Thus freed from the family, at least temporarily, through study in the metropole (for the elites) or labor for the Japanese empire, youth became individuals, which facilitated peer group formation and the practice of yЕЏnae. 11. Love for a teacher is usually, but not always, depicted in popular culture as between a female student and male teacher. The sexual purity of adolescent boys is neither protected nor assumed, and a series of incidents were reported in 2011 involving high school male students sexually harassing or even assaulting their female teachers. Student-teacher relationships are also depicted as heterosexual, though the oft-noted homosociality of Korean social life allows for depiction of male-male platonic love. 12. IS shook her head critically while describing a section in her daughter’s middle school social studies textbook, in which South Korea was heralded as a “delivery culture” (paedal munhwa) in the same paragraph as being defined once again as danil minjok sahoe (single-race society). IS was equally incredulous at the insistence on pure blood lines in this textbook (when so many have been revised to include damunhwa kajЕЏng following the migrant bride phenomenon of the last ten years) and the glib way “delivery culture” and “single race” were made equivalent in importance in a social studies unit. 13. South Korea’s idol agency system is most similar to Japan’s jimusho (literally “office,” but meaning idol training agencies), which operate as vast machines processing large numbers of potential idols as their raw material. Both Japanese and Page 190 →South Korean talent agencies continue to take a large percentage of an idol’s earnings even after they have become a household name, as contracts are as long as ten or fifteen years, and this is seen as a debt owed by the idol for the many years of training provided. Scholars of the Japanese idol industry (Galbraith and Karlin 2012) have found that a quick calculation of the stipend an idol-in-training receives (not to mention costs of room and board), when multiplied by the great number of youth being “processed” at any given time, hardly create a profit when compared with the revenue generated by the few idols who do make it big. In the South Korean case, however, the trainees are not provided with nearly as generous a monthly stipend—indeed, there is precedent for small stipends in the amount paid to men performing their military service, who depending on rank receive the US dollar equivalent of between $70 and $90 a month, well below the monthly minimum wage—and there have been exposГ©s of the poor quality of lodgings for trainees, and even for those who have already become successful idols (for example, a documentary exposing the exhausting lives of girl group Girls’ Generation led to a public outcry over the exploitative nature of the industry). 14. The filmic trope of cynical (or otherwise broken-by-society) teacher helping students who are Others vis-Г -vis accepted categories of social belonging, and helping themselves to finally be well-adjusted, happy adults in the process, is ubiquitous in other cultural contexts as well. In the United States it is often the figure of benevolent but personally unfulfilled white teachers (formally or informally) taking on the task of getting through to tough black (or other nonwhite) students and providing opportunities for them. Since South Korea does not have the same history of racial heterogeneity—though it must be noted that recently there are a few films about benevolent Koreans helping “ethic others” such as migrant brides from Southeast Asia and manual laborers from South Asia—the students made into Others come from nonnormative families. Four of the students in these two youth dramas come from economically disadvantaged families (three urban and one rural) made up of only a single mother, grandmother, or deadbeat single father. Two of the students are fat, a symptom of parental negligence. And two male students come from families of the opposite extreme, one with a cold and opportunistic big-business

chaebol father, the other with a cold and opportunistic politician father. 15. Both Galbraith and Karlin (2012) and Lukacs (2010) have written about the unique features of the pop idol universe in Japan, in which the tarento (talent) are ironically famous for not being talented, but rather being endlessly malleable, commodifiable, and above all, easily identified with by the average consumer (who is also generally not a talented singer, dancer, or actor). These Japanese tarento are truly idols rather than pop stars, as they are icons before they are performers. Galbraith and Karlin note (in their introduction to a volume on Japanese celebrity) the intertexuality of Japan tarento/idols: “Due to their sustained exposure, across genres and platforms of performance, they cannot help but appear as themselves in a drama or other fictional context; the perception is that they are not playing characters so much as playing themselves. As a result, the real world and the onscreen world cease to be different, and instead a deeply intertextual form of televisual pleasure is created between the performer and audience” (11). Lukacs comments that “the growing number of actors Page 191 →without acting talent dates back to the rupture between the film and the television industries in Japan. Indeed, it was at this point that smart marketing and overexposure to viewers were institutionalized as practices that could compensate for lack of talent” (45). In South Korea, there is no such rupture between film and television, with actors freely moving between the two mediums. Though some dismiss the recent slew of “idol actors” appearing in dramas, idols have successfully appeared in serious films as well. This indicates that the South Korean entertainment landscape is beginning to resemble Hong Kong’s (with many top stars filling the dual roles of actor and pop singer) more than Japan’s landscape of self-referentiality. There is also no cult of “no talent idols” in South Korea—an idol must be good at something, even if they can’t pull of singing and dancing equally well. 16. Dreams of getting scouted or capturing national attention through televised audition have only become more tangible since a proliferation of shows such as Korea’s Got Talent. While the most conventionally attractive, talented but not terribly interesting singers tend to win these contests, being more talented but quirkier will often gain contestants a rank of second, third, or fourth place, which is often the ticket to getting a major record deal. In 2011, a young homeless man in his early twenties named SungBong Choi won second place on Korea’s Got Talent singing opera arias. This singer had grown up on the street after being abandoned at age three, and although he attended an arts high school, he wasn’t able to pay the fees to actually take voice lessons. Many reported being inspired by Choi’s teaching himself to sing through searching for and imitating clips of famous opera singers online. 17. A common trajectory for idols is to debut as a member of a boy or girl group, eventually splitting off to forge a solo career when the group has lost its novelty. As elsewhere, pop stardom is about marketable assets, and youth is a particularly valuable asset. However, idol groups that persist longer than the norm are said to be able to do so because of considerable talent. (Korea’s longest-existing idol group, Shinhwa, formed in 1998. Though the members are all in their thirties now, and have received sporadic criticism for being too old for the business, they continuously and publicly improve their dancing, and write many of their own songs.) 18. “Specs” can be defined as all of those skills and attributes that should be accumulated to list on a resume to submit to a potential workplace or matchmaking agency. 19. Of course, such a pure conceptualization of “study for study’s sake” has most likely never existed, as education is always linked with class distinction if not actual social mobility; Seth has noted the dissonance manifested in “concern for uniformity of standards and opportunity while being preoccupied with academic ranking” (2012, 27). The constant call for universal educational opportunity signals both an understanding of education as a driving force in social mobility and recognition of education as a fundamental human right, in which study is a key element in the pursuit of happiness. Preoccupation with academic ranking, on the other hand, indicates widespread awareness that the system is not equal, that studying doesn’t necessarily produce happiness, and that happiness is not necessarily linked with security.

Page 192 →Works Cited Abelmann, Nancy, Jung-Ah Choi, and So Jin Park, eds. 2012. No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean

Education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Arai, Andrea. 2013. “Notes to the Heart: New Lessons in National Sentiment and Sacrifice from Recessionary Japan.” In Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation and the New Economy in Uncertain Times, edited by Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai, and Hai Ren. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cherniavsky, Eva. 2009. “Neocitizenship and Critique.” Social Text 27 (2): 1–23. Chin, Bertha. 2007. “Beyond Kung-Fu and Violence: Locating East Asian Cinema Fandom.” In Fandom: Identity and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Alan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press. Cho, Haejoang. 1995. “Children in the Examination War in South Korea.” In Children and the Politics of Culture, edited by Sharon Stephens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Galbraith, Patrick W., and Jason G. Karlin, eds. 2012. Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ho, Swee Lin. 2012. “Fuel for South Korea’s вЂGlobal Dreams Factory’: The Desires of Parents Whose Children Dream of Becoming K-Pop Stars.” Korea Observer 43 (3), Autumn. Kwon, Boduerae. 2005. “The Paradoxical Structure of Modern вЂLove’ in Korea: Yeonae and Its Possibilities.” Korea Journal (Autumn): 186–208. Lukacs, Gabriella. 2010. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. Mazarella, William. 2009. “Affect: What is it Good For?” In Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube. New Dehli and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2003. “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (2): 147–72. Moon, Okpyo. 2001. “Guests of lineage houses: Tourist commoditization of Confucian cultural heritage in Korea.” In Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance, edited by Laurel Kendall. Honolulu: University of HawaiвЂi Press. Park, Kyeyoung. 1997. The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Park, So Jin. 2006. “The Retreat from Formal Schooling: “Educational Manager” Mothers in the Private After-School Market of South Korea.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Illinois, Anthropology Department. Park, So Jin. 2012. “Mothers’ Anxious Management of the Private After-School Education Market.” In No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean Education, edited by Nancy Abelmann, Jung-Ah Choi, and Sojin Park. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Page 193 →Seth, Michael. 2012. “South Korea’s Educational Exceptionalism.” In No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean Education, edited by Nancy Abelmann, Jung-Ah Choi, and So Jin Park. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Song, Jesook. 2007. “вЂVenture companies,’ вЂflexible labor,’ and the вЂnew intellectual’: The neoliberal construction of underemployed youth in South Korea.” Journal of Youth Studies 10 (3): 331–51.

Song, Jesook. 2009a. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. Durham: Duke University Press. Song, Jesook. 2009b. “Between Flexible Life and Flexible Labor: The Inadvertent Convergence of Socialism and Neoliberalism in South Korea.” Critique of Anthropology 29 (2): 139–59. Wu, Weihua, and Xiying Wang. 2008. “Cultural Performance and the Ethnography of Ku in China.” positions 16 (2): 410–33.

Page 194 → Page 195 →

8 Stories of Cruel Youth The South Korean Anti-Teenager Movie Peter Y. Paik It is difficult to speak of contemporary South Korean society without making reference to the country’s rapid ascent from being one of the poorest countries in the world to joining the ranks of the globe’s advanced industrial economies. After enduring four decades of brutal colonial rule by Japan, followed by a shattering civil war that laid waste to almost the entire peninsula and took the lives of over 10 percent of the population, the emergence of South Korea as prosperous, technologically advanced capitalist democracy has been hailed as one of the most spectacular economic and political turnarounds in modern history. By any measure, the ascent of South Korean society to economic prosperity from the poverty and desperation of the postwar years has been stunning. During the 1950s and 1960s, the South Korean economy was written off by many in the West as doomed to hopeless poverty while its political system was regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. But by the 1970s, the authoritarian regime of Park Chung Hee (Pak ChЕЏng-hЕ-i), brutal though it was in its repression of student protesters and labor activists, nevertheless established the foundations for an export-oriented economy that has enabled many ordinary citizens to attain middle-class prosperity. The political transformations have been no less dramatic, as massive demonstrations forced the military regime to hold free elections in 1987, making way for the eventual return of a fully civilian administration in 1992. As an affluent consumer society and a stable democracy marked by peaceful transfers of power, South KoreaPage 196 → has been hailed in the present era for its success in navigating the process of modernization, which in Europe and the United States took roughly two centuries, during a span of less than half a century. But newfound wealth and hard-won liberties generate dilemmas and spark crises of their own. The experience of modernization not only disrupts traditional ways of life but also undermines long-held values and beliefs. While human beings gain unprecedented freedom to lead their lives without interference from the bonds of religion and convention, the vacuum left by the waning of premodern values and traditions often comes to be filled by materialistic values and instrumentalist attitudes. Moreover, economic freedom fosters social indifference, as the failure to achieve or maintain a middle-class status becomes ascribed wholly to the flaws and mistakes of the individual, rather than to the impersonal and uncontrollable forces of the global market. Prosperity weakens social bonds and communal attachments, as social cohesion is no longer taken for granted as an unquestioned and necessary good as it was in the less affluent past. As sociologist Daniel Bell points out, the phenomenon of mass consumption, whereby objects and experiences that were formerly restricted to the wealthy become widely available to the middle and lower classes, brings about the disintegration of social norms and the loss of social cohesion (Bell 1978, 65). In a society centered no longer on the fulfillment of needs, which are limited and concrete, but on the satisfaction of wants, which are to the contrary unlimited, there takes place a “loss of will and fortitude,” as individuals “become competitive with one another for luxuries, and lose the ability to share and sacrifice” (Bell 1978, 83). The emancipation of the appetites not only worsens competition for wealth and status in bourgeois society but also elevates the pursuit of individual self-realization as a sacrosanct value. The search for “self-realization and self-fulfillment” constitutes for Bell the “axial principle” of modern culture, in which “nothing is forbidden” and “all is to be explored” as the individual sets about expressing and reinventing his or her “self.” Religion, tradition, morality, and any other communal purpose thus become subordinated to the will and appetites of the individual, who reserves for himself or herself the right to overrule the demands of any external authority. For Philip Rieff, such a cultural transformation, in which any kind of belief or commitment is made subordinate to the prerogative of the individual, constitutes an unprecedented development in history. For it indicates a fundamental reversal in the way in which individuals relate to their commitments and beliefs. Faith, tradition, and

morality become deprived Page 197 →of the power to command the individual. It is instead the individual who takes command over every aspect of communal life, feeling himself at liberty to adopt or abandon any belief or doctrine in accordance with the shifting of his or her moods and appetites. Every form of communal life becomes weakened and diluted into matters of merely personal choice. Men and women are no longer expected to embrace unconditional commitments, including the “cruel and heroic deceptions” that brought glory and misery to those who sacrificed themselves, but rather to learn how to use “all commitments,” which “amounts to loyalty toward none” (Rieff 2006, 17, 16). That is to say, all “faiths” and “god terms” become reduced to instruments for “therapeutic use,” whereby the value of any knowledge or aspect of the civilizational heritage is measured according to how well it contributes to an individual’s sense of well-being (Rieff 2006, 20). Rieff does not hesitate to call this shift a “cultural revolution,” as it signals the emergence of a culture unlike any other that has existed in human history. For the “therapeutic” turn, which elevates psychological comfort into the highest social goal, enables modern democratic capitalist society to take a step earlier societies would have considered unthinkable: to dispense with the moral systems based on renunciatory demands and communal purposes that have governed practically every previous human civilization. In Rieff’s view, the idea of the therapeutic comprises the truly revolutionary force within modernity. Writing in the mid-1960s, Rieff contends that it is a “terrible error” to regard the liberal democratic West as “conservative,” for in fact it is communism that is “culturally conservative,” as it strives to remain within the “classical tradition of moral demand systems” (Rieff 2006, 15). It is the West, by contrast, that brings about radical change, as it establishes a society in which “all morality, be it ascetic or hedonistic, loses its force” (Rieff 2006, 17). Against such a revolution, which unfolds at the level of culture and psychology, communism, or any communal belief system, can mount no effective countermeasure. As Singaporean sociologist and diplomat Kishore Mahbubani points out, the United States has undertaken a vast and far-reaching social experiment in which it has systematically dismantled the moral taboos and social institutions that once served to restrain individual freedom. The outcome has been nothing less than “massive social decay”: a 560 percent increase in violent crime, a 419 percent rise in out-of-wedlock births, and a 300 percent rise in divorces and single-parent households, over the period from 1960 to 1992 (Mahbubani 1998, 14).1 “Many a society shudders at the prospects of this happening on its shores,” Mahbubani remarks, not least because the vast majorityPage 198 → of non-Western countries lack the wealth to keep the fallout of unrestrained personal freedom within manageable limits.2 Indeed, Rieff’s account of the therapeutic provides an indispensable vantage point from which to grasp the deep ambivalence of non-Western peoples to the West—they look upon its immense wealth, technological innovations, and unparalleled personal freedoms with envy, but they are at the same time filled with dread at the alarming levels of social disintegration in the wealthiest, most individualistic, and most technologically advanced countries in the world. Traditional, non-Western societies may be in possession of a more vital spiritual and cultural heritage than their industrialized and affluent counterparts, but will they not also wither before the temptations of radical individualism as affluence becomes more of a fact of daily life? How long can religion, tradition, or any other form of cultural memory hold out against the lure of leading an “experimental life” or keep at bay the social pathologies that are the unavoidable consequence of extending the privileges of self-invention to all individuals (Rieff 2006, 20)? Can a society maintain moral and social discipline, in the absence of the external pressures that make them an unquestioned necessity? South Korean culture offers an intriguing terrain for examining such questions. In having transformed within a single lifetime from one of the poorest countries in the world into a thriving high-tech consumer society, South Korea has been defined by what sociologist Chang Kyung-Sup calls the “unique civilizational condition” of “compressed modernity.” The country has experienced “full-scale capitalist industrialization, economic growth, urbanization, proletarianization, and democratization” within a remarkably brief span of time while “manifesting distinctly traditional and/or indigenous characteristics in many aspects of personal, social, and political life” (Chang 2010a, 447). The “compressed” nature of South Korean modernity has given rise to conflicts that in Chang’s view cannot be accounted for according to the divide between tradition and modernity. Rather, social antagonism in contemporary South Korea tends to arise from the very “coexistence of traditional, modern, and even postmodern cultures” that members of different generations have adopted or assimilated to varying and uneven

