While the U.S. Talks of War, South Korea Shudders
There is no war scenario that ends in victory.

By HAN KANG; OCT. 7, 2017

SEOUL, South Korea — I cannot turn my thoughts from the news article I happened to see a few days ago. A man in his 70s accidentally dropped two thick wads of cash in the street. Two people who happened upon this bundle of money and shared it between them were caught by the police, made to give up the money and charged with theft.

Up until here, it is still an ordinary story. But there was a special reason this man was carrying so much cash on him. “I’m worried that a war might be coming,” he told the police, “so I’d just taken my savings out of the bank and was on my way home.” He said that it was money he had saved — a little bit each month — for four years, intended to send his grandchildren to college. Since the Korean War broke out in 1950, war would have been the enduring experience of this man’s adolescence. I imagine what he would have been feeling, a man who has lived an ordinary middle-class life ever since, on his way to the bank to take out his savings. The terror, the unease, the impotence, the nervousness.

Unlike that man, I belong to the generation that never experienced the Korean War. Crossing the border to the North was already impossible before I was born, and even now it is forbidden for Southerners to meet or have contact with Northerners. For those of us of the postwar generation, the country known as North Korea is at times felt as a kind of surreal entity. Of course, rationally, I and other Southerners are aware that Pyongyang is only two hours by car from Seoul and that the war is not over but still only at a cease-fire. I know it exists in reality, not as a delusion or mirage, though the only way to check up on this is through maps and the news.

But as a fellow writer who is of a similar age to me once said, the DMZ at times feels like the ocean. As though we live not on a peninsula but on an island. And as this peculiar situation has continued for 60 years, South Koreans have reluctantly become accustomed to a taut and contradictory sensation of
indifference and tension.

Now and then, foreigners report that South Koreans have a mysterious attitude toward North Korea. Even as the rest of the world watches the North in fear, South Koreans appear unusually calm. Even as the North tests nuclear weapons, even amid reports of a possible pre-emptive strike on North Korea by the United States,

the schools, hospitals, bookshops, florists, theaters and cafes in the South all open their doors at the usual time. Small children climb into yellow school buses and wave at their parents through the windows; older students step into the buses in their uniforms, their hair still wet from washing; and lovers head to cafes carrying flowers and cake.

And yet, does this calm prove that South Koreans really are as indifferent as we might seem? Has everyone really managed to transcend the fear of war?

No, it is not so. Rather, the tension and terror that have accumulated for decades have burrowed deep inside us and show themselves in brief flashes even in humdrum conversation. Especially over the past few months, we have witnessed this tension gradually increasing, on the news day after day, and inside our own nervousness. People began to find out where the nearest air-raid shelter from their home and office is. Ahead of Chuseok, our harvest festival, some people even prepared gifts for their family — not the usual box of fruit, but “survival backpacks,” filled with a flashlight, a radio, medicine, biscuits. In train stations and airports, each time there is a news broadcast related to war, people gather in front of the television, watching the screen with tense faces.

That’s how things are with us. We are worried. We are afraid of the direct possibility of North Korea, just over the border, testing a nuclear weapon again and of a radiation leak. We are afraid of a gradually escalating war of words becoming war in reality.

Because there are days we still want to see arrive. Because there are loved ones beside us. Because there are 50 million people living in the south part of this peninsula, and the fact that there are 700,000 kindergartners among them is not a mere number to us.

One reason, even in these extreme circumstances, South Koreans are struggling to maintain a careful calm and equilibrium is that we feel more concretely than the rest of the world the existence of North Korea, too.

Because we naturally distinguish between dictatorships and those who suffer under them, we try to respond to circumstances holistically, going beyond the dichotomy of good and evil. For whose sake is war waged? This type of longstanding question is staring us straight in the face right now, as a vividly felt actuality.

In researching my novel “Human Acts,” which deals with the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when the military
dictatorship turned to the armed forces to suppress student protests against martial law, I had to widen
the field to include documents related not only to Gwangju but also to World War II, the Spanish Civil
War, Bosnia and the massacres of Native Americans.

Because what I ultimately wanted to focus on was not one particular time and place but the face of universal humanity that is revealed in the history of this world. I wanted to ask what it is that makes human beings harm others so brutally, and how we ought to understand those who never lose hold of their humanity in the face of violence. I wanted to grope toward a bridge spanning the yawning chasm between savagery and dignity. One of the many things I realized during my research is that in all wars and massacres there is a critical point at which human beings perceive certain other human beings as “subhuman” — because they have a different nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology. This realization, too, came at the same time: The last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering, which wins out over all of these biases.

And the fact that actual, practical volition and action, which goes beyond simple compassion for the
suffering of others, is demanded of us at every moment.

The Korean War was a proxy war enacted on the Korean Peninsula by neighboring great powers. Millions of people were butchered over those three brutal years, and the former national territory was utterly destroyed. Only relatively recently has it come to light that in this tragic process were several
instances of the American Army, officially our allies, massacring South Korean citizens. In the most well-known of these, the No Gun Ri Massacre, American soldiers drove hundreds of citizens, mainly women and children, under a stone bridge, then shot at them from both sides for several days, killing most of them. Why did it have to be like this? If they did not perceive the South Korean refugees as “subhuman,” if they had perceived the suffering of others completely and truly, as dignified human beings, would such a thing have been possible?

Now, nearly 70 years on, I am listening as hard as I can each day to what is being said on the news from America, and it sounds perilously familiar. “We have several scenarios.” “We will win.” “If war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, 20,000 South Koreans will be killed every day.” “Don’t worry, war won’t happen in America. Only on the Korean Peninsula.”

