SPEAKING
FREELY Jeju: From peace island to war
island By John Eperjesi
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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Korean-American
writer Paul Yoon's 2009 short story collection
Once the Shore (Sarabande), which
won the prize for fiction at the 13th Asian
American Literary Awards, is set on a
fictionalized version of Jeju Island and deals
with the devastating impact of militarism,
colonialism, and the cold war on a rugged island
culture.
In Once the Shore, Yoon
gives us Oceania from below, an island multitude
composed of service workers, farmers, divers,
fishermen, war orphans, and various others who
form strange friendships across barriers of age,
gender, ethnicity, and
nationality. The lead story
is set in the present and opens with a
sixty-something American woman at a high-end
tourist resort gazing out over the ocean while
thinking about her deceased husband, a Korean War
veteran who she comes to realize probably cheated
on her and lied about it when he returned from the
war.
She befriends a young Korean waiter
who often stands behind her listening, "as if it
weren't her voice at all, but one that originated
from the sea." During the woman's visit, the
waiter's brother, a fisherman, is killed when an
American submarine on training exercises surfaces
and sinks his fishing boat.
Throughout the
story, the waiter fixates on the terror of
drowning. Cold War past and present is fused in
the widow's and waiter's discrepant memories of
loved ones, their awkward, distracted friendship
grounded in the ability to partially identify with
the other's loss, a process of identification that
appears as each gazes silently out over the ocean,
beneath the glimmering surface of which submarines
cruise like whales on a hunt. Yoon has commented
that the initial idea for this story came from the
sinking of the Ehime Maru, a Japanese fishing
boat, by the USS Greenville, an American
nuclear-powered submarine, off the coast of Oahu
in 2001.
The relevance of Yoon's stories
to the real Jeju Island has recently intensified
as concrete has begun to pour on coral reefs to
make way for an "eco-friendly" military base for
South Korea's expanding blue water navy, at the
head of which is the 18,000 ton assault ship
symbolically named the Dokdo, which makes
it almost as big as the island in the East Sea it
is named after.
Many believe that the base
may also provide "lily pad" support for the United
States Navy. Leading local activists in the
anti-base movement have been arrested while peace
activists from all over the world have begun to
lend their support, most notably feminist writer
Gloria Steinem.
In a letter to friends
that has circulated widely on the Internet,
Steinem describes the epic volcanic beauty of Jeju
Island, which is home to three United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
World Heritage Sites. Steinem concludes the letter
stating, "Jeju Island means Women's Island. It
stands for an ancient balance. We must save it
from the cult of militarism that endangers us all,
women and men." Jeju is home to both The
International Peace Institute and Jeju Peace
Forum. In 2005, former Korean president Roh
Moo-hyun declared Jeju an "Island of World Peace."
Both Mongolia, which ruled Jeju from 1273
to 1374, and Japan, which ruled Jeju from 1910 to
1945, fought to capitalize on Jeju's strategic
proximity to China, Russia, and Japan. In 1948, a
multitudinous protest movement on Jeju known as
the April 3 Uprising organized against the
appointment of Syngman Rhee as president of Korea
by the US military.
The violent crackdown
on supposed communists and communist-sympathizers
by the South Korean army resulted in the death of
somewhere around 30,000 Jeju civilians. The April
3 Uprising has become a symbol of Jeju's
independence from the mainland. As historian Bruce
Cumings notes, "The people were deeply separatist
and did not like mainlanders; their wish was to be
left alone." This attitude is reflected in the
Korean drama Tamra: the Island, which is
set on Jeju during the 17th century and depicts
tensions between the between local divers and
farmers and an exploitative Confucian elite
residing in Seoul.
Protesters are
concerned about the cultural and environmental
impacts of the base and it is estimated that as
much as 90% of the people of Gangjeong, the
village on the southern part of Jeju where the
base is being constructed, are currently in
opposition. The histories of colonialism and the
cold war are still alive in the bodies and minds
of the people of Jeju who fought against both
Japanese colonialism and cold war
authoritarianism.
The remilitarization of
Jeju could pour salt water on wounds that have
never fully healed. In an article in the Jeju
Weekly, Dr Anne Hilty, a cultural health
psychologist living on Jeju Island writes: "In a
society brutalized and traumatized by the national
military, the idea of a military base on the
island which will house 25,000 troops is difficult
for Jeju's people to accept."
The November
23, 2010 bombing, evacuation, and increased
military deployment on Yeonpyeong Island located
near the disputed maritime border of North and
South Korea made it clear that the cold war is
still hot in this part of the world. We are
currently witnessing a re-cold warring of the
Pacific Rim of Asia as China looks to expand
control over shipping lanes in the South China Sea
and the US and Korea move to contain China by
expanding into the East China Sea.
When I
first moved to Korea in 2005, I believed that I
would see a peaceful end to the Korean War in my
lifetime. But with the wreckage of militarization
piling up from all directions in the Asia-Pacific
region, that hope is being blown farther and
farther into the future. In a recent article for
Project Syndicate, former Philippines president
Fidel Ramos argues that a Pax Asia-Pacifica needs
to replace Pax Americana in the region in order to
"contain our rivalries and avoid the arms buildup
that, unfortunately, now seem to be underway".
Fictional narratives like Once the
Shore and Tamra: the Island work to
restore humanity to islanders, a humanity that is
stripped away when islands are viewed as strategic
pieces in a regional game of risk. There was no
great outpouring of support in South Korea for the
people of Yeonpyeong, and there have been no
candlelight vigils in downtown Seoul over the
basing of Jeju, perhaps because as islanders, the
people of Yeonpyeong and Gangjeong are islanders
on the periphery of the nation. But what about the
people for whom the periphery is the center? For
whom the island is the mainland?
John Eperjesi is an assistant
professor of English at Kyung Hee University in
Seoul and the author of The Imperialist
Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in
American Culture, (UP New England, 2005). The
author would like to thank Dr Anne Hilty and
Professor Gwi Sook Gwon of Cheju National
University for their contributions.
(Copyright 2011, Asia Times Online.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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