degrees (Chang 2010b, 15). A glance at contemporary South Korean film and television bears out the unsettled, uneven, and, for many outside observers, paradoxical character of South Korean modernity. South Korean television dramas have achieved a wide viewership across Asia and other parts of the developing Page 199 →world for portraying modern ways of life in a manner that upholds traditional morality and honors the bonds of family (Kim 2011, 53). For example, the wildly popular Tae Chang KЕ-m(The Great Jang Geum, 2003), in which the heroine overcomes bitter injustices and the hostility of entrenched privilege on the way to achieving a position of authority at the court, teaches the reassuring lesson that the acceptance of modern values, like equality between the sexes or social advancement based on merit, need not result in the destruction of the bonds of family and the loss of one’s cultural identity and moral restraints. Korean dramas emphasize romance over sexual experimentation and feature earnest and morally principled protagonists who must often contend with wealthier and less scrupulous rivals. They thus hold strong appeal for peoples across the globe who seek to build up a modern market economy but who are at the same time anxious about the corrosive effects of modern values on religious beliefs, traditional values, and cultural identity.3 The new South Korean cinema, on the other hand, has become known in the West for its graphic depictions of sexuality and violence. Although the reputation of South Korean cinema for its cruelty and brutality is exaggerated, one often finds in recent South Korean films a more bleak and pessimistic vision of South Korean modernity than in the television dramas. Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk) and Kim Ki-duk (Kim KidЕЏk) have become well known for their exploration of taboo and transgressive themes in their films as well as their command of film style. Other directors such as Hong Sang-soo (Hong Sang-su) and Im Sang-soo (Im Sangsu) have turned out films that are as jaundiced and even as nihilistic in their view of middle-class society as any of the work of their French or American counterparts. The dyspeptic view of sexual relationships or of the habits of the wealthy in their films would be familiar to Western audiences. But while critiques of middle-class hypocrisy and oppressive social conventions have long been staple in world cinema, in which transgression of social norms serves as the vehicle of critique, the coexistence of modernity with tradition, and even the renewal of traditional values by modern developments, such as the rapid spread of Christianity, has also given rise to films that take on perspectives that are strange and unexpected from the standpoint of the West. One of the most notable examples of such a perspective can be found in three films about the generational divide that explicitly favor the viewpoints of the older generation over the young. The rift between young and old is the subject of three films by directors with strikingly disparate styles and thematic preoccupations. SamariaPage 200 → (2004) is the tenth feature film directed by Kim Ki-duk, who has developed the reputation as the most scandalous of the directors of the new South Korean cinema. P’aju (2009) was directed and written by Park Chan-ok (Pak Ch’an-ok), one of South Korea’s most prominent female directors, whose debut film was about the frustrated romantic life of a young intellectual. Poetry (2010) is the fifth feature directed by Lee Chang-dong (Yi Ch’ang-dong), whose humanistic films have been acclaimed for taking on weighty social and political themes. All three films focus on the destructive behavior and antisocial actions of the young. In Samaria, two girls start a prostitution business to finance a trip to Europe. In P’aju, a teenager’s inability to deal with her emotional conflicts and her fundamental obliviousness to the political struggles around her lands her innocent brother-in-law in prison, which has the further repercussion of quashing a protest campaign against urban gentrification. Finally, in Poetry, a boy and his friends drive a female classmate to suicide by blackmailing her for sex. But what makes these films noteworthy is the fact that all three take the side of the adults who become anguished at the behavior of the teenagers they look after and emphasize the limited and even amoral nature of the perspective of youth. In Samaria, P’aju, and Poetry, the members of the older generation are portrayed as more moral, more compassionate, and even more innocent than their teen counterparts. These depictions provide a remarkable contrast to the social types made familiar by Hollywood films, which, in having long commodified youth rebellion, routinely portray the antisocial behavior of young people as being wholly justified in light of the hypocrisy, vindictiveness, and cluelessness of their parents, teachers, ministers, and other authority figures. Indeed, these three films give voice to the very social types that a fully therapeutic culture readily dismisses by means of ridicule and mockery. Of these “anti-youth” films, it is Poetry that contains the most cursory and least sympathetic portrayal of a

callous and thoughtless young person. The film concerns an elderly, working-class woman who is raising her grandson in place of his mother, who lives in another city. The grandmother is horrified to learn that her grandson, along with a group of his friends, has been forcing a female classmate to have sex with them. The girl, who initially consented, commits suicide when the boys threaten to embarrass her when she expresses her desire to stop. The film, which focuses on the grandmother’s sorrow and guilt over the girl’s death, portrays the grandson as a kind of impenetrable and unregenerate entity who is incapable of feeling compassion or guilt. The grandmother’s distressed appealsPage 201 → to the teen to acknowledge the grievous wrong he has committed with his friends leave him utterly confused and befuddled. A wholly physical creature with a voracious appetite for food, the grandson’s sole worry is that he will be sent to juvenile detention. By the time the boy is picked up by the police, he has undergone no change whatsoever—all moral and spiritual growth in the film takes place in his grandmother, who tries to do justice to the memory of the dead girl while performing what she supposes is her duty to her kin. But the realism of Poetry proves to be moral as well as psychological, in that it depicts the victory of an impartial conception of justice over an amoral commitment to the bonds of family that excuses crime and represses concern for victims so long as one may protect the well-being of one’s own offspring. P’aju features a more complicated and layered portrayal of a young person who causes harm to the adult who loves her. The film is a complex and understated drama about an antigovernment activist named Chung-sik who, fleeing the authorities, hides out in the city near the border with North Korea and takes a job teaching at a church school. He finds himself attracted to one of his students, a precocious teenager named Е¬n-mo, but ends up marrying her older sister, Е¬n-su, who makes clear her desire for him. Chung-sik and Е¬n-su’s marriage proves to be troubled, but after a night during which they reconcile with each other, Е¬n-mo becomes determined to run away from the home the three of them have made. While cutting out the face of her brother-in-law from their wedding portrait, the teenager is surprised by the sudden entrance of her sister into her bedroom. Trying to conceal what she had been doing from her older sister, Е¬n-mo accidentally cuts a gas pipe while hiding a pair of scissors. The leaking gas causes an explosion that takes the life of Е¬n-su. Realizing that Е¬n-mo was responsible for the accident, Chung-sik lies to her about how her sister died in order to save her from the trauma of realizing that she has caused her sister’s death. The widower and sister-in-law grow close to each other, maintaining a platonic and familial relationship, until a friend from Chung-sik’s past appears and gets him involved in various political activities. Е¬n-mo, feeling threatened by the presence of Chung-sik’s old flame, uses the money saved for her college tuition to take a trip to India. The beginning of the film shows her returning to the border city near the demilitarized zone to find that Chung-sik has become the leader of a group of residents struggling against corrupt developers and their thuggish henchmen. Е¬n-mo becomes drawn into the struggle when one of the gangsters offers her a deal to preserve the house bequeathed to her by her Page 202 →deceased parents in exchange for convincing Chung-sik to give up his activism. Е¬n-mo eventually has the innocent Chung-sik arrested for the murder of her sister, but this turn of events comes about not only from Е¬n-mo’s suspicions about Chung-sik’s evasiveness but also from her lack of political consciousness. She has fallen in love with Chung-sik, who expresses his feelings for her at the end of the film, but she is horrified by the thought that her dream has come true by means of her sister’s death. Е¬n-mo moreover misreads the reticence of Chung-sik, mistaking his penitence for causing accidental harm to a child for evasiveness and mendacity. But the film also underscores the fact that Е¬n-mo comes from a generation for whom thinking politically does not come naturally. It is not fully real to her that the imprisonment of Chung-sik will derail the antigentrification campaign he leads. The final scene memorably shows Е¬n-mo being hailed and thanked by the gangsters as tears, perhaps unknowing, fill the eyes of the troubled beauty. Although there is no moral reckoning for the adolescent boy in Poetry, and it only dawns on the young adult in P’aju at the end that the consequences of her choice may leave lasting wounds, the method of atonement undertaken by the teenaged girl in Samaria on the other hand triggers a series of violent confrontations that culminates in suicide, murder, and the eventual imprisonment of the teen’s father. Divided into three parts, the beginning of the film, titled “Vasumitra,” focuses on two teenaged girls who turn to prostitution to fund a trip to Europe. The more traditional and repressed YЕЏ-jin arranges the appointments, handles the accounts, and keeps an eye out for the police, while the easygoing and uninhibited Chae-yЕЏng sleeps with the clients, grown

men who are looking to gratify themselves with an underaged partner. Chae-yЕЏng eventually gets caught in a police raid and makes a rash attempt to escape by jumping from an upper-story window. Sustaining fatal injuries, she asks YЕЏ-jin to bring her favorite client to her bedside. The client, however, is deaf to YЕЏ-jin’s desperate pleas and only agrees to accompany her to the hospital after she has slept with him. They arrive to find that Chae-yЕЏng has already passed away. YЕЏ-jin initially responds to her feeling of guilt at the death of her friend and the loss of her virginity by trying to burn the money she and Chae-yЕЏng had made, but reconsiders and takes a path of atonement that is as unorthodox as the decision to go into prostitution in the first place. Pretending to be Chae-yЕЏng, YЕЏ-jin calls her former clients to set up assignations and sleeps with them. Afterwards, she reveals that Chae-yЕЏng is dead and returns their money. Page 203 →YЕЏ-jin undergoes a drastic change in her attitudes and behavior in the middle part of the film, which is titled “Samaria.” In the previous section of the film, YЕЏ-jin comes across as deeply conflicted about helping her friend earn money as an underaged prostitute. She experiences pangs of distress not over the illegal nature of their activities but over the possibility that Chae-yЕЏng actually enjoys sleeping with her clients. YЕЏjin grows upset when Chae-yЕЏng mentions that she gets pleasure from having sex or is otherwise pleased by the company of her johns, who are for YЕЏ-jin all unregenerate scum. Indeed, her attitude toward the men who frequent prostitutes like her friend is aggressively censorious: she insults one of Chae-yЕЏng’s clients, ordering him to go away when Chae-yЕЏng tries to introduce him to her, and chews out another man who, spying her in front of a love hotel, mistakes her for a prostitute. But while there are undercurrents of lesbian desire between the two girls, as YЕЏ-jin says that it angers her to think that “just any man” could touch a body as beautiful as that of Chae-yЕЏng, it is the strangeness of sex, especially sex with strangers, that is galling to YЕЏjin. She asks Chae-yЕЏng, in disbelief at the latter’s friendly regard for her clients, how it is possible to develop “deep emotion” for these disgusting men in such a short span of time. When YЕЏ-jin begins to weep at her explanation that the amount of time is irrelevant to the connection she feels with her clients, ChaeyЕЏng hastily apologizes and promises to stop liking them. In what must strike Western audiences as an unexpected twist, it is the more inhibited and repressed girl who takes the lead in the friendship, while the more sexually experienced girl is the one who always backs down and apologizes for “doing something wrong” to hurt her friend. But YЕЏ-jin adopts the easygoing nature of her friend when she begins to have sex with these same men out of penitence for the latter’s death. YЕЏ-jin is moved to take up this carnal form of repentance by the story of the Indian courtesan Vasumitra, which Chae-yЕЏng had recounted to her at the beginning of the film. According to the legend, the men who had slept with Vasumitra were said to have achieved a spiritual awakening and become pious Buddhists. The film in its second chapter, titled “Samaria,” becomes a kind of mystical fantasy in which the teenaged girl brings spiritual enlightenment to a group of johns by engaging in sexual intercourse with them. One middle-aged client of Chae-yЕЏng, startled to learn of the death of the underaged prostitute and stunned by the money her friend pays back to him, is suddenly filled with thoughts of his family and calls his school-age daughter to take her out to dinner. Another older Page 204 →man thanks YЕЏ-jin profusely for her generosity, pledging to “pray” for her for the rest of his life and stating his determination to live with greater sympathy for others. The transformative power of the “very happy sex” and “deep maternal love” that Chae-yЕЏng attributed to the legendary courtesan is exercised by YЕЏ-jin who, as Sheng-mei Ma argues, keeps her friend “alive” by carrying out a series of “Tantric miracles” (Ma 2006, 41). The antinomian mystical practice that confers spiritual liberation to her lovers hits up against a determined obstacle, however, when YЕЏ-jin’s father, a police detective, finds out about her promiscuous sexual activity. Called in to a love hotel to investigate the murder of a woman, in all likelihood a prostitute, the detective, to his shock and horror, catches sight of his daughter and a lover sitting in bed together in another hotel room. YЕЏ-jin’s father, a devout Catholic named YЕЏng-gi, is overcome by a murderous fury. He tails YЕЏ-jin’s erstwhile lover, a disgruntled man in his twenties, and confronts him on the street, slapping him repeatedly and threatening to take his life before letting him go. YЕЏng-gi proceeds to hound the men who have arranged to meet his daughter in a series of encounters marked by escalating violence. One middle-aged client he warns away from his appointment by forcing him to have a drink

with him and then threatening him with a broken bottle. YЕЏng-gi then prevents another older man from having sex with YЕЏ-jin in his car by pelting the windows of the sedan with rocks. He then follows the man, who appears to be successful in business, to his high-rise apartment. Panicked at being followed and possibly being exposed, the man makes a remorseful apology to his grim-faced pursuer. What comes next is a painful confrontation, in which an enraged father enters the home of the penitent father to disgrace him in front of his wife, mother, and children. The camera itself shakes when it frames YЕЏng-gi in a close-up, as though his uncontainable rage threatens to destabilize the visual image itself. As the man’s family looks on in shock and disbelief, the vengeful YЕЏng-gi slaps him repeatedly, while the john, bowing his head, makes no move to defend himself: “Filthy bastard, you sleep with a girl younger than your daughter. Dogs don’t even do that. Bastards like you make this world crazy.” Even as the man’s family unites against the hostile intruder, their anger at the outsider cannot quell their growing sense of unease that their patriarch has done something terribly wrong. The sequence ends with the man looking down from the balcony of his high-rise apartment at YЕЏng-gi driving away. As the vehicle moves offscreen, there is the sudden sound of the man’s body hitting the pavement, followed an instant later by his watch Page 205 →bouncing into the middle of the film frame and then by rivulets of blood pooling on the pavement. Although Kim Ki-duk is regarded as the most outrageously provocative of the filmmakers of the new South Korean cinema, as his earlier films are replete with scenes of sexual violation and mutilation taking place in seedy milieus pervaded by prostitutes, pimps, and petty criminals, Samaria is remarkable for its sympathetic and complex portrayal of a gentle and nurturing middle-class father who becomes overwhelmed by anguish and torment at the promiscuous behavior of his adolescent daughter. YЕЏng-gi, a widower still grieving the death of his wife, is shown carrying out the household chores typically performed by the mother, such as preparing meals and waking up YЕЏ-jin in the morning, with solicitude and tenderness. Driving her to school, he recounts miraculous occurrences with a sense of reverent wonder, such as the report of green shoots sprouting from a weathered wooden cross outside a church in Avignon. In other words, he is not at all the sort of overbearing, hottempered, and hypocritical patriarch who would supply his child with ample justification to rebel against him. It is thus all the more unsettling to see YЕЏng-gi’s face contorted with rage when he intimidates a hapless middle-aged man on his way to an assignation with YЕЏ-jin or when he mercilessly berates the businessman in the presence of his family. Indeed, the sight of his rage is so shocking that it is easy for the audience to forget the fact that the man whom he drives to suicide never slept with YЕЏ-jin in the first place. The sequence in which YЕЏng-gi humiliates the businessman before his family is perhaps even more disturbing than the scenes of mutilation that have made Kim Ki-duk’s films notorious, as the camera cuts from YЕЏng-gi’s wrathful face to the worried, maternal pleas of the man’s elderly mother and then frames the disbelieving and frightened face of his young, primary school-aged son. The final tryst that YЕЏ-jin sets up ends with YЕЏng-gi bludgeoning to death in a public restroom the man who just had sex with her, resulting in her shocked discovery of his blood-soaked corpse. Both Sheng-mei Ma and Hye Seung Chung interpret the violent acts of YЕЏng-gi as the reassertion of the patriarchal law. As Chung observes, YЕЏng-gi, as a father and police officer, is “endowed with both symbolic/patriarchal and public/state powers” (Chung 2012, 97). Ma likewise unifies YЕЏng-gi’s perspective with the disapproving gaze that the societal superego casts on uninhibited sexual pleasure (Ma 2006, 41). Such claims, however, are complicated by the fact that YЕЏng-gi never once exercises his fatherly authority by confrontingPage 206 → YЕЏ-jin about her sexual activity. The violence he inflicts is directed solely against her sexual partners, who are to all appearances inconspicuous middle-class men or young professionals. His fury is thus aroused not by the misdeeds of lawbreakers or criminals but by something deeper and more corrosive: the realization that he, as the defender of law and order, is being duped and betrayed by his fellow citizens whom he is duty-bound to protect. The situation in which otherwise ordinary, law-abiding men are using his daughter to gratify their wanton appetites reveals to him the powerlessness of moral restraint and the impotence of the patriarchal law, as though the ubiquity of promiscuous sexuality were a secret withheld from him alone. YЕЏng-gi is plunged into unbearable anguish, a state exacerbated by his sense of hopeless isolation. His dark intuitions take on additional credence when he goes out to drink with an old friend, who proceeds first to flirt with a group of high school girls and then becomes embroiled in an altercation with their male friends, who address him in an outrageously disrespectful manner,

