I must admit that attending the segment of this year’s Bellarmine Forum hosted by Heangjin Park, assistant professor of Asian and Asian American Studies and the instructor of my “Economic and Political Issues in Contemporary Asia” course, was a somewhat surreal experience. After spending two and a half weeks in February reading and discussing “Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War” by Clara Han, and portions of “Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ” by Eleana Kim, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Professor Park would be hosting both authors in University Hall’s McIntosh Center on March 13th for presentations and a Q&A session.
I can’t remember another time in which a professor of mine provided students with the opportunity to interact in-person with the authors of the course’s assigned readings. As such, Wednesday’s event almost felt like a prolonged celebrity sighting of sorts—a rare opportunity to observe and interact with the human person behind respective texts that we, as a class, had become so familiar with. The first of the two authors to provide a brief speech was Eleana Kim, whose kind and distinguished demeanor, oratorial eloquence, and evident knowledgeability did not surprise me, given the rich complexity of “Making Peace with Nature’s” featured content and the intricacy with which said content is articulated. Clara Han followed with her own speech, and if Kim’s personality seemed to fit neatly with her text, Han’s did so all the more. “Seeing Like a Child” is unique as a text, as its stream-of-consciousness structure and approachable prose are far more experimental and, if I can put it this way, artistic, than the tried-and-true style of academic writing of which Kim is a master. While observing Han’s easygoing yet earnest method of speaking, complete with entertaining interjections, such as imitations of her young daughter Ella’s style of communication, it was by no means difficult to associate her with her out-of-the-box yet brilliant text.
Hopefully it is evident that I observed Clara Han and Eleana Kim, despite both being seasoned Korean-American anthropologists whose familial and individual lives have been deeply affected by the Korean War, to be two very different people. Witnessing these two clearly-distinct experts give speeches about their respective thoughts and experiences related to the Korean War, which, I will add, were not similar in regards to their subject matter either, prompted me to consider just how far-reaching the impact of this still-ongoing conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been. With this reality mind, we have all the more reason to consider the questions that Professor Park posed during his introduction speech: “…how do Koreans live with the unending war? How does the unfinished war affect people’s social, cultural, economic, and political lives? Can people avoid, ignore, finish, or move on from the war?” In her speech, Kim addressed these questions by speaking about her experience of studying the demilitarized zone that lies between the two Koreas, which has, due to the overwhelming number of landmines present within it, remained mostly free from human contact since the 1953 armistice was signed, and as such, has become a flourishing ecological safe-haven. After attending a 2008 lecture from the “DMZ Forum,” Kim was, “dumbfounded that Korean unification could ever be seen as secondary to [ecology].” Her subsequent experiences of field research in and around the DMZ area led her to consider the fact that peace is typically only understood in human/political terms, and she now claims that the DMZ situation suggests that another framework for understanding peace is needed, as, in her words, “[environmental peace] and human peace are inseparable.”
Senior psychology major Amanda Hsieh, whose midterm essay about Han and Kim’s books was read aloud at the event, relayed to her audience some of the conclusions drawn by Kim in her text. “Landmines continue to harm ecosystems and communities long after the war’s end. They contaminate soil and water, disrupt local livelihoods, and pose a constant threat of explosion. As remnants of U.S. involvement, they reflect the enduring consequences of military conflict on the environment.” Clara Han addressed Professor Park’s questions by posing another question to her audience: whether or not “Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War” is about the Korean War? She later answered this question by stating that it was not about the war, but rather, it was about “everything,” from care, pets, trees, Los Alamos, death, Baltimore, separated families, amputated names, etc. Her book, of which she read a few pages, details many of her personal life experiences, most of which have, at least in some way, been impacted by the Korean War.
Another student whose midterm essay was also read aloud connected the literal battleground of the Korean War to the metaphorical battleground of Han’s household as a child. Between her mother’s stroke and her father’s constant behavioral manifestations of resentment, the war-zone of the Han household was scattered with landmines of a certain nature that, similarly to the literal landmines found on the war-zone of the DMZ area, could violently disrupt the everyday lives of those in their territory. With this description in mind, understanding Han’s answer to her initial question, and why she continuously stressed the need to stop searching for a consolidated identity, becomes quite easy.
Han’s personal story and Kim’s environmental research, each detailed in their respective books, highlight the extremely wide-ranging, and often-overlooked, ripple effects of war, from domestic tension to environmental turmoil. Combining my experience of reading from these two works with the novel experience of having interacted with Han and Kim in-person only strengthened my fervor for the content of Professor Park’s “Economic and Political Issues in Contemporary Asia” course, as I believe, along with Han and Kim, that the Korean War, as well as its manifold ripple effects that have touched the lives of millions, both human and nonhuman, in far more dramatic and and grave ways than I would have assumed before taking this course, ought to be given far more attention.