To the South Korean government, which speaks only of a solution of dialogue and peace in this situation of sharp confrontation, the president of the United States has said, “They only understand one thing.”

It’s an accurate comment. Koreans really do understand only one thing. We understand that any solution that is not peace is meaningless and that “victory” is just an empty slogan, absurd and impossible. People who absolutely do not want another proxy war are living, here and now, on the Korean Peninsula.

When I think about the months to come, I remember the candlelight of last winter. Every Saturday, in cities across South Korea, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered and sang together in protest against the corrupt government, holding candles in paper cups, shouting that the president should step down. I, too, was in the streets, holding up a flame of my own. At the time, we called it the “candlelight rally” or “candlelight demonstration”; we now call it our “candlelight revolution.”

We only wanted to change society through the quiet and peaceful tool of candlelight, and those who eventually made that into a reality — no, the tens of millions of human beings who have dignity, simply through having been born into this world as lives, weak and unsullied — carry on opening the doors of cafes and teahouses and hospitals and schools every day, going forward together one step at a time for the sake of a future that surges up afresh every moment. Who will speak, to them, of any scenario other than peace?

Han Kang is the author, most recently, of the novel “Human Acts.”
This essay was translated by Deborah Smith from the Korean.


작가 한강, NYT기고 “美 전쟁 말할때 한국 몸서리친다” 2017-10-08
7일 NYT 기고, 데보라 스미스 번역

'채식주의자'로 맨부커상 인터내셔널 부문을 수상한 소설가 한강© News1

한국 소설가 한강이 미 일간 뉴욕타임스(NYT) 7일자 기고문에서 전례 없는 한반도

긴장 국면에 한국인들이 바라는 것은 평화적 해결이라고 강조했다.

소설가 한강은 지난 해 채식주의자(The Vegetarian)로 영국 문학상 맨부커상

수상에 이어 지난 1일 소년이 온다(Human Acts)로 이탈리아 문학상 말라파르테

상을 수상했다. 이번 NYT 기고문은 ‘채식주의자’와 ‘소년이 온다’의 영어 번역본

을 옮긴 데보라 스미스가 번역했다. 

한강은 ‘미국이 전쟁을 언급할 때 한국은 몸서리친다 (While the U.S.

Talks of War, South Korea Shudders)’라는 제목의 기고에서 부제와

같이 ‘전쟁 시나리오는 승리할 수 없다’는 메시지를 강조했다. 

한강의 이번 기고는 공교롭게도 트럼프 대통령이 연이어 “폭풍 속의 고요” “(북한에

) 단 한 가지만 통할 것”이라며 군사 옵션을 시사한 상황에서 나왔다.

한강은 미국의 대북 선제 타격 등 군사 옵션 가능성이 커진 상황에서 한국은 겉으론

평화로운 일상이 계속되는 것 같다고 했다. 

그는 “한국인은 보이는 것처럼 정말로 (전쟁에)무감각할까. 모두가 전쟁의 공포를

이겨낸 걸까”라고 반문하며 “그렇지 않다. 오히려 수십 년간 축적된 긴장과 테러는

우리 안에 깊이 파고들었다”고 했다. 

한강은 “특히 지난 몇 개월간 이런 긴장이 계속 높아지는 것을 목격했다”며 사람들

은 저마다 집에서 가까운 방공호를 찾거나 추석을 앞두고 과일 상자가 아닌 ‘생존

배낭’을 선물로 주는 경우도 있었다고 했다.

그러면서 한국인들은 “전쟁에 대한 말들이 점차적으로 현실의 전쟁으로 변하는 것을

두려워한다”며 한국에 사는 5000만명의 사람들과 그 중의 유치원생 70만명은 그저

숫자가 아니라고 했다. 

한 작가는 한국인들이 전례 없는 긴장 속에서도 조심스러운 침착함과 일상을 유지하는

것에 대해 “우리는 독재 권력과 그 속에서 고통 받는 사람들을 구분해낼 수 있고 단

순히 선악이란 이분법을 넘어 전체적으로 상황에 반응하려 노력하기 때문”이라고 했다

. 

한강은 5·18 광주 민주화 운동을 다룬 장편소설 ‘소년이 온다’를 집필했을 때 제

2차 세계대전이나 스페인 내전 등도 함께 조사했다면서 “모든 전쟁과 학살은 인간이

다른 인간을 국적이나 인종, 종교, 이념이 다르다는 이유로 열등한 존재(sub

human)로 인식하는 임계점이 있다는 것을 깨달았다”고 했다. 

그러면서 “인간이 인간다울 수 있는 최후의 방어선은 완전하고 진실하게 다른 이의

고통을 인식하는 것”이라고 했다. 


그는 문재인 정부가 대북 문제를 두고 대화와 평화적 해법을 강조하는 상황을 가리켜

“미국 대통령은 이를 두고 ‘그들은 오직 하나밖에 모른다’고 말했다. 그것은 정확한

말이다. 한국인은 하나밖에 모른다. 우리는 평화적인 해법이 아닌 것은 의미없다”고

주장했다.

한강은 지난 해 박근혜 대통령의 탄핵을 촉구한 촛불 집회에 참석한 경험을 덧붙였다

. 그는 “우리는 촛불의 조용하고 평화적 방법으로 사회를 바꾸길 원했다. 그것은 결

국 현실이 됐다”면서 “평화가 아닌 다른 시나리오를 그들에게 말할 자가 누구인가”

라며 기고를 마무리했다.

(서울=뉴스1)

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