calling him an “old pervert.” Sunk into desolation and despair, YЕЏng-gi lashes out at YЕЏ-jin’s sexual partners and violates the very laws he has sworn to uphold. It is thus erroneous to regard his violence as “patriarchal” in nature, as such violence would remain within the bounds of the legal order and restore a sense of moral equilibrium by means of socially sanctioned punishments and forms of deterrence. Rather, YЕЏnggi’s violent acts must be recognized more properly as “postpatriarchal,” as they stem from his perception of the breakdown of patriarchy and the destruction of the restraints and protections it once provided. YЕЏng-gi’s shocked and horrified discovery of his daughter’s promiscuous sexuality is thus also a shocked and horrified discovery of the true nature of society itself, which had been hitherto hidden to him thanks to his own moral innocence and his dedication to defending the law. The fact that his profession brings him into daily contact with crime and other pathological behavior nevertheless left YЕЏng-gi wholly unprepared to deal with the fact that the patriarchy, or the regime of the father, has mutated behind his back into what Juliet Flower MacCannell calls the “regime of the brother.” According to MacCannell, the emergence of democratic values like liberty and fraternity has not resulted in authentic equality for all but has given rise to the “rule of the narcissistic group,” which casts aside the responsibilities of the “paternal moral lawgiver” or “self-governed liberated self” (MacCannell 1991, 14, 17). The son who overcomes the overbearing authority of the patriarch does not become himself a father, but Page 207 →remains a brother, who asserts the prerogative to act as both ego and id, switching from one to the other in accordance with his shifting appetites. MacCannell’s concept of the fraternal superego, which has made a narcissistic pact with the id to replace prohibition with enjoyment as the object of its imperative, bears strong affinities to Rieff’s idea of the therapeutic. For as MacCannell emphasizes, the key feature that defines postpatriarchal society is the abolition of what she calls the “best part” of the patriarchal superego, its “parental function” of protection (MacCannell 1991, 11). This abdication of responsibility moreover entails the elimination of “guilt as debt, ” leaving the individual without any barriers, including familial love and the consciousness of one’s condition of interdependence, between him and his enjoyment: “The post-deist, post-paternal, post-monarchic self imagines itself to be free from necessary sacrifices, imagines itself entirely free to вЂEnjoy!’” (MacCannell 1991, 19). The moral economy of a therapeutic society is accordingly one that operates on the basis of pure profit, without the possibility of loss. YЕЏ-jin’s antinomian spiritual practice, which not only satisfies the carnal appetites but also fulfills the so-called higher needs of the spiritual life, exemplifies the utopia inherent to the therapeutic. The generous and undifferentiated good will with which YЕЏ-jin offers herself to Chae-yЕЏng’s former clients, who include the aging, the corpulent, and the otherwise unattractive, renders superfluous the ardors and privations of asceticism in achieving spiritual insight. It is not only the case that the restraints of morality and convention have lost their social utility in a society centered on therapeutic individualism, but even spiritual awakening becomes accessible to lecherous men who satisfy their sexual urges with teenagers. Against such a utopia, any kind of resistance, including the acting-out of a distraught father, appears quaintly futile. As Rieff puts it, the triumph of the individual over the “compulsions of culture” means that “culture, as previously understood, need suffer no further defeats” (Rieff 2006, 16). YЕЏng-gi’s violence thus emerges as a desperate resort to create consequences for his daughter’s promiscuity, because an affluent and permissive society would otherwise exact no price for sexual license. Indeed, in a culture ruled wholly by the therapeutic, the only limitation to enjoyment are other forms of enjoyment, namely those that go beyond pleasure, like the gratification experienced by the killer of the woman whose murder YЕЏng-gi was summoned to investigate. YЕЏng-gi makes a last ditch attempt to redirect his daughter away from a life of carnal pleasure by awakening in her a sense of guilt—not the weak guilt that consists of being reminded of one’s misdeeds but Page 208 →the far more binding guilt that comes from realizing that one’s actions have had the consequence, however unintended, of causing grave harm to others. Thus, while never speaking to YЕЏ-jin about her behavior, he shocks her by deliberately burning his hand over a boiling pot. But YЕЏng-gi understands that just as he is helpless to prevent middle-class girls like his daughter from engaging in promiscuous sex, or to deter middle-class men from acting on their pedophilic appetites, he also lacks the power to ensure that YЕЏ-jin will understand his thoughts and actions. The final section of the film, titled “Sonata,

” after the make of car he drives, shows the father and daughter taking a trip into the country to visit the mother’s grave. The audience expects some kind of cathartic resolution to take place, in which YЕЏng-gi confronts YЕЏ-jin about her actions or murders her and buries her body in a remote area, with the latter scenario playing out in a nightmare that YЕЏ-jin dreams while asleep in the car. The film, however, ends on a far less melodramatic note, as the father teaches the daughter how to drive. After YЕЏ-jin is jolted awake, she finds her father painting a row of stones to make a lane for her to navigate. Walking alongside the car, YЕЏng-gi gives his daughter directions and offers words of encouragement as she learns how to maneuver the vehicle across rough ground. When she brings the car to a stop, he speaks what are in essence words of farewell to her in his role as her father: “From now on, you’ll be going alone. Dad is no longer going to follow you.” As she once again moves the car forward, the camera cuts to an extreme long shot framing YЕЏng-gi and the car driven by YЕЏ-jin in a flattened, abstract composition. While the car moves offscreen toward the left, the tiny figure of the father is shown standing in the middle of the frame. He occupies an unmarked space between the shapes he has painted on the rocks. To his left there are parallel curving lines, while to his right are the straight lines that form the shape of a parking space, which from the high angle framing resembles a child’s drawing of a factory or a ship. YЕЏng-gi’s awkward placement in the image, with his back to wavy lines that evoke fire, water, and feeling—all elements that flow—and facing the direction of a harsh, rectilinear shape, foreshadows his eventual fate. The next shot of YЕЏng-gi, this time in medium close-up, shows a car driving up behind him on the dirt road. He gives a long look of sadness and resignation in the direction of his daughter, before turning and walking toward his colleagues to be taken into custody. YЕЏ-jin, busy trying to stay within the lines painted by her father, fails to catch sight of her father being taken away, but only glimpses the police Page 209 →officers’ white jeep driving away. She uses her newly developed skills to follow the car, but gets stuck in mud, while the jeep fades into the horizon. The final shot of the film frames YЕЏ-jin in an extreme long shot, having emerged from the car, in a damp and foggy landscape. For Chung, arguing against the critiques of Kim Ki-duk that condemn his films as misogynistic, this image constitutes a “powerful feminist sign,” evoking the “grand semiotic chora” in which the female subject may undergo “regeneration and renewal” in a space outside the “phallocentric, symbolic order” (Chung 2012, 99, 98). Yet the relatively conventional nature of the final extreme long shot, especially when compared to the previous aerial composition involving the father, raises doubts about whether the final image is capable of bearing such heavy theoretical freight. Indeed, the road, the river, and the hills in the background provide clear cues to the viewer to establish a straightforward sense of depth. The final composition, in comparison to the previous composition, is devoid of any markers of creative intervention, whereas the alteration of stones in imitation of roads and parking spaces initially takes on a playful and childlike character when seen from a great distance above in an extreme high angle shot. This playfulness however gives way to something both ominous and poignant, when the film reveals that the lines make up YЕЏng-gi’s farewell message as a father and defender of the law. The landscape at the very end is by contrast mute in its ordinariness. The image tempts us to imagine the confusion of the girl and her dismay over not being able to follow the car bearing her father away. But the fadeout denies the audience the satisfaction of getting a glimpse of her face after it has dawned on her that something is seriously awry. Indeed, the final close-ups of YЕЏ-jin show her frustration at getting the tires stuck in mud, and before these shots, we see a mild look of surprise, rather than shock, passing over her face when she notices that her father has vanished and that a jeep is driving away on the main path. The film, in other words, withholds from the viewer even a partial sense of resolution from a glimpse of YЕЏ-jin’s face, whether it communicates fear, regret, worry, or determination. We are left waiting in vain for clues as to how YЕЏ-jin has been affected by her father’s actions and how she will live her life after her father is sent to prison. Instead, the film ends with an image that would more typically function as an establishing shot, without leaving behind any hint about how these questions will be answered. For the unsettling open-endedness of the film echoes YЕЏng-gi’s own sense of uncertainty over whether YЕЏ-jin will understand his actions and how she will ultimatelyPage 210 → respond to them. The lack of resolution underscores the absence of reciprocity between father and daughter. His gesture of teaching her to drive, as well as his act of turning himself into the police, are actions carried out in a void, without any guarantee of recognition or requital on the part of the teenager for whose sake they are performed.

A comparison with the final sequence of P’aju is instructive. For unlike Samaria, P’aju closes with a lengthy close-up of its female protagonist, in a shot that lasts for thirty seconds before the film fades to black. Е¬n-mo is shown riding on the back of her friend’s moped against a fog-shrouded landscape. A henchman of the real estate developer, whom the film reveals to be a mob boss, calls out to her as she passes the gas station where he is refueling his car. He shouts his thanks to her and promises to take her family’s house off the list of properties slated for demolition. Moments later a car carrying the developer himself pulls up alongside the moped carrying the two girls. A passenger window slides down to show the face of the developer, who studies Е¬n-mo with a long look before flashing a patronizing and grateful smile. The camera cuts back to frame Е¬nmo’s face in close-up, showing her eyes welling up with tears. Е¬n-mo is shocked into a moment of selfrecognition by the unexpected show of thanks from the mobsters, who believe that she betrayed her brother-in-law in order to keep her family house from being bulldozed. She comes to the stunned realization not only that others were standing ready to profit from her conflicted passions but also that these passions have direct political consequences. Although the ending leaves unclear whether Е¬n-mo is capable of accepting the truth about her responsibility for the death of her sister, nevertheless, her look of dismay and sorrow at the very least indicates her awakening to the reality that her choice to turn Chung-sik over to the police has benefited the ruthless and the greedy. Chung-sik’s decision to spare Е¬n-mo the burden of guilt she would have to bear in learning the truth about her sister’s death appears to spring from a desire for self-punishment, yet the serenity and resolve he displays in his prison cell imply that Е¬n-mo is capable of looking beyond the mask of false guilt he has chosen to wear. The father in Samaria, by contrast, has committed murder and cannot escape his guilt or tantalize his daughter with a secret morality. The sacrifice he undertakes is no less unilateral than that of Chung-sik, and the most that YЕЏng-gi can hope for is to be understood by his daughter. Unlike P’aju, Samaria leaves the shape of this understanding entirely opaque. The young are unknowable to the old and appear to come from a wholly differentPage 211 → world. Indeed, the one-sided nature of the gestures of the father in Samaria and the brotherin-law in P’aju—both of whom end up in prison—attest to the seriousness of the rift between young and old in contemporary South Korean society, which is currently in the midst of an unprecedented generational shift. For during the last decade a new generation has come of age for which South Korea has always been a stable liberal democracy and prosperous consumer society. Freedom is no longer something hard-won after risking one’s life and limb, and while a strong work ethic is by itself not enough to secure a stable middle-class occupation, nevertheless the economic disparities in South Korea concern differences in the distribution of wealth, rather than struggles over necessities. The conflict between young and old may take a familiar form in modern societies of rebellious and antisocial behavior of teenagers and adolescents, but this most recent generational rift manifests a troubling historical distance. For the young lack the memories that have defined the perspective of their elders: the repressiveness of military rule and the privations of postwar poverty. Teenage rebellion and adolescent self-absorption, to be sure, take forms that are far less violent and harrowing than the violent crackdowns by the military regime of prodemocracy protesters. But the divide between old and young is in at least one sense more serious than the political and economic conflicts of earlier decades. For while the protests against the military regime resulted in the killing and torture of thousands, both the police and the student and labor activists could take for granted the nature of the world over which they struggled. Both sides understood themselves as political agents engaged in a conflict over the type of regime that would govern the country. The conflict between young and old, however, is not over something shared. Rather, it stems from a radical break between those whose frames of reference—their expectations and the things they take for granted—fail to coincide altogether. As a person who belongs to a vanishing world, the father undertakes a sacrifice that breaks with its patriarchal moral economy of punishment and ostracism by willingly absorbing the penalties established to deter and discipline the behavior of his daughter. YЕЏng-gi wants his daughter to experience guilt, but he is trapped not by his silence but by language itself. The uncomprehending words spoken to him by YЕЏ-jin, who believes him to be a client on the way to her hotel room, evoke a shattering obscenity that reduces the father to tears: “Hurry up.В .В .В . Did someone die? I’ll comfort you.” These words become properly unspeakable, because the responsesPage 212 → they invite are incestuous in nature. The father accordingly acts out in an effort to avoid replying to her. The silence of the father not only thwarts the acts that YЕЏ-jin’s words ineluctably set in

motion but also yields a riddle that the teenager may or may not be able to solve. Indeed, as in the ending of Oldboy, in which the villain of the film refuses to spell out what he wants from the protagonist, but instead forces the latter to work out for himself that what he must do is to cut off his own tongue, anxiety over the loss of morality, tradition, and historical memory is conveyed by the form of the puzzle. But unlike in Oldboy, we are not given the time in Samaria to find out if the teenager is capable of fathoming her father’s actions, and if she can discern what action or words would be commensurate with his sacrifice. Whereas a character who has lived out the tumultuous history of modern South Korea can arrive at an answer of what necessity demands, even if it leads him to undergo further trauma, the teenager in Samaria faces a receding horizon in which the memory of love and duty can only be sustained by transgressions far in excess of her own.

Notes 1. During this span of years, the population of the United States rose by 41 percent. See Berman 2006. 2. Quoted in Berman 2006, 87. 3. As one member of a fan site for Korean TV dramas based in Egypt puts it, “Korean dramas,” unlike those from other countries, “have taught us that there is something called ethics and respect and righteousness and true love and sincerity.” See Noh 2011, 352.

Works Cited Bell, Daniel. 1978. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Berman, Morris. 2006. Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. New York: W. W. Norton. Chang, Kyung-Sup. 2010a. “The Second Modern Condition? Compressed Modernity as Internalized Reflexive Cosmopolitization.” The British Journal of Sociology 61 (3): 444–64. Chang, Kyung-Sup. 2010b. South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition. London: Routledge. Chung, Hye Seung. 2012. Kim Ki-duk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kim, Do Kyun, and Min-Sun Kim, eds. 2011. Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Page 213 →Kim, Youna. 2011. “Globalization of Korean Media: Meaning and Significance.” In Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond, edited by Do Kyun Kim and Min-Sun Kim, 35–62. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Ma, Sheng-mei. 2006. “Kim Ki-duk’s Non-Person Films.” Asian Cinema 17 (2): 32–46. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. 1991. The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy. London: Routledge. Mahbubani, Kishore. “The Dangers of Decadence: What the Rest Can Teach the West.” Foreign Affairs 72 (4) (September-October 1993): 10–14. Noh, Sueen. 2011. “Unveiling the Korean Wave in the Middle East.” In Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond, edited by Do Kyun Kim and Min-Sun Kim, 331–67. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Rieff, Philip. 2006. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.

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9 Unfinished Business? Transgression and Moral Agency in Park Chanwook’s Vengeance Trilogy Juhn Y. Ahn The public will believe in the dreams of the theatre only in so far as they are taken truly to be dreams and not as carbon copies of reality; only so far as they permit the public to liberate within them that magic liberty of dreams which can be recognized only when steeped in terror and cruelty (Artaud and Morgan 1958, 76). These are the prophetic words of the French playwright and actor Atonin Artaud (1896– 1948), who pitted his “theater of cruelty” against, among other things, cinema. What Artaud tried to envision with the help of this notion of a theater of cruelty was a form of theater that could free itself from the tyranny of text and thought. Shifting its focus away from thought and understanding toward the senses, theater, Artaud argued, should try to conjure up not a shadow of reality but dreams wherein the spectator’s “taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out” (Artaud 1958, 92). Dreaming, however, was not possible in cinema, for cinema, as Artaud puts it unequivocally, “assassinate[s] us with shadows, which, when filtered through a machine, no longer are able to reach our senses” (75). There is little reason to rehearse the rest of Artaud’s well-known arguments here. In fact, the aim of this paper is not to discuss Artaud’s thoughts on cruelty and transgression but to question the following comment found in a review of the Korean director Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk)’s film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002): Page 216 →Unlike the great cultural provocations, like the French theater director Atonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, most of what falls under the aegis of extreme cinema is devised just to distract and reaffirm the audience’s existing worldview: an eye for an eye, it’s a dog-eatdog world, ad nauseam. (Dargis 2005a) As a good example of a film that belongs to this new genre of extreme cinema, Park’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the review continues, “doesn’t challenge the status quo; it just affirms it by flattering paying customers for whom the movie screen will never be anything more than a reassuring mirror” (Dargis 2005a). Are Park Chan-wook’s films really just arty exploitation flicks? Does Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, as the above review claims, degenerate from “a beautifully shot character study with glimmerings of political and social insight into a cavalcade of cruelty” and “senseless shocks and sadism” at the forty-five-minute mark? Is it true that the cruelty in Park’s films “carries no meaning beyond the creator’s ego” (Dargis 2005b)? And, lastly, do cruelty, violence, and transgression in Park’s trilogy—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005)—lack the “dreamlike” quality that Artaud wanted for theater? This paper argues that the transgressive elements of Park’s films are not senseless, superficial, or meaningless gimmicks as the above movie critic suggests. On the contrary, the films that form Park’s vengeance trilogy consistently rely on the idiom of cruelty, violence, and transgression to reflect critically on the neoliberal restructuring of post-IMF Korea and raise important questions about moral agency.1 Park’s trilogy does not, pace the above review, promote Hollywood values such as aesthetic relativism (i.e., a cinematic rendering of “it’s all good” or “it’s a dog-eat-dog world”) or poetic justice (“the good are rewarded and the evil are punished”). Instead, the trilogy, this chapter argues, shows a strong commitment to exploring the question of morality through the lens of history, cruelty, violence, transgression, and also secular values such as responsibility and free will.

Asian Financial Crisis Evidence of Park’s effort to grapple with the IMF crisis and its aftermath, that is, history is not difficult to find. Park, whose sparing use of words in his films usually leaves the audience to rely on visual cues to follow the Page 217 →plot, goes to the trouble of having one of the main characters of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Pak Tong-jin (played by Song Kang-ho), state clearly that his wife left him because of “this economic downturn, ” an unmistakable reference to the financial crisis that began to unfold in 1997 and 1998. Another key character in the same film, the deaf mute Ryu (played by Sin Ha-kyun), offers a different but no less explicit kind of testimony to the devastation of the Asian financial crisis. In the opening scene, Ryu, who borrows the disembodied voice of a radio talk host, describes himself as “a kind person and a diligent laborer.” He goes on to explain that his sister, his only remaining family, had given up the goal of going to college and joined a factory to send him to art school, but she became seriously ill (presumably because of the poor working conditions of the factory) and had to quit. Ryu himself had to therefore give up his dreams and work at a steel factory to pay for his sister’s medical bills. The story of Ryu and his sister (an allegory for the exploitation of laborers in government-sanctioned industrial capitalism), which opens the film, foreshadows the impending danger that awaits the both of them. Ryu will, indeed, lose his job at the factory—massive layoffs were an important condition of receiving the IMF fund—and also his last remaining resource, his kidney. He will consequently be forced to take extreme measures to ensure that his sister that can get the kidney transplant that she so desperately needs. These extreme measures, that is, the kidnapping of a little girl and asking for ransom will result in the unintended death of the girl, her father, Ryu, and also Ryu’s sister. All four figures thus become the victims of the Asian financial crisis. Oldboy makes an even more explicit reference to the same crisis. Imprisoned against his will and without an explanation, the film’s protagonist, Oh Tae-su, played by Choi Min-sik (Ch’oe Min-sik), falls into a state of utter despair. But when he discovers an extra chopstick that was delivered to his room by mistake, Tae-su rekindles his fighting spirit and plans an escape. Using a split screen, the film provides a chronological frame for Oh Tae-su’s effort to break through the wall with a single chopstick. As Tae-su slowly works his way through the wall on the left side of the screen, a television shown on the right side of the screen continues to display, in chronological order, news reports of major national and international events that took place between the years 1995 and 2002. The flashback events that Park Chan-wook chose for this shot are quite telling: the arrest of former Korean president Chun Doo-hwan (ChЕЏn Du-hwan) (6:34 p.m., December 3, 1995), the handover ceremony of Hong Kong (June 30–July 1, Page 218 →1997), the death of princess Diana (August 31, 1997), IMF approval of bailout package to South Korea (December 3, 1997), inauguration of Korean president Kim Daejung (February 25, 1998), arrival of the new millennium (January 1, 2000), Kim Dae-jung’s visit to Pyongyang (June 13, 2000), 9/11 terrorist attack on the WTC (2001), the advancement of Korea to the quarterfinals in the World Cup with Ahn Jung-hwan (An ChЕЏng-hwan)’s golden goal against Italy (June 18, 2002), and the election of Roh Moo-hyun (No Mu-hyЕ-n) as the ninth Korean president (December 19, 2002). In addition to the rapid passage of time, it is clear that these events are also meant to represent change. More specifically speaking, the world that Oh Tae-su knew before his imprisonment—a world dominated by authoritarian regimes (Chun Doo-hwan) and global superpowers—was disappearing and a newly democratized Korea was beginning to assert its sovereignty and national pride. The juxtaposition of these events against the image of Oh Tae-su slowly crawling through a hole in the wall towards his freedom strongly suggests that Oldboy is not simply a film about the private travails of an individual but rather a larger political allegory. But it must be borne in mind that Oldboy’s attempt at social and political critique does not end with the simple celebration of sovereignty, freedom, and pride. Far from it. Oh Tae-su, with just one month’s worth of digging left to do, is unexpectedly set free. This freedom, as we learn later in the film, however, was no freedom at all. Tae-su had simply stepped out of one prison to walk into an even larger one. As Tae-su’s captor, for instance, sardonically puts it, “How’s your life in the larger prison?” What is particularly noteworthy about this larger prison is the cast of characters responsible for making this prison house of imagined freedom possible. First, there is Yi U-jin (played by Yu Chi-t’ae), the wealthy leader of a large business enterprise. And, then, there is Pak Ch’ŏl-ung (played by Oh Tal-su), the boss of an underground business that specializes in private incarcerations.

These two key figures were clearly meant to embody the forces of postindustrial, free market, finance capitalism in the film. In a short but important scene that is ultimately inconsequential to the unfolding of the film’s plot, U-jin is seen walking out of a luxury sedan (a Jaguar X-type) with a cell phone in his hand. He is greeted at the door of an office building by his chief of staff who is also holding a cell phone in his hand. The two are having a conversation about a building that U-jin’s business is trying to sell at 270 million Korean won (approximately two million dollars). The sale, however, is not going smoothly. The chief of staff reports that the Page 219 →market value of the building presents no problems for the sale, but the buyer is having problems with their loan limits. Although not on such a large scale, Pak Ch’ŏl-ung is similarly portrayed as someone who is engaged in free market finance capitalism. While Oh Tae-su is exacting violent revenge on his incarcerators with a hammer, their boss Ch’ŏl-ung is seated comfortably in front of multiple observation monitors that represent his illegal incarceration business. He is intently looking at his laptop. In a brief close up of the laptop it is made clear that Ch’ŏl-ung is keeping a close eye on the stock market. Like the scene of U-jin emerging from his car, none of these shots of Ch’ŏl-ung are particularly important for plot development. They were clearly meant to serve a different function, namely a subliminal reminder of the film’s historical context. The real incarceration in Oldboy, in short, is free market finance capitalism. The presence of the state and the law, as we shall see shortly, is minimized in Park’s films. What drives and confines the “virtual citizenry” in these films is the violence of the unregulated exchange of commodities and capital, the law of supply and demand.2 Most notable in this regard is Park’s continued reliance on the motif of commodified body parts in his vengeance trilogy.3 The most common motif is the kidney, which frequently appears in Park’s films as an object of economic desire. Ryu, for instance, tries to purchase a kidney for his ailing sister from illegal organ traffickers who, in exchange, ask for Ryu’s own kidney and also ten million Korean won (approximately seventy-seven thousand dollars). The same amount of money is required for the sister’s badly needed kidney transplant operation, which inadvertently objectifies and commodifies the kidney that she needs. Commodification is not limited to the kidney. The underground business boss, Pak Ch’ŏl-ung, in Oldboy sells his own hand to U-jin for a new building and spares Oh Tae-su’s teeth (Tae-su had forcibly pulled out Ch’ŏlung’s teeth) for an undisclosed amount of cash he receives from U-jin. Similar issues appear in Lady Vengeance. Yi KЕ-m-ja (played by Lee Yeong-ae—Yi YЕЏng-ae), the main protagonist, sacrifices her own kidney in exchange, as we later learn, for a one-of-a-kind gun. She also cuts off the pinky finger on her left hand in exchange for forgiveness. KЕ-m-ja, however, will regain her finger through an operation, but to pay for the operation she will use up all her savings, which she earned by laboring in prison for thirteen years. The finger returns to KЕ-m-ja, in other words, as a commodified object. It is essential that the trilogy’s treatment of the theme of the commodificationPage 220 → of body parts in Korea be considered in the context of new medical technologies and changes in the legislation regarding brain death and organ transplants. The first key step in the growth of the organ transplant industry in Korea was the formal acknowledgment of brain death by the Korean Medical Association in 1993. The next key step was the establishment of the Korean Network for Organ Sharing or KONOS in 1998. The number of brain death patients who served as organ donors, for instance, jumped from sixty-six in 1996, ninety-seven in 1997, and 125 in 1998 to a whopping 162 in 1999.4 But, curiously, the number of patients whose organs were harvested will drop to sixtyfour in 2000, fifty-two in 2001, and an alarming thirty-six in 2002.5 The cause for this precipitous drop can be found in the passing of the legislation regarding organ transplants and brain death in 1999.6 The legislation was put into effect early next year in 2000.7 This legislation prohibited the use of organs for commercial gain—organ harvesting was defined as legal only if the organ is donated voluntarily without monetary gain—and, more importantly, set stricter standards for declaring a patient brain dead. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was filmed as Korea was grappling with the issue of biopower and commodification of the body. It is in this context that we must try to make sense of Chief Inspector Ch’oe’s remark that Ryu’s sister had “luckily received a kidney donation from a brain death patient.”8 The fact that he makes this remark while taking care of his own bedridden daughter who is waiting for a kidney donation adds a sense of urgency to the film’s social commentary on the commodification of bodies. An even more explicit reference to the larger historical context of the commodification of bodies can be witnessed in the scene where Ryu’s lover and accomplice, Ch’a

YЕЏng-mi, played by Bae Doona (Pae Du-na), visits the organ traffickers who stole Ryu’s kidney. Before she leaves them, YЕЏng-mi gives them pamphlets detailing the ideas of her anarchist organization, Revolutionary Anarchist Association. The purpose of this organization, we learn, is to “destroy neoliberalism,” “dismantle chaebol conglomerates,” and “kick out the American forces.” Further evidence of Park Chan-wook’s efforts to come to terms with the fundamental changes taking place in Korea can be found in other details from Lady Vengeance. First, the fact that the villain Mr. Paek (played by Choi Min-sik) is employed in an English hagwЕЏn in Kangnam is not insignificant. Second, the fact that Mr. Paek tried to purchase a yacht with the ransom money he stole from the parents of the children he kills is also worth taking into account here. Third, the fact that the bereaved families Page 221 →put the fate of Mr. Paek to a vote instead of the law or even KЕ-m-ja—both were presented in the film as options—seems to further support the reading of Lady Vengeance as a critical reflection on the neoliberal democratization of Korea. Finally, there is the violent conclusion to KЕ-m-ja’s revenge inLady Vengeance. After the group of grieving parents torture and ultimately kill the murderer of their children, Mr. Paek, they gather in KЕ-m-ja’s bakery and celebrate their communal revenge with a cake. During this melancholic celebration, the group cautiously raises the issue of getting back the ransom money that they had given Mr. Paek under the mistaken belief that their children were still alive. In this powerful scene, each family cautiously but surely pulls out pen and paper to write down their bank account information to give to KЕ-m-ja who has access to Mr. Paek’s accounts. The awkwardness of this moment is underscored by a close-up shot of the handwritten notes with the bank account information and the silence that follows. One of the family members, however, consecrates this awkward moment with the statement that the French interpret a break in the conversation as sign of the passing of an angel—an important motif that will be discussed later. This statement is immediately followed, in turn, by a scene that underscores the warm sense of resolution and salvation felt by all the family members. Using soft-shot cinematography, the film provides a hazy close-up of the family members’ faces glowing gently under the soft light of a chandelier. This scene is punctuated by shots of their hands firmly grasping the mementos that Mr. Paek kept of his murders. The scene ends with the camera moving its gaze away from the family members to the chandelier above. But this sense of resolution and salvation is short-lived. During the close-up of the chandelier, an employee of the bakery, a close friend and lover of KЕ-m-ja, walks into the bakery and the family members abruptly walk out as if nothing had happened, leaving the audience with the impression that what brought these people together was not a sense of community or higher purpose but rather personal vendettas and monetary interests.

Withdrawal of the Law As noted earlier, in all three films that belong to the vengeance trilogy there are also clear references to the impotence and even the withdrawal of the law and, by extension, the state. A good case in point is chief inspector Ch’oe (played by Yi Tae-yЕЏn) who is assigned to investigate the death Page 222 →of Tong-jin’s daughter. During his interview of the little girl’s father Tong-jin, whose trauma is viscerally conveyed through his thin cracked voice, the chief inspector casually takes a phone call from his wife. While remaining in close distance to the bereaved father, the chief inspector complains to his wife about the cost of the surgery that their daughter needs—ten million Korean won (a recurring motif in the film)—and then tries to comfort his wife with these untimely words: “At least our kid wasn’t kidnapped and killed.” In this well-crafted scene what the film renders clear is a simple reality: the law lacks sympathy. In fact, Tong-jin too will come to eventually lose sympathy and thus his humanity. The anguish and despair that Tong-jin feels during his daughter’s autopsy, underlined by the close-up of his face, is nowhere to be seen in a later shot where Tongjin is caught nonchalantly yawning during the autopsy of the killer’s sister. But in the filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s eyes the law lacked more than sympathy. It also lacked integrity. Park renders this explicit in a few different scenes. First, there is a scene where the chief inspector visits Tong-jin at his luxurious home in an upscale neighborhood. There, the chief inspector receives an envelope full of money. The audience can readily guess why. He is expected to help Tong-jin find the killer, Ryu, presumably so that Tong-jin can avenge his daughter. Then, there is a scene consisting of a shot of the chief inspector at the scene of another crime committed by Ryu, immediately followed by a shot of Tong-jin waiting for Ryu in Ryu’s own home. Park, using a cut, abruptly replaces the shot of the crime scene with the shot of Tong-jin to juxtapose the

two individuals. A sharp contrast is drawn between the chief inspector who is terrified by Ryu’s inhuman capacity for violence—Ryu had beaten his victims, the aforementioned organ traffickers, to a pulp with a baseball bat and stolen their kidneys—and Tong-jin whose emotionless face testifies to the indifference that he feels toward the same violent act. This indifference is rendered all the more palpable by using rack focusing to direct the attention of the audience gradually away from the calm and determined Tong-jin to the ice cream box that Ryu used to transport the kidneys and also to the kitchen knife and cutting board that he used to chop up and eat the stolen organs. Even in the presence of these indexes of extreme violence Tong-jin, as the audience can readily witness in his emotionless face, remains unfazed. Tong-jin is not alone in taking the law into his own hands. In the absence of the law, the Revolutionary Anarchist Association issues its own formal judgments (p’an’gyЕЏlmun) and punishes the guilty. When Ch’a Page 223 →YЕЏng-mi makes her appearance in the film she, for instance, is sitting in front of a computer typing out a judgment and sentence against the labor minister in the name of her organization, the Revolutionary Anarchist Association. The minister is sentenced to death for causing the death of two laborers who died during a repression of a strike. This sentence against the minster is never actually carried out in the film, but the anarchist organization will eventually get to play judge, jury, and executioner. In the final scene of the film the anarchist organization appears in a jeep while Tong-jin is trying to bury the chopped up remains of Ryu whom he has just brutally executed to avenge his daughter. The four anarchists who emerge from the jeep each stab Tong-jin once and use a knife to stick their judgment and sentence to his chest. The judgment states that Tong-jin is sentenced to death for the crime of killing one of its members, YЕЏng-mi. The film here is not trying to advocate anarchy. Rather, it seems to be trying to make a political point: in the absence of the law its double demands to be obeyed. The law also makes a brief but important appearance in the beginning of Oldboy. The opening sequence of the film takes place in a police station where the belligerent and drunk Oh Tae-su is allowed to wreak havoc without too much resistance. After this explicit reference to its impotence, the law remains visibly absent in the rest of the film. The impotence of the law is explored in an even more explicit but subtle way in Lady Vengeance. The person who embodies this impotence is Chief Inspector Ch’oe (played by Nam Il-u), who was responsible for putting KЕ-m-ja in prison for a crime that she did not commit. When KЕ-m-ja stages and orchestrates the torture and execution of the real criminal, her ex-lover Mr. Paek, Chief Inspector Ch’oe, in clear violation of his duties as an officer of the law, makes no effort to stop her. In point of fact, he actually plays the most active role in helping KЕ-m-ja carry out her cruel and vindictive plan. But how should we make sense of the withdrawal of the law in Park’s vengeance trilogy? Is it a direct and transparent reference to the realities of post-IMF Korea? The treatment of vengeance, the central theme of the trilogy, may offer us a useful clue. According to the Korean film scholar Kyung Hyun Kim, “in these films vengeance is carefully restricted to the realm of the personal, rarely ever entering the public domains: it is always aimed at other individuals and almost never against state institutions” (Kim 2011, 181). Kim also asserts that Tae-su and U-jin occupy “a mythical, ahistorical world—beyond the realities of a legal system” (Kim 2011, 181). The creation of this mythical, ahistorical world, which bears no direct relation to the Page 224 →“knowable” (i.e., the historical world) and yet still appears familiar and knowable, is taken by Kim as evidence of the filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s engagement in a cinematic experiment that he labels “virtual.”9 Arguing against the tendency to reduce Park’s vengeance trilogy to aesthetic relativism, Kim insists that the violence in Park’s trilogy can neither be read simply or exclusively as sociopolitical allegory nor as a natural extension of the causality that drives the plot of each film. The brilliance of Park’s trilogy, in other words, lies in its deft avoidance of the epistemological problem inherent to modernism, namely its lingering attachment to (the representation of) reality and history, that is, to the knowable. Despite the unmistakable allusions to the IMF crisis in the trilogy, the trilogy does, as Kim argues, remain squarely in the realm of the personal and, unlike the films produced during the democratization movement in the 1990s, do not offer the audience a direct view of the truth about the realities of Korea. Instead of an unmasking that reveals the truth, what the trilogy offers are unfamiliar familiarities. For instance, instead of “the deaths of numerous demonstrators throughout this period of democratization, or the workers fired during the so-called IMFbailout crisis,” what Oh Tae-su remembers, according to Kim, is the kunmandu (fried dumplings) with too

much puch’u (chives), which he was forced to eat every day for fifteen years during his incarceration (Kim 2011, 180). History, Kim claims, is thus unpacked in kunmandu. Similarly, the repeated scenes of torture, murder, and self-mutilation in the trilogy should be understood as unfamiliar familiarities rather than as sociopolitical allegories of the symbolic violence of a spatiotemporally localizable historical event, namely the IMF crisis. Indeed, as Kim argues, in Park’s trilogy the brief but unmistakable allusions to the events that began to unfold after the crisis of 1997 were meant not so much to anchor the message of the films in historical reality as to render these events and the circumstances that gave rise to them “virtual.” But referring to vengeance as virtual does not necessarily imply that Park’s trilogy leaves the question of ethics open as argued by Kim. Instead of harboring resentment at “a society whose law and ethics have been dictated by the combined interests of liberal democracy and capitalism,” the resentment that the main characters in the trilogy harbor, Kim claims, is directed at each other (Kim 2011, 180). History is thus unpacked in personal resentment. But there is a twist. Invoking the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment, or resentment, Kim also argues that the main characters neither establish good and evil (“slave morality”) on the basis of resentment, which is actualized in the form of vengeance, nor do they abandon resentmentPage 225 → for the sake of achieving a superior (Гњbermensch) morality. As evidence of this moral indeterminacy, Kim points to the death of Tong-jin who, surprisingly, does not kill Ryu out of hatred or resentment. Ryu, Tong-jin admits, is a kind person. Had Tong-jin stopped there he could have become the symbol of superior morality. But he goes on to kill Ryu. And for killing YЕЏng-mi, Tong-jin himself is killed at the end of the film. Is Tong-jin’s death, then, a judgment of his inability to abandon resentment and, hence, slave morality (“it’s a dog eat dog world”)? Or is it just plain old poetic justice? Kim contends that the final scene of the film refuses to give us an answer (Kim 2011, 189 and 199). In Kim’s opinion, then, the task of defining a new morality and ethics for post-IMF Korea remains, purposefully, unfinished business in Park’s trilogy. There is no moral, didactic, or “higher” (religious) lesson to be learned in these films. And this, as Kim seems to suggest, is what makes the trilogy subversive. This paper takes issue with this reading of vengeance in Park’s trilogy. Rendering reality “virtual” does not make ethics irrelevant. Rather, it allows filmmakers like Park Chan-wook to imagine new capacities for moral action. Once “virtualized,” the image, as Kim explains, is severed from an external or “actual” referent. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to say that vengeance in the trilogy was meant to function as a kind of social or political critique of Korean society or the state. But what the pursuit of vengeance against the Other in the trilogy does establish is answerability. The point of vengeance in the trilogy, this chapter argues, is not to punish the virtual Other. It is to remind us that there is no such a thing as an “innocent” victim. To borrow the words of KЕ-m-ja, everyone makes mistakes, but those who have sinned must atone for their sins. And this is true regardless of the presence of an authority to which an individual is answerable. What is most noteworthy about Park’s take on this issue of answerability, as we shall see, is the contrast he draws between the kind and innocent individual who transgresses unintentionally and the vicious and cruel individual who intentionally seeks vengeance, violence, and pain. In Park’s trilogy these individuals are often one and the same person. In spite of this agentive complexity, the vengeance trilogy fashions a new world wherein an individual is held accountable all the same.

Vengeance and Responsibility Again, at the center of the plot of all three films that belong to the trilogy we find supposedly good innocent people who unintentionally make Page 226 →tragic mistakes and transgress. Swindled by organ traffickers, the deaf mute Ryu, for instance, is forced to make the grave mistake of kidnapping a young girl. This will have the unintended outcome of the suicidal death of Ryu’s sister. To avenge his sister’s death Ryu will brutally beat to death and eat the kidneys of the organ traffickers who made him resort to kidnapping. Ryu, however, makes another mistake and inadvertently causes the young girl’s death. This leads the girl’s father to torture and kill Ryu’s lover Ch’a YЕЏng-mi, which, in turn, leads Ryu to seek revenge again, but it will be Ryu himself who meets a violent end at the hands of the girl’s father, Tong-jin. Ultimately, both Ryu and Tong-jin will pay for their sins with death.

Similarly, in Oldboy the protagonist Oh Tae-su unintentionally exposes the secret love affair between Yi U-jin and his sister Yi Su-a (played by Yun Chin-sЕЏ), which leads to his incarceration, the loss of his wife and best friend, his violent pursuit of vengeance, and eventually his own unintended incestuous love affair with his daughter Mido (played by Kang Hye-jЕЏng). Tae-su will be made to suffer this way, but this, we learn later in the film, is only the path toward his atonement. It is only after Tae-su finally realizes what sin he has committed in the course of seeking revenge that U-jin gives him a chance to atone for his sin: Tae-su can atone for his sins by consciously choosing to continue the incestuous affair with his daughter. The price Tae-su chooses to pay for his sins, however, is not his life or voluntary engagement in incest but perhaps something more valuable to him—his tongue. Since Tae-su could no longer sin, U-jin sees to no reason to live on and takes his own life. A similar but subtly different pattern is in found in Lady Vengeance. Forced by Mr. Paek, who holds their infant daughter captive, the protagonist KЕ-m-ja confesses to a murder that she did not commit. By making this mistake, KЕ-m-ja unwillingly lets a murderer roam free to carry out more acts of violence against children. KЕ-m-ja’s mistake also forces her daughter to grow up thinking that she was abandoned by her mother. This leads KЕ-m-ja to seek the cruelest form of vengeance possible. She first forces the tied-up Mr. Paek to listen to the bereaved families plan his torture and murder. Having subjected Mr. Paek to this brutal form of mental torment, KЕ-m-ja then helps the families actually carry out their monstrous plan. Mr. Paek consequently meets a violent end, but KЕ-m-ja takes the stylish pistol that she had fashioned just for this occasion and shoots him in his cold, unmarked grave. What does she accomplish by shooting his Page 227 →mangled cadaver? KЕ-m-ja wanted to kill Mr. Paek for turning her into a sinner, so she carefully staged his execution. As she is about to shoot him in the face, however, Mr. Paek’s phone rings and KЕ-m-ja discovers the mementos that he kept of all his murders attached to the phone. This is a pivotal moment. KЕ-m-ja is forced to temporarily give up her own personal revenge to allow the bereaved parents a chance to avenge the death of their children first. But KЕ-m-ja had intended to shoot him close range and that is exactly what she does. Whether Mr. Paek was alive or not did not matter. For vengeance was not an instrumental act for KЕ-m-ja. It played a constitutive role in her transformation into a powerful moral agent. It was also virtue in action. That is why, I submit, her pistol had to be stylish and special. KЕ-m-ja herself thus believed that she had atoned for her role in the cover up of the little boy WЕЏn-mo’s death. But while taking the red makeup off her eyes (more on this later) after the execution of Mr. Paek, KЕ-m-ja finally realizes her dream of meeting WЕЏn-mo and asking for his forgiveness. The camera captures WЕЏn-mo staring quietly at KЕ-m-ja with a cigarette in his small hand. Like the members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Association who signify their transformation into the double of the law with their intense smoking and silent staring (an indexical reminder, perhaps, of the secret interrogations of the authoritarian regimes in Korea), WЕЏnmo also uses smoking and silent staring to signify that he is ready to issue a judgment in the absence of the law. As KЕ-m-ja is about to ask for forgiveness, WЕЏn-mo puts the same gag that she used to silence Mr. Paek in her mouth. Suddenly all grown up, WЕЏn-mo (played by Yu Chi-t’ae) quietly leaves, however, without issuing a formal judgment. All he offers KЕ-m-ja is an inexplicable smile of seeming discontent. KЕ-m-ja is never truly free of her own transgression. Tragically, all the protagonists are good, kind people and they all happen to be guilty of transgression. As Ryu declares at the beginning of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, “I’m a kind person.” Ryu is so kind that he is willing to give up his dream and even his kidney for his ailing sister. When his lover YЕЏng-mi hatches the plan to kidnap the daughter of his former boss at the factory for ransom money, Ryu disapproves on the ground that such an act is a crime. But YЕЏng-mi responds to his disapproval with a telling idiom: “Is a boiled pig afraid of boiling water?” (salmЕ-n toeji ka kkЕ-llЕ-n mul Е-l turyЕЏwЕЏ harya ). As further proof of Ryu’s genuine kindheartedness, the film also includes shots of him performing random acts of kindness such as him taking care of a senile old man in the neighborhood. The film’s Page 228 →other main protagonist, Tong-jin, is also portrayed as an originally good person. When asked by Chief Inspector Ch’oe if he had done anything to provoke anyone, Tong-jin, for instance, simply replies that he considers himself a kind person. Both Ryu and Tong-jin will, however, carry out unimaginably horrible acts of violence against other kind people. But why? The juxtaposition of the protagonists’ kindness and their cruelty was not, this paper contends, meant to serve

as a convenient way to demonstrate the irrationality of violence or the fickle nature of human beings. Rather, it was meant to serve as a way to underscore the complexity of the web of causality and hence moral agency. This complexity, however, is deceiving. Park’s trilogy may complicate the causality of guilt and thereby challenge the Hollywoodization of morality (“the good are rewarded and the evil are punished” and/or “it’s a dog-eat-dog world”), but what remains unchanged and unchallenged is the notion of answerability. Ironically, the kind and naive protagonists become more responsible moral agents in the trilogy by seeking extremely violent forms of revenge. The question of whether or not they receive the right judgment and eventually die for their sins (Tong-jin comes to mind here) is of little consequence. What matters is that they establish answerability by voluntarily seeking revenge and inflicting pain.10 The reason why the protagonists like Tae-su or KЕ-m-ja seek revenge, in other words, is not because they want to hide or repress their guilt or because they want to empower themselves. Those who have “transgressed” (more on this later) need to be held accountable and made to suffer. Seeking vengeance, therefore, does not make the protagonists guiltier. It makes them responsible moral agents. Before Tong-jin slashes Ryu’s Achilles tendons under water to make him drown like his daughter, Tong-jin utters these seemingly contradictory words: “I know you’re a good guy. So you understand that I have to kill you, right?” Here Tong-jin is admitting that he and Ryu are moral equals. They are both willing to seek revenge and that is why they can understand each other. They are both smaller pieces in the larger game of answerability.

Conclusion Pain and suffering are absolutely necessary. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Tong-jin is forced to confront one of his former employees, the engineer P’eng (played by Ki Chu-bong). P’aeng was a flawless employee Page 229 →who had been with the company since its founding. In front of Tong-jin and his family who just returned from a birthday party at TGI Fridays—a clear and unmistakable symbol of consumerism, free market capitalism, and class conflict—P’aeng slices up his own belly. This self-inflicted pain is not necessarily a symbol of disempowerment (or empowerment). Instead, this pain, like the other forms of self-inflicted pain in Park’s trilogy (e.g., Tae-su cutting off his own tongue), plays a critical role in an economy of moral action. P’aeng’s mistake was his naivetГ©. He let himself become the passive victim of the Asian financial crisis. P’aeng’s self-inflicted pain turned his mistake into a “transgression” for which he was answerable. It also turned him into a morally responsible person. Put simply, pain has the power to turn involuntary action and naivetГ© into a transgression and pain is itself a kind of action in that it establishes the secular virtue of responsibility.11 What Park’s trilogy thus exposes are the transgressions that lie at the root of the rapid development of liberal democracy and finance capitalism in Korea. As noted earlier, most, if not all, of the protagonists find themselves in the midst of a vicious circle of revenge largely as a consequence of a mistake they inadvertently made because of their naivetГ©. Ryu’s naivetГ©, for instance, led him to lose his kidney and his precious money, which in turn led him to kidnap Tong-jin’s daughter. Tae-su’s naivetГ© led him to share a secret that he should not have shared, which led to his incarceration and incestuous relationship with his daughter. KЕ-m-ja’s naivetГ© led her to take the fall for a crime that she did not commit, which in turn led to the deaths of numerous other children. As a consequence of their “honest” mistakes, almost no one is left unscathed. Ryu is robbed of a kidney, stabbed in the stomach, and left to bleed to death in a river. His lover YЕЏng-mi is electrocuted to death. Tong-jin’s daughter drowns and Tong-jin himself is stabbed multiple times. P’eng slices his belly open and later, together with his family, commits suicide with rat poison sprinkled over pizza. Tae-su is incarcerated against his will for fifteen years. He attempts suicide and cuts off his own tongue. The people who incarcerated Tae-su are beaten with a hammer. The same hammer is used to pull out the teeth of their boss. U-jin’s bodyguard (played by Kim PyЕЏng-ok) is stabbed in the ear with a pair of scissors and then shot in the head. U-jin shoots himself in the head as well. KЕ-mja is incarcerated and forced to part ways with her infant daughter. She also cuts off her finger. The “witch” in prison (played by Ko Su-hЕ-i) is poisoned to death and Mr. Paek is tortured with various weapons until he dies. Pain is the price these individuals had to pay for being Page 230 →naive. Only pain could turn them into moral agents who were finally responsible for their transgressions. The three films that comprise the vengeance trilogy are largely stories about individuals who transform from

“ignorant,” naive, and kind people to shrewd, cunning, and cruel moral agents. This transformation also happens to function as an allegory. The trilogy is using its characteristic dark humor to criticize those who naively believe that they are free to do as they please under the newly democratized and procapitalist Korean state. What these Koreans, like Tae-su, do not realize is that they are actually living in a larger invisible prison. What one needs to do, as U-jin reminds Tae-su, is “free oneself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter and like a bird from the hand of the fowler” (Proverbs 6:5). The cruelty and violence of the trilogy is meant to shake its viewers out of the slumber that keeps them incarcerated in this larger prison of neoliberal democracy and free market capitalism.12 What the trilogy offers, to borrow the words of Artaud, is a dream and not a carbon copy of reality. Glimpses of this dream can be caught in seemingly insignificant motifs such as the angel. In Oldboy, the angel first appears in the form of wings. Tae-su had bought them for Mi-do’s third birthday. This also happens to be the day that Tae-su is kidnapped and incarcerated. The wings thus play the role of marking Tae-su’s entry into the path out of ignorance and toward responsibility. The wings, indeed, appear again when Tae-su learns the truth about his relationship with Mi-do. To heighten the suspense of Tae-su’s discovery of the horrifying truth, Park Chan-wook uses crosscutting to connect U-jin’s revelation of the truth with Mi-do’s discovery of the wings. Although it is Mi-do who flaps the wings on screen, the person who is actually set free from the larger prison is Tae-su. But is he really free? U-jin, before he commits suicide, challenges the tongue-less Tae-su to try to live with the truth. Taesu, however, chooses not to. KЕ-m-ja is perhaps no different. When told by the evangelical missionary that there is an angel behind her wicked witch-like face—and, of course, her face is wicked because of its seductive beauty—KЕ-m-ja asks, “If so, where was that angel when I was committing such wicked deeds?” KЕ-m-ja reaches a conclusion: the angel inside her only reveals itself when she invokes it through prayer and prison is an ideal place to learn to pray. Kindhearted KЕ-m-ja—the original title of the film—therefore begins to transform herself through prayer. She gradually leaves behind her naivetГ© and kindheartedness and transforms into a merciless vengeance-seeking angel. To mark this transformation, she even colors her eyes bright red. Page 231 →Not surprisingly, everyone who knew her as “kind-hearted KЕ-m-ja” will, without fail, note (always out loud) how much she’s changed. In Lady Vengeance it appears as if the angel finally prevails. Mr. Paek is made to suffer and experience pain and the angel will, as expected, appear. As noted earlier, it makes one last appearance during the communal sГ©ance at the bakery. Its appearance meant that those who held Mr. Paek accountable for his transgressions were now free. They were no longer passive, helpless victims. By seeking vengeance, they had become powerful moral agents. But this freedom and redemption is short-lived. They quickly return to the prison-world that lies just beyond the doors of the bakery. As the audience learns from the narration that closes the film, KЕ-m-ja too will not find the permanent redemption that she so eagerly sought. But “that is precisely why,” as the narrator tells us, “I liked KЕ-m-ja.” In the final shot, as she buries her face deeply into the tofu-shaped cake that she prepared for her daughter, it becomes evidently clear that KЕ-m-ja will continue to try to be “white” like a vengeful angel.

Notes 1. For an excellent treatment of the neoliberal restructuring of Korea, particularly in the realm of welfare practices and the normalization of a neoliberal subjectivity to regulate the post-IMF labor population in Korea, see Song 2009. 2. I borrow the expression “virtual citizenry” from Comaroff 2000, 308; also noted in Song 2009, 19. Jean and John Comaroff (Comaroff 2000) were referring more specifically to youths who, along with other disenfranchised social groups, often form their own illegal “twilight economies” as a marginalized people. 3. This was also noted by Kyung Hyun Kim; see Kim 2011, 190–92. As Kim claims, “In Park’s films, the body of an individual is almost a site of transgression that moves from вЂserv[ing] to protect the entire community’—to use RenГ© Girard’s description of sacrifice—to being a crude

repository of private assets, in which each body part can be exchanged for money in order to help realize capitalistic goals” (Kim 2011, 192). For a useful overview of the literature on the commodification of the body, see Sharp 2000. 4. These figures were released by the KONOS; see their website (www.konos.go.kr) and also the national index website (www.index.go.kr) maintained by the Korean Statistical Information Service for more relevant data. It seems worth noting here that the number of kidney transplants also gradually increased from a total of fourteen (brain dead seven and living donors seven) in 1995, six (all brain dead) in 1996, and three (all brain dead) in 1997 to an astonishing 319 (brain dead eighty-three and living donors 236) in 1998 and 308 (brain dead 121 and living donors 187) in 1999. 5. The number of kidney donors will also drop from 121 in 1999 to one hundred in 2000, ninety-nine in 2001, and sixty-eight in 2002. Page 232 →6. These figures are borrowed from the KONOS website (www.konos.go.kr) where one can find statistics for each organ. 7. It seems worth noting here that there was an alarming increase in the number of illegal organ sales in recent years. The number of cases related to the illegal sale of organs increased from 174 cases in 2010 to 754 in 2011. These figures were recently released by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The cause behind this sudden increase is not clear and requires closer scrutiny. 8. The subtitles in the US version distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures fails to mention that the donor was a brain death patient. 9. See especially Kim 2011, 192–94. A similar argument (i.e., in the postmodern context of Oldboy “the nostalgia for referentiality disappears entirely and only signifiers remain) can be found in Jeon 2009, 715. Jeon also argues that trauma in Oldboy is not about redressing the past but about forgetting it entirely; see Jeon 2009, 716. As this paper hopes to make clear, I disagree with this reading of Park’s film. 10. Steve Choe argues that Park’s trilogy “pushes the logic of revenge to its logical breaking point, ” which “makes way for an ethics initiated by the cinema itself, namely the possibility of pure and unconditional forgiveness”; see Choe 2009, 31. Park Chan-wook himself, as Choe duly notes, may have intended to reveal the absurdity of revenge by displaying the violence of revenge, but I find Choe’s argument about forgiveness unconvincing. I am, in fact, less interested in what Park Chan-wook intended to demonstrate in his trilogy than its (unintended?) implications for thinking about morality in post-IMF Korea. As I argue in this paper, it seems to be the naive expectation of forgiveness without seeking answerability (through vengeance)—the individuals who transgress are originally good and kind people—that “imprisons” and makes individuals “transgress.” 11. Talal Asad has cogently made a case for thinking of pain outside of the secular frame of responsibility and intention; see Asad 2003. 12. The purpose of this paper is not to evaluate the quality of Park’s trilogy. The fact that this paper reexamines the importance of cruelty and violence in Park’s trilogy, moreover, does not mean that it condones cruelty and violence. What has hopefully become clear is the irony of Park’s position: Park makes use of secular values (responsibility and free will) to criticize secularism, neoliberalism, and free market capitalism. Whether his films are successful in criticizing these modern doctrines or not cannot be simply gauged on the basis of ticket sales. Admittedly, this issue is too complex to be explored in the limited space of this paper and will therefore not be discussed here.

Works Cited Artaud, Atonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove Press. Artaud, Antonin, and James O. Morgan. 1958. “The Theatre of Cruelty.” The Tulane Drama Review 2 (3): 75–77. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Choe, Steve. 2009. “Love Your Enemies: Revenge and Forgiveness in Films by Park Chan-wook.” Korean Studies 33: 29–51. Page 233 →Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Dargis, Manohla. 2005a. “Sometimes Blood Really Isn’t Indelible.” The New York Times, March 3. Dargis, Manohla. 2005b. “For Want of a Kidney, a Child is Kidnapped and an Explosion of Shocking Violence Ensues.” The New York Times, August 19. Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. 2009. “Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17 (3): 713–40. Kim, Kyung Hyun. 2011. Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharp, Lesley A. 2000. “The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 287–328. Song, Jesook. 2009. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Epilogue Juhn Y. Ahn The seeds of the present volume were sown many years ago at a dinner table where a seemingly innocuous question about recent Korean films was raised: why are they so violent, sexually deviant, and yet so successful? The question, which failed to be adequately answered then, later served as the motivating force behind a conference on the broader theme of transgression in Korea. But rather than focus on cinematic representations of excessive violence and illicit sexual behavior, it seemed necessary to explore the growing Korean interest in transgression from a broader perspective. The films, it was suspected, had to be responding to larger historical concerns that could not be simply reduced to the erosion of traditional values in Korea. The papers presented at the conference and included in this volume vindicated this suspicion. Transgression was shown to be a concept that continued, since premodern times, to play an important role in drawing and redrawing the boundaries of the subject and nation in Korea. What the conference participants did not expect to discover was a complex and fragmented understanding of transgression. Surely, we assumed, transgression must always take the form of resistance to established boundaries, limits, and prohibitions. Could it, we wondered, be anything other than an attempt at selfempowerment? Our assumptions were quickly proven to be misguided. We discovered that transgression in Korea could not be reduced to the story of resistance and control. The present volume has tried to present our discovery in the form of a three-pronged argument. First, we cannot simply assume that the aim of transgression is always the dismantling of boundaries. Transgression, we argue, need not necessarily imply radical change. Indeed, the first three Page 236 →chapters of this volume demonstrated that, in premodern contexts, sanctioned transgressions sustained the illusion of a functioning discursive order and thus played a constitutive role in maintaining the status quo in Korea. Through its domestication (in popular tales, paintings, illustrated manuscripts, and so on), transgression was transformed into a means to support the realm of representation and hence control. Second, transgression can, however, pose a real threat to the established discursive order by resisting domestication and representation. The double suicide of Hong Ok-im and Kim YЕЏng-ju and the inscrutable gaze of the commodities in Kim Ki-yЕЏng’s film Housemaid illustrate how transgressions—same-sex companionship and extramarital, cross-class affairs—can expose the contradictions inherent to idealized images and representations of the modern subject in Korea (e.g., the “new woman” of the colonial period and the successful middle class of the 1960s). What we find at the root of these transgressions is a disavowal: the modern subject in Korea was expected to disavow forms of desire that were inconsistent with the bourgeois goals of secular enlightenment, the expansion of individual rights and freedoms, material prosperity, and the restructuring of society along nuclear family lines. It may be tempting to regard Hong Ok-im, Kim YЕЏng-ju, and Kim KiyЕЏng’s housemaid as instances of individuals who failed or refused to disavow these prohibited desires, but they, on the contrary, have been shown to be instances of the perfection of this disavowal. Third, transgression can take the seemingly paradoxical form of self-imposed constraint or control. Figures like the teenage girl YЕЏ-jin from the film Samaria and Oh Tae-su from the film Oldboy remind us that, where representation fails and control is lacking, that is, where the Law (or paternal function) is absent, subjects can “transgress” to bring the Law into existence. In these films, transgression counterintuitively takes the form of the voluntary renunciation of the fantasy of a nondiscursive truth (secret) or pleasure to which individuals are denied access. Transgression, in other words, takes the form of the voluntary acceptance of the nonexistent boundary or limit that separates individuals from this imagined truth or pleasure. The absence of the Law or paternal function is a problem that still confronts Korea today. The merciless reign of free market capitalism and liberal democracy has created victims everywhere: academic all-stars, wayward youths, the IMF homeless, the people who lost their lives on SewЕЏl, and so on. As shown in a few of the

chapters of this volume, one common Page 237 →response to the proliferation of victims under the neoliberal government of contemporary Korea has been the construction of objects of fantasy, that is, the “other” who can enjoy, to borrow Georges Bataille’s words, the “accursed domain.” No one, perhaps, serves as a better example of this fantasy than the infamous Choi Soon-sil. The present volume reaches the final stages of publication as the case against Choi is being made by prosecutors in court. She has been accused of colluding with President Park Geun-hye and exerting undue influence from behind the scenes to seek personal gain. Shortly after the revelation of the Choi Soon-sil scandal, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people gathered in Gwanghwamun Square to hold a peaceful candlelight protest. The protestors criticized the president’s collusion with Choi as a breach of the people’s trust and demanded her resignation. Candlelight vigils have continued to take place in Gwanghwamun Square and elsewhere every weekend since the scandal was made public. The protestors who gathered for the third candlelight vigil, which took place on November 12, numbered in the hundreds of thousands. In response to these developments, South Korea’s national assembly voted to impeach the president on December 9, 2016. After three tense months, the constitutional court of Korea upheld the impeachment of Park Geun-hye and removed her from office on March 10. A presidential election was held on two months later on May 9 and Moon Jae-in was sworn in as the new president the following day. Moon and his new cabinet quickly declared their desire to carry out prosecution reform and their decision to revisit transgressions that took place under the previous administration. There is no knowing what the ongoing investigation of the Choi Soon-sil scandal will eventually reveal, but one thing is certain: as it did in the past, transgression continues to structure the process of subject formation in Korea today. In the absence of limits and the paternal function, objects of fantasy like modern-day cannibals, organ traffickers, and Choi Soon-sil have come to function as the constitutive outside. Under South Korea’s neoliberal regime, subjects, in other words, partake in the enjoyment of the accursed domain obliquely and vicariously through the transgressions of the other who consumes human body parts, sells her own body to acquire capital, and manipulates the president and chaebЕЏl conglomerates to enrich herself and her daughter. How, then, can we use this knowledge to tackle problems such as the SewЕЏl tragedy? If Koreans truly wish to bring the “truth” of liberal democracy to light, then it may be necessary to first embrace the reality of its inherentPage 238 → transgressions (e.g., the relentless pursuit of capital and transparency). It may be necessary to refuse to see transgression as something that only the other enjoys. The transgressions of liberal democracy are ours. A similar point was made by the filmmaker Kim Ki-yЕЏng in his film Housemaid. There, the protagonist Tong-sik breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience, accusing them/us of espousing the fantasy (of infidelity) that he enjoyed in the film. The film thus challenges the audience to acknowledge the fantasy as their own. The present volume similarly challenges its readers to do the same. Once the acknowledgment (a passage Г l’acte in Lacanian term) of the disavowed fantasy as our own is made, neoliberal forms of transgression will lose its sway over us and we will finally be able to fashion a new subjectivity without this transgression. New discursive boundaries will have to be drawn, of course, but the violence inherent to this practice of drawing discursive boundaries will hopefully not have to haunt us any further in the form of the other’s transgressions.

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List of Contributors Juhn Y. Ahn is Assistant Professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His work focuses on the relationship between Buddhism and wealth in fourteenth-century Korea and the history of reading practices in Chan/Zen Buddhism. He was Kyujanggak Fellow at the International Center for Korean Studies, Seoul National University (2013) and recipient of the Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2010). His work appears in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Journal of Chinese Religions, Journal of Korean Studies, Japanese Religions, and the edited volume Modern Chinese Religion I: Song-Jin-Liao-Yuan (960–1368) (Brill, 2015). Karen S. Hwang taught art history at Vassar College and Wellesley College. She received her PhD in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Legitimacy, Genealogy, and the Icon: A Study of Mogao Cave 9, Dunhuang, of the Guiyijun Period (851–1002),” was completed in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Harvard University Merit-Based Dissertation Grant, and research grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and from the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies. She is the author of the Oxford Bibliographic Online entry on “Buddhist Art and Architecture of China” (2012). Her contributions to Korean studies include her work as Curatorial Assistant in the Chinese and Korean Arts department at LACMA, and her work as cotranslator of “The Monastery Hwangnyongsa and Buddhism of the Early Silla Period” by Park Youngbok in Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art from Korea and Japan (Japan Society, 2003). Se-Woong Koo received his PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, specializing in the role of religion in modern Korean national identity. He previously taught Asian religion and philosophyPage 240 → at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. He was Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre de Recherches sur la CorГ©e, a division of the Г‰cole des Hautes Г‰tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France, and Rice Family Foundation Visiting Fellow of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He regularly contributes articles to The New York Times and is currently the managing editor of the online journal Korea ExposГ©. Charles La Shure is Assistant Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University. He received his doctorate in classical Korean literature with a specialization in oral literature in 2011, and his research interests include Korean trickster tales and Korean film. His work appears in the academic journals T’ongbЕЏnyЕЏkhak yЕЏn’gu, Acta Koreana, Kihohak yЕЏn’gu, and Kubi munhak yЕЏn’gu. His translation of the novel Black Flower by Kim Young-ha was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012. Se-Mi Oh is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean History in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She received her PhD from Columbia University. She served as postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Kyujanggak Fellow at the International Center for Korean Studies, Seoul National University (2013). Her research interest is in the architectural and urban practices of Colonial Seoul of the 1920s and 1930s. In her book manuscript in progress entitled Seoul Streets: Surface Matters and Speech Matters, she examines the relationship between language, text, and media in tracing the discursive formation of modernity and colonialism through urban space. Peter Y. Paik is Associate Professor in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. His book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010. He is also the coeditor of Debt: Ethics, the Environment, and the Economy (Indiana University Press, 2013) and Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered (Rutgers University Press, 2009). Paik’s articles have appeared in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Theory and Event, and Religion and the Arts and in the essay collections Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art, and Social Practices and The Yale Broch Symposium. He is currently at work on two book

projects—the first is a study of the new South Korean Page 241 →cinema and the second takes up the question of what replaces authority in contemporary culture and society, focusing on the work of J. G. Ballard, Michel Houellebecq, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Manent, Jean Baudrillard, Philip Rieff, and Peter Sloterdijk. Myung-Sahm Suh is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Center for Critical Korean Studies at University of California Irvine. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His dissertation project examines a correlation among religion, political orientation, and generational consciousness through a case study of the emergence of the Christian Right in contemporary South Korea. He has written an entry on “South Korea” in the second edition of the Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices (forthcoming) and is currently working on a comparative study on church-state relations in South Korea and Taiwan in the postwar period. Bonnie Tilland is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yonsei University (Wonju). She received her PhD from the University of Washington. Her research focuses on South Korean women’s negotiations of care labor in the family and affect management through television dramas. She has recently published on the Korean mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship revisited, in The Journal of Korean Studies (2016). Jennifer Yum received her PhD from Harvard University in 2014. Her dissertation explored the early history of modern psychiatry in Korea. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Deborah W. Diehl Prize for Distinction in History (2005), Korea Foundation Fellowship for Dissertation Field Research (2010), and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Merit/Term Time Research Fellowship (2011). She is now an independent scholar and mother who currently resides in Vancouver, Canada.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to the illustrations. abortion, 98, 102n16 academic success fixed proclivity for, 13, 169, 175, 182 as smoke and mirrors process, 171, 179, 186 temporality of, 175, 184–85 as transgressible, 13, 166, 170 as transgressive, 13, 177, 179–80, 182 affect, 187 Agamben, Giorgio, 17n13 agency, moral, 15, 225–27, 228–31 Ahn, Juhn, 15, 215, 235 Ajŏssi (The Man from Nowhere, 2010), 96–97, 102n14 Amitābha, depicted in No Yŏng screen, 23, 24 answerability, 225, 228, 232n10 Answer Me, 1997 (Ŭngdaphara 1997), 170, 185–86, 187 Arai, Andrea, 182 Artaud, Atonin, 215, 216 Asad, Talal, 232n11 Aśoka, King, 43–44 atopy, 167, 188n3 auspicious omens, 43–47 autonomy, human, 4, 5–6 Avalokiteśvara, 38–42, 40 Avataṃsaka Sūtra, 38, 45 bandits, 55–56, 80–81 Bataille, Georges, 5–6, 237

Bell, Daniel, 196 Ben cao gang mu (Compendium of Materia Medica), 91 bianxiang tradition, 49n12 Boas, Franz, 53, 54 Bodhisattva of Compassion, 38–42, 40 body, commodification of, 219–20, 222, 231n3 body, retribution, 46, 47, 51n35 body, transformation, 46, 51n34, 51n36 body, true, 46, 47, 51n33 boundaries/limits as curse, 5–6, 10, 11–12 erased by transparency, 4, 5 paradoxical relationship with transgression, 5–7, 17n12, 236 violence of, 238 See also law Brinton, Daniel, 53 Buddha, Three Bodies of, 46, 47, 51nn33–36 Buddha Triad of Hwangnyongsa, 43–44 cannibalism abduction and murder for organs, 90–91 China blamed for, 10, 95, 96, 98–99 in ChosЕЏn period, 5, 10, 86–94 in contemporary South Korea, 95–99 as efficacious, 90, 91–92, 98, 99, 100, 102n15, 102n20 framed as victimizing South Koreans, 95–97, 98–99 Page 244 →as legitimate or virtuous, 5, 10, 86, 87–90, 92, 93, 101n6 moral evaluation of, 91, 95, 97–98, 99, 100 normalized by ritualization and commercialization, 94, 97–98, 99, 100 political/economic concerns expressed through, 98–99, 100–101

rejection of, 10, 85, 86, 87, 100 in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 222, 226 “transgressive” discussion of, 87, 93, 101n9 capitalism, free market community weakened by prosperity, 196–97 critiqued in vengeance trilogy films, 216–21, 229, 230, 232n12 New Right perspective on, 155, 156 rooted in transgression, 229 victims of, 236 “Casiopeia,” 172 cat’s cradle game, 130–31, 136, 137nn5–6 CCEJ (Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice), 142, 154, 155 Chang, Kyung-Sup, 198 Changan Monastery, 45 Cherniavsky, Eva, 181–82 children, paths to success for, 166, 179–80 See also academic success; fandom; pop idols Chi Man-wЕЏn, 140 China, 10, 95, 96, 98–99 Choe, Steve, 232n10 Ch’oe family, 36 Ch’oe So-ha, 90 Cho HЕ-i-ung,57 Choi Soon-sil, 237 Choi Sung-Bong, 191n16 Chong, Daham, 94 ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ (trickster) essential traits of, 57 historical context for, 56, 57, 78

vs. Pang Hak-chung, 83n46 relationship to poor and disadvantaged, 69 social order attacked by, 9 socioeconomic status improved by, 66 tales unique to, 57, 61, 73 transgressive language used by, 58–59, 61–63 Chŏng Yag-yong, 94 Chŏnju, 168 Chosŏn period (1392–1910) bandits in, 55–56 cannibalism during, 10, 86–94 political turmoil, 54–55 social revolution, 80 transgression reconfigured in, 94 trickster’s emergence during, 9, 55 Cho Tong-il, 57 Christian activism. See New (Christian) Right movement Chung, Hye Seung, 205, 209 Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ), 142, 154, 155 Comaroff, Jean, 231n2 Comaroff, John, 231n2 Committee for Promoting Globalization (Segyehwach’ujin wiwŏnhoe), 155 communism, 147–49, 159n7, 197 community, sense of, 3, 196–97, 207 compressed modernity, 198 credentials, attitudes toward, 170 cultural nationalist movement, 107, 108–10 cultural revolution, 197 culture, Korean

conservative vs. liberal, 197 dance music, 168, 188n4 generational rift in, 145–49, 199–200, 211 hierarchy and mythology in, 80 love and marriage, 172–73, 189n10 online connectedness, 166, 176, 188n2 patriarchal structure of, 109, 206–7, 211, 236, 237 “soft power” of, 188n1 temporality of, 175–77, 189n12 See also fandom activity Daoshi, 44 “delivery culture,” 175–76, 189n12 Page 245 →democracy, neoliberal critiqued in vengeance trilogy, 216, 220–21, 229, 230, 232n12 inherent transgressions of, 229, 237–38 Korea’s rapid conversion to, 3, 4, 12 victims of, 236–37 See also capitalism, free market democratization movement, Korean disintegration of, 149–53 generational rift in, 145–49 DharmakДЃya, 45, 46, 51n33 Dharmodgata as auspicious omen, 45, 47 distanced from 14th-century viewer, 34, 35 with Kб№Јitigharba, 25, 42 mode of apparition, 33, 46 as patron deity of Mt.KЕ-mgang,33, 47 transcendental status of, 42

12,000 manifestations of, 45 Wang KЕЏn’s encounter with, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33–34 Diamond Mountain. See Mt. KЕ-mgang disgust, 100 divine manifestations, 43–47 Dong Yuan, 31, 32 Douglas, Mary, 100 Dragon King, 42 Dream High (TЕ-rim hai), 170, 177–79, 184, 185 education, of “new women,” 108, 109, 111–12, 113, 114 educational system academic rankings, 191n19 class distinction within, 191n19 societal disillusionment with, 170, 171, 179, 181, 188n8 stresses of, 173–74, 176 student migration, 186–87 ethics, 224, 225, 232n10 Evangelical Left, 140, 158n1 “exam hell,” 173, 176 extreme cinema, 216 fandom activity ambivalence about, 169, 171–72 benefits of, 171–75 ethnographic vignettes, 167–68, 169–70 lack of temporal limits for, 185, 186, 187 reorientation of knowledge in, 187 sasaeng fans, 185–86 Fa yuan zhu lin (Daoshi), 44 filial piety, 88–89

films, South Korean extreme cinema, 216 violence and sex in, 199, 235 youth portrayal in, 13–15, 199–201, 210–11 See also morality, in film; specific titles forgiveness, 232n10 Foucault, Michel, 6–7 fraternal superego, 207 free will, 232n12 Galbraith, Patrick, 190n15 gallbladders, medicinal uses of, 90, 91 gaze in Hitchcock films, 133, 137 in The Housemaid, 12, 126, 131, 133–34, 136–37 Lacan’s theory of, 130 gender. See “new woman” ideal geomancy, 33–34 ginseng, 91–92, 101n8 Girard, RenГ©, 231n3 Glenn, Norval, 158n3 globalization, 99, 155, 156, 165 God of Study (KongbuЕ-i sin), 170, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185 Guo Xi, 31 Han, Byung-chul, 3, 4, 17nn10–11 Hannara Party, 143, 144 Heavenly Mandate auspicious omens indicating, 43, 44, 45 political subversion condemned and accepted by, 21–23, 34 Ho, Swee Lin, 170

Hollywood, 200, 216, 228 homonyms, in Korean folk tales, 61–62 homosexuality, 112–14, 116, 189n11, 236 Hong Kil-tong, 56, 80–81 Hong KyЕЏng-nae, 54–55 Page 246 →Hong Ok-im biographical background, 105, 106, 112–13 “new woman” ideal inadequate for, 109, 112, 120 relationship with Kim, 113 suicide of, 11, 105, 114, 115 Hong Sang-soo (Hong Sang-su), 199 hope, in reorientation of knowledge, 187 Housemaid, The (1960) audience as transgressive in, 136–37, 238 audience reaction to, 124, 125–26, 137 cat’s cradle symbolism in, 130–31, 136, 137nn5–6 critical responses to, 123, 124, 137n4 desires connected and explored in, 12, 127, 128, 131, 135–36, 136, 236 diegetic sounds in, 134 domestic–work boundaries traversed in, 11–12, 127, 134 gaze explored in, 12, 126, 131, 133–34, 136–37 middle-class explored by, 11, 12, 126–27, 132–33, 135–36 mimicry in, 127–28, 129 motifs repeated in, 128–29 optics of identity in, 126, 127–28, 129–30 plot summary, 123 similarity and difference juxtaposed in, 128 space as interlocuter in, 132 structure of, 11–12, 124, 125, 126, 136, 137, 238

subject–object relationships in, 12, 130–31, 132, 135–37 visual storytelling in, 131–32 human meat capsules, 10, 95–96, 97 Hwang, Karen, 8–9, 21 Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, 2010), 96–97 Identity Debate, 151 IMF crisis, 216–18, 224 Im Hyo-jong, 115, 118 Im Kwon-Taek, 183 Im Sang-soo (Im Sang-su), 199 individualism vs. communal responsibility, 206–7 dangers of, 14 favored by economic freedom, 196 in suicide choice, 118, 119 therapeutic, 197, 198, 207 as unprecedented historical development, 196–97 In Myŏng-jin, 150–51 inyuk k’aepsyul (human meat capsules), 10, 95–96, 97 Iryŏn, 43–45 Itoigawa shinjū, 113–14 Japan acting talent in, 190n15 colonial Korean publishing allowed by, 107, 120n4 emperor’s role in, 49n1 Heavenly Mandate in, 22 “love” and “heart” in educational context, 182 “modern girl” discourse in, 110–11 same-sex love in, 113

Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun, 232n9 Kammerspielfilm, 132 Kanghwa Island, 35, 35, 36–37, 44, 50n21 Karlin, Jason, 190n15 KFDA (Korean Food and Drug Administration), 96, 97 Ki, Empress, 45–46 “Kids Who Fall in Love With Stars,” 171 Kim, Kyung Hyun, 137n3, 223–25, 231n3 Kim, Yuna (Kim YЕЏna), 171–72 Kim Chang-jae, 112, 115 Kim Cha-song, 112 Kim Chin-ch’ŏl, 147 Kim Chin-hong (Kim Jin Hong), 139–40, 156 Kim Chong-hwan, 141 Kim Hong-sЕЏn, 10 Kim HЕЏn-sЕЏn, 57 Kim Il-sung, 147–48 Kim Ki-duk (Kim Ki-dЕЏk), 2, 199, 200, 205, 209 See also Samaria Page 247 →Kim Ki-jЕЏn, 109, 117 Kim Ki-young critical responses to, 123, 126, 128 gaze explored by, 12, 130, 133–34 limits interrogated by, 11–12 polar opposites contrasted by, 126 on story-within-a-story structure, 124, 125 visual storytelling, 131–32 See also Housemaid, The Kim Mun-su, 154

Kim Sŏn-dal (trickster) essential traits of, 57 historical context for, 56, 57, 78 marriage to prank victim, 75, 77 sexual pranks, 74 social order attacked by, 9 socioeconomic status improved by, 66 tales unique to, 57, 60, 65, 70–71, 72–73 targets of pranks, 69, 70–71 transgressive language used by, 60, 63–64 Kim So-yŏng, 137n3 Kim Ŭi-jŏng, 87, 93 Kim Yol-gyu, 81n3 Kim Yŏng-hwan, 147 Kim Yŏng-ju biographical background, 105, 106, 112 “new woman” ideal inadequate for, 109, 112, 120 relationship with Hong, 113 suicide of, 11, 105 Kim Young-sam, 154 King and the Clown, The (2005), 183 kisaeng (courtesans), 61–62, 72, 75–76 Kodera Kikuko, 110–11 Kongmojadǔl (“The Traffickers”), 96–97 KONOS (Korean Network for Organ Sharing), 220 Koo, Se-Woong, 10, 85 Korea, colonial (modern) cannibalism rejected during, 10 publishing in, 107, 120n4

suicide in, 106, 115–16 transgression disavowed in, 10–11 women in, 10–11, 106, 107, 108, 116–17 youth as individuals in, 189n10 Korea, contemporary cannibalism in, 95–99 conversion to neoliberalism, 3, 4, 12 democratization movement in, 145–49 failure of bioethics in, 98 moral agency in, 15 paths to success in, 13 self-generated constraint in, 12, 14, 236 Korea, premodern Chosŏn period, 9, 10, 54–56, 80, 86–94 Koryŏ period, 8, 33–34, 36–37, 46 sanctioned transgression in, 8–10 Korea Foundation, 188n1 Korean Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 97 Korean culture. See culture, Korean Korean Food and Drug Administration (KFDA), 96, 97 Korean Network for Organ Sharing (KONOS), 220 “Korean Wave,” 171 Korea’s Got Talent, 191n16 Koryŏ period (918–1392) geographic politics of, 33–34, 46 historical context for No Yŏng screen, 8 Kanghwa Island resistance, 36–37 Kṣitigharba, in No Yŏng screen as auspicous omen, 47

conflated with AvalokiteЕ›vara, 38, 39 function of, 36, 38, 50n20, 50n22 image description, 8, 23, 25, 26 political subversion framed as Heaven’s Mandate, 30 transcendental status of, 42 visual dominance of, 34–36, 38 ku (crying), 187 Kumagai Nobuo, 27, 37 KЕ-mgang, Mt. (Diamond Mountain) Changan Monastery located on, 45 Dharmodgata as patron deity of, 33, 47 Dharmodgata’s manifestation on, 45 images venerated as sacred, 50n20 map, 35 No YЕЏng’s treatment of, 27, 29, 31, 32 Kungye, 37 Kutcher, Norman, 88 Page 248 →Kwangju-Democratization Movement, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152 Kwangju Uprising, 12–13, 144–50 Kwon, Boduerae, 189n10 Lacan, Jacques, 130–31, 132 Lady Vengeance (2005) angel motif in, 221, 231 commodified body parts in, 219–20 kindness and cruelty juxtaposed in, 226–27 law minimized in, 223, 227 moral agency explored in, 15, 227, 231 neoliberal democratization critiqued by, 220–21 responsibility for transgressions in, 226

language ambiguity of, 61, 62, 63, 64 tricksters’ transgressive use of, 58–64 La Shure, Charles, 9–10, 53 law anarchy as double of, 222–23, 227 impotence of, 15, 219, 221–22, 223 reintroduced through transgression, 236 withdrawal of, 221–24, 227, 236–37 Lee Chang-dong (Yi Ch’ang-dong), 14, 200 See also Poetry Lee Joon-seok (Yi Chun-sŏk), 2 Lee Jun-ik, 183 “level distance” (artistic technique), 31–33, 34 Li, Shizhen, 91 Lofty Power of Forests and Streams, The (Guo Xi), 31 love, 172–73, 189n10 Lukacs, Gabriella, 190n15 lying, in Korean folk tales, 58–60 Ma, Sheng-mei, 204, 205 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 206–7 MacDonald, Michael, 106 Mahbubani, Kishore, 197–98 Makarius, Laura, 54 Man from Nowhere, The (2010), 96–97, 102n14 March First Movement, 107 marriage, 189n10 mass consumption, 196 Maude, Francis, 3

Mazarella, William, 187 middle class, post-war desire and anxiety in, 11, 12, 132, 135–36 irony of identity in, 126–27 optics of, 135–36 ownership of/by objects, 132–33 See also Housemaid, The mimicry, 127–28, 129 Minju Nodong (Democratic Labor) Party, 144 mise-en-scène, 131–32, 133 Mitchell, W. J. T., 130–31 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 187 “modern girl” ideal, 110–11 modernity compressed, 198 in South Korean film and TV, 199 values and beliefs undermined in, 196–97 Moon Jae-in, 237 moral agency, 15, 225–27, 228–31 morality, in film breakdown of patriarchy, 206–7, 211 generational themes, 200–201, 205, 210 Hollywood’s oversimplification of, 216, 228 limited and amoral perspective of youth, 200 morality-fueled rage, 205–6 moral restraint as powerless, 206, 208 in P’aju (2009), 202 in Poetry (2010), 200–201 profit-driven moral economy, 207

in Samaria (2004), 202, 203–4, 205–10, 211–12 unresolved nature of, 201, 209–10, 212, 225 in vengeance trilogy, 15, 224–27, 228, 229, 230, 231 weakened by therapeutic individualism, 196–97, 207–8 morality, in TV dramas, 199, 212n3 mothers Page 249 →as education managers, 166, 171, 174, 180–81 ethnographic vignettes of, 166–69, 180–81 multiculturalism, 102n18 Mun, MyЕЏng-dae, 27, 37, 38, 49n9, 49n12 Mun, Pu-sik, 145–46 Mun Il-p’yЕЏng, 107 Murphy, Terence, 106 Myon-yae, 112–13 naivetГ©, 15, 229–30 National Council of Churches in Korea (NCCK), 146, 148, 159n11 negativity, 3, 4, 5 neoliberalism Korea’s post-IMF conversion to, 3, 4 paths to success affected by, 13, 181–82 SewЕЏl sinking blamed on, 3 supported by New Right, 12, 13, 140, 153–57, 155 transparency demanded by, 4 See also democracy, neoliberal New (Christian) Right movement Christian identity debated in, 151–53, 155–56 criticism of, 140–41, 158 economic advancement as motivation for, 155–57 failing democratization movement as motivation for, 149–53

founding of, 140 generational resentment as motivation for, 142–44, 157 generational rift and Kwangju uprising as motivation for, 144–49, 157 label applied to organizations, 158n2 neoliberal conservatism embraced by, 12, 13, 140, 153–57 vs. Old Right, 142–43 political conversion explanations, 141, 158n3 political transgression by, 140, 141, 157 vantage position of, 156–57, 158 “new woman” ideal contradictions inherent in, 236 critique of, 110–12 cultural nationalist construction of, 11, 108–10 education of, 108, 109, 111–12, 113, 114 vs. “old woman,” 107 transgressed by double suicide, 11, 120 unintended consequences of, 116 nihilism, 114–16 Nirmanakāya, 46, 51n34, 51n36 No Yŏng activity on Kanghwa Island, 37 artistic influences, 30–31 depicted in screen, 23, 26, 30, 42 political leanings, 37 No Yŏng screen auspicious omens in, 47 Chinese precedents for structure of, 44 famous features of, 23–30, 24–29 historical context for, 8

intended audience, 34–36, 38 Kб№Јitigarbha and AvalokiteЕ›vara conflated in, 38–43 “level-distance” structure employed in, 31, 32–33 political subversion normalized by, 8–9, 22–23, 30, 37–38, 48 reverse side composition, 30, 42 Obama, Barack, 3 OGP (Open Government Partnership), 3–4 Oh, Se-Mi, 11–12, 123 Oldboy (2003) angel motif in, 230–31 commodified body parts in, 219 critical reviews of, 232n9 ending of, 212 IMF crisis portrayed in, 217–18 kindness and cruelty juxtaposed in, 226 law minimized in, 223 moral agency explored in, 15 social and political critique in, 218–19 transgression explored in, 15, 226, 236 omens, auspicious, 43–47 Open Government Partnership (OGP), 3–4 oral literature, 57, 78, 82n26 Page 250 →organ harvesting, 220 organ trafficking, 90–91, 96–97, 222, 232n7 organ transplant industry, 220, 231nn4–5 O WЕЏn-ch’un, 96 Paik, Peter, 13–15, 195 pain and suffering, 228, 229, 232n11 P’aju (2009)

generational rift explored in, 199–200, 211 moral themes in, 14, 202 plot summary, 200, 201–2, 210 transgressive behavior of youth explored in, 14 Pak Е¬i-bung, 118–19 Pak YЕЏng-hЕ-i,110 Pang ChЕЏng-hwan, 117 Pang Hak-chung (trickster) vs. ChЕЏng Man-sЕЏ, 83n46 essential traits of, 57 historical context for, 56, 57, 78 marriage stories, 57, 66, 76 relationship to poor and disadvantaged, 69 sexual pranks, 75–76 social order attacked by, 9 socioeconomic categories violated by, 66 tales unique to, 57, 66, 69–70 transgressive language used by, 59–60, 61–64 Park, So Jin, 169 Park Chan-ok (Pak Ch’an-ok), 14, 200 See also P’aju Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk) accountability highlighted by, 225 critical reviews of, 216, 232n10 IMF crisis treatment, 216–17, 224 ironic positions of, 232n12 law critiqued by, 222 motifs employed by, 219, 221, 230–31 taboo and transgressive themes explored by, 199

“virtual” cinematic experiment, 224 See also Lady Vengeance; Oldboy; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; vengeance trilogy Park Chung-hee (Pak ChЕЏng-hЕ-i),139, 195 Park Geun-hye (Pak KЕ-n-hye),2, 17n7, 237 patriarchy, Korean breakdown of, 206–7, 211, 236, 237 as context for women, 78–79 criticized by cultural nationalists, 109 as cultural structure, 109, 206–7, 211, 236, 237 pessimism, 114–16 Pflugfelder, Gregory, 113 piety, filial, 88–89 placenta, human, 97–98, 99, 102n15 Poetry (2010), 14, 199–201 pop idols boy and girl groups, 191n17 as conventional path to success, 169–71, 175, 179–80, 188n7 creativity and flexibility of, 175, 184 entertainment industry corruption, 170, 178, 184, 188n8, 189n13 ethnographic vignettes, 168–69 Korea’s Got Talent, 191n16 student backgrounds, 182–83 temporality of, 175, 176, 184–85 university attendance by, 183–84, 188n8 postpatriarchal society, 206, 207, 211 prosumers, 180 Pu MyЕЏn-yae, 117 “puppy love,” 172–73, 189nn10–11 Radin, Paul, 54

“Reckless Death, A,” 119 “regime of the brother,” 206 religion, 196, 197, 198, 207 resentment, 224–25 resistance, political condemned and accepted by Heavenly Mandate, 21–22 normalized by No YЕЏng screen, 8–9, 22–23, 30, 37–38, 48 transgression broader than, 5–6, 15, 235 responsibility, 225, 228, 229, 230, 232n12 “retribution body,” 46, 47, 51n35 Page 251 →Rieff, Philip, 196–97, 198, 207 ritual pollution, theory of, 100 Roh Moo-hyun (No Mu-hyЕЏn) administration, 12, 142, 143, 144, 159nn5–6 sacrifice, 5, 17n13 Samaria (2004) feminist reading of, 209 generational rift explored in, 199–200, 205, 210, 211 impotence of moral authorities explored in, 14, 15, 206, 207 moral themes in, 202, 203–4, 205–10, 211–12 plot summary, 200, 202–6, 208–9 transgressive behavior of youth explored in, 14, 236 SambhogakДЃya, 46, 51n35 same-sex love, 112–14, 116, 189n11, 236 Samgang haengsilto, 87, 88, 93, 101n3 Samguk yusa (Miscellaneous History of the Three Kingdoms, IryЕЏn), 43–44 sasaeng fans, 185–86 Schwenger, Peter, 132 Seth, Michael, 191n19 SewЕЏl Ferry Act, 2, 17n8

SewЕЏl sinking, 1–3, 4, 16n2, 16n5, 16n7 SewЕЏl Truth, 2, 17n9 sex, 74–76, 100 sexuality, 6–7 shijitu (History Painting) genre, 50n29 Shin, Jiweon, 110, 111–12 Shinhwa, 191n17 SinjЕ-ng tongguk yЕЏji sЕ-ngnam(geographical history of Korea), 33, 49n15 Sin yЕЏsЕЏng (New Woman magazine), 105, 108 Sixth Republic, 95 SKDM (South Korean Democracy Movement), 2 “slave morality,” 224–25 SЕЏ, KyЕЏng-sЕЏk Christian concerns overshadowed, 156, 159n12 Christian heritage, 159n8 confrontation with progressive Christian activists, 141 conservative politics embraced by, 140, 154, 155 New Right movement organized by, 140 response to Kwangju uprising, 149–50 So Chun, 113 socialism, utopian, 139–40, 159n9 social media, 3, 4 “soft power,” 188n1 SЕЏk-chin, 88, 89, 90 Song, Jesook, 165, 170, 177 SЕЏnjo, King, 90 SЕЏnwЕЏnsa temple, 37 SЕЏp’yЕЏnje (1993), 183 South Korea

acting talent in, 190n15 cultural tensions in, 198 economic and political turnaround, 195–96, 198 generational rift in, 145–49, 199–200, 211 IMF crisis in, 216–18 pace of development in, 165 South Korean Democracy Movement (SKDM), 2 sovereignty, 5–6 “specs,” 183, 191n18 story-within-a-story structure, 124, 125, 126 Sudhana, 42 suffering and pain, 228, 229, 232n11 Suh, Myung-Sahm, 12–13, 139 suicide, Hong–Kim case history, 11, 105, 106, 114 media responses to, 105–6, 114–16, 117–19 “new women” ideal transgressed by, 11, 107 as platform for analyzing transgression, 105–6, 236 prohibited desires disavowed by, 236 suicide, Itoigawa shinjЕ«, 113–14 superego, fraternal, 207 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) commodified body parts in, 220, 222 as extreme cinema, 216 IMF crisis portrayed in, 216–18 Page 252 →kindness and cruelty juxtaposed in, 226, 227–28 law minimized in, 221–23 moral agency explored in, 15, 226, 230 pain as necessary in, 228–30

responsibility for transgressions in, 226, 227, 229 Tae Chang KЕ-m (The Great Jang Geum), 198 T’aejo, 8, 27, 34 Tale of Hong Kil-tong, The (HЕЏ Kyun), 56 tarento (talent), 190n15 teachers film tropes about, 178, 179, 190n14 student crushes on, 173, 189n11 teenagers. See youth television dramas, South Korean Answer Me, 1997, 170, 185–86, 187 Dream High, 170, 177–79, 181, 188n8 God of Study, 170, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185 Korea’s Got Talent, 191n16 morality in, 199, 212n3 Temple of Golden Dragon, 43–44 theater of cruelty, 215, 216 therapeutic individualism, 196–97, 198, 207–8 Tilland, Bonnie, 13, 165 TosЕЏn, 33 Traffickers, The (2012), 10, 96–97 “transformation body,” 46, 51n34, 51n36 transformation tableaux, 49n12 transgression academic success as, 13, 177, 179–80, 182 autonomy and, 4–6 body as site of, 231n3 committed by kind people, 225, 226–28, 232n10 disavowal of, 10, 236

of discursive limits, 11–12 of identity based on social agenda, 10–11, 152 illusion of functioning social order sustained by, 9–10, 81, 236 Korean interest in, 235 language as, 58–64 liberal democracy and finance capitalism rooted in, 229, 237–38 moral agency and, 15, 216, 225–26 morality and, 13–15, 199–200 naiveté transformed into, 15, 229–30 paradoxical relationship to limits, 5–7, 17n12, 236 political conversion as, 140, 141, 157 sanctioning of, 8–10, 236 self-restraint of, 4, 12, 93, 236 in Sewŏl tragedy, 1–2, 4, 16n2, 16n7 social-political structure buttressed by framing of, 10–11, 86, 92 story structure as vehicle of, 11–12, 126, 136, 137 subject formation through, 237–38 of subversion by Heavenly Mandate, 21–23, 34 transparency as, 4, 17nn10–11 as trickster identity, 71 in tricksters’ attacks on social order, 9–10, 55, 78, 81 transparency, 3–4, 17nn10–11 trickster, as multicultural archetype, 53–54, 81n3 tricksters, Korean free room and board gained by, 72 liminal nature of, 55, 64, 71, 79–80 as manifestations of archetype, 58, 81n3 marriages of, 57, 66, 75, 76 patriarchal ideas attacked by, 79

powerful and weak targeted by, 67–71, 78, 79 rich and poor targeted by, 65–67, 78, 79, 82n26 social-historical context for, 9, 55–56 social order improvements pursued by, 9–10, 81 social structure critiqued by, 9–10, 55, 78, 81 socioeconomic categories violated by, 64–71, 78 taboos and social mores violated by, 78, 79 transgressive language of, 58–64 transgressive nature of, 9–10, 53–54, 71 Page 253 →women targeted by, 63–64, 69–70, 72–77, 78–79 tricksters, Native American, 53 tricksters, tales about bathroom squatter, 65–66 civil service examination, 66–67 dragon dream, 75 drowning sack switch, 59–60, 69 fake meal and broken dishes, 70 general store wordplay, 62 insulting innkeeper’s daughter, 73 kЕЏmun’go (instrument)/kЕЏmЕ-n kЕЏ(black thing) switch, 61 men besting tricksters, 83n46 Pang Hak-chung and his master, 66 pranks on blind men, 70–71 pranks on patrolmen, 67–69 ringing the curfew bell, 61 sale of water in Taedong River, 57, 60, 65 scholar’s penis, 72–73 scratched-face assault, 72 servant wins master’s daughter in marriage, 57, 66

“stolen” horse, 62 stolen kisses, 73–74 too busy to tell a lie, 58 woman lifting skirt, 73 woman pounding grain, 69–70, 81n4 woman with scissors and cushion, 63–64 women besting tricksters, 76–77 “you just eat it,” 62 Tripitaka Koreana, 36, 44 “true body,” 46, 47, 51n33 trust, 3–4, 17n11 “Truth about Sales of Humans, Their Organs, and Flesh, The” (video), 98 TVXQ (boyband), 172 Underwood, Lilias, 92 United Kingdom, 3 United States cinematic portrayal of youth in, 200 Korean relationship with, 145–46, 147 social disintegration in, 197 teacher tropes in, 190n14 Uri Party, 144, 159n6 values, secular, 232n12 values, societal, 196–97 vengeance committed by kind people, 225, 226–28, 232n10 moral agency tied to, 225, 228, 231 as virtual, 223–25 vengeance trilogy angel motifs in, 221, 230–31

answerability established in, 225, 228 commodified body parts in, 219–20, 222, 231n3 IMF crisis allusions, 216–18, 224 kindness and cruelty juxtaposed in, 228 morality and ethics explored in, 15, 224–27, 228, 229, 230, 231 neoliberal democracy critiqued in, 216, 220–21, 229, 230, 232n12 personal resentment in, 221, 224–25 state and law minimized in, 219, 221–25 unfamiliar familiarities in, 224 vengeance as virtual in, 223–25 withdrawal of law in, 221–24 See also Lady Vengeance; Oldboy; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance “virtual citizenry,” 219, 231n2 Wang, Sixiang, 89, 101n6 Wang, Xiying, 187 Wang KЕЏn birth legend, 33–34 encounter with Dharmodgata, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33 KoryЕЏ dynasty founded by, 27 political subversion normalized by, 30, 33, 37 Wang Е-i namja (King and the Clown, 2005), 183 Water-Moon AvalokiteЕ›vara, 38–42, 40 Weber, Max, 156, 159n4 Wintry Grove and Layered Banks (Dong Yuan), 31, 32 Page 254 →women colonial social positions of, 78–79, 106, 107, 108, 116–17 libido/urination of, 77, 83n47 as means to an end, 74 pessimism of, 115–16

productivity mirrored in sexuality, 127 tricksters bested by, 76–77, 79 tricksters’ lack of respect for, 74–75 tricksters’ pranks on, 63–64, 69–70, 72–76 See also “new women” ideal Wu, Empress, 44 Wu, Weihua, 187 xenophobia, 100, 102n18 yangban, 59 Yang Kwi-jin, 86, 87 Yellow Sea, The (2010), 96–97 Yi, Chae-o, 154 Yi Ik, 56 Yi Kok epitaph, 45, 46, 50n30 Yi Kwang-su, 118 Yi Kye-jŏn, 101n9 Yi Man-gyu, 117–18 Yi Ton-hwa, 116 Yi U, 87, 93 Yi Ŭn-sang, 108 Yi Yŏng-hui, 118 Yi Yŏn-ho, 130 Yoo Byung-eun (Yu Pyŏng-ŏn), 17n7 youth film portrayals of, 13–15, 199–201, 210–11 generational rift, 199–200, 211 as individuals, 189n10 paths to success for, 166, 179–80 as prosumers, 180

“twilight economies” formed by, 231n2 Yum, Jennifer, 10–11, 105 Yun Ch’i-ho, 115 Yusa, 43–44 Žižek, Slovoj, 133, 135–36