Mea Culpa:

Situations Vol. 2(Fall 2008) © 2008 by Yonsei University
Kyung Hyun Kim
East Asian Lang. & Lit., Film & Media Studies
(UC Irvine)
Mea Culpa:
Reading the North Korean as an Ethnic Other
in Recent South Korean Films
ABSTRACT
o less than 20 feature-length films were made on the subject of North Koreans by the
South Korean film industry between 2000 and 2007, the so-called Sunshine Policy period.
The South Korean film industry churned out film after film during this Sunshine period
using North Koreans as a character bank. From big-budget blockbuster productions such
as JSA (2000) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) to forgettable B-movie duds such as
Whistling Princess (Hwip’aram kongju, 2002), Love of orth and South (am nam buk
nyǒ, 2003), and orth Korean Guys (Tonghaemulgwa paekdusani, 2003), North Korean
characters created by South Korean film industry refused to adhere to the stereotypical
image of the North. Once fervently anti-Communist, South Korea’s recent films helped to
demonstrate that it had already removed North Koreans from its list of fictive villains.
Though such progress has been notable, this paper argues that the Sunshine Policy is in
essence a liberal policy that still perceives the North as the Other and the tendency of
South Korean films to liberalize their depictions of North Koreans reflects South Korea’s
desire to other-ize North Korea. This paper analyzes three films, blockbuster thriller
Typhoon, comedy Wedding Campaign (aǔi kyǒlhon wonǒnggi, Hwang Pyǒng-guk,
2005), and Innocent Steps (Taensǒǔi sunjông, Park Young-hoon (Pak Yông-hun), 2005),
48
which depict suffering North Korean/Yanbian women as characters who are both
unwavering in their goals and capable of redemption, in the process establishing new
stereotypical characterizations of North Korean women. And this emphasis on the
victimized women from the outside constitutes a kind of cultural mea culpa by South
Koreans which has much in common with the “race card” that has been exploited by
political and cultural agents in the United States.
49
VIRTUAL TOUR
It only took a couple of minutes. Quickly and swiftly, the bus operated by Hyundai Asan
crossed the DMZ, the 2.5 mile wide zone separating the North and South.1 There was
hardly any traffic, and the only other vehicle on this road I could spot other than the row
of tourist buses making the crossing was a North Korean military truck. For the first time,
I was officially in North Korea. Though it was the first day of March, the weather
forecast had predicted heavy snow. The day remained overcast, as the weather between
Seoul, which I had departed only four hours earlier, and the Geumgangsan (Diamond
Mountain) Tourist Region, was no different. But weather was probably the only thing
that remained the same between the two Koreas. The usual noisiness heard from the cellphone chatter on almost every corner of South Korea had remarkably disappeared. Just
as we boarded the special bus that makes the run between the North and South, they were
placed in plastic bags and taken away by the tour agents. Also removed were the traffic
noises that constantly bug you almost everywhere you go in the vast metropolitan area of
Seoul and its vicinities. 2 The North was unbelievably quiet—on and off the bus. The
absence of cell-phones and cars along with the ubiquity of guards and agents wearing
Kim Il-Sung badges had suddenly transformed the usually raucous and temperamental
South Korean tourists into remarkably laconic and obsequious creatures.
At the border checkpoint, I took out my navy-colored U.S. passport, expecting hostile
questions from the dark-skinned, lanky fellow in the retro-fit North Korean uniform.
However, despite the fact that I was probably the only one in my queue of about 20
tourists who had provided a passport other than a South Korean’s, I was spared from
special treatment. All I got was a brief stare—no longer than the one the previous person
1
Hyundai Asan is one of the companies of Hyundai Group, once the largest conglomerate founded by
Chung Joo-young (Chǒng Chu-yǒng) (1915-2001). Because Chung originally came from North Korea, he
always had special affection towards the North. Using his financial power, he had singlehandedly
engineered several North-South reconciliation projects–one of them being the Geumgangsan Tour.
2
Though limited to 20 per day, private vehicles driven by South Koreans are permitted to enter North’s
Geumgangsan resort as of March 17, 2008. This of course was invalidated after the July 11, 2008 incident
when Pak Wang-ja (Park Wang-ja), a 53-year old South Korean female tourist, was fatally shot by a North
Korean soldier at the resort.
50
in line had received. The North Korean representative only took several seconds to
review my passport, stamp a special visa on my entry card earlier disseminated by the
Hyundai Asan agent, and call for the next tourist waiting behind me. No words, no smile,
and no inquiry. For me, he represented the first live signifier of the Communist North
that I had come across; for him, I was just one of the many Korean Americans passing
through, meriting no more than a split second review during his mundane routines of
browsing through documents, stamping entry visas, and matching passport photos with
real faces.
Close to two million South Koreans have visited the Geumgangsan Special Tour Region
since the tour officially began in 1998, and since this entire zone is separated from real
North Korea with green-colored fences, it is tempting to call this region a part of the
South. In order to allow this region to be a South Korean tour resort, Onjeong Maeul of
the North had to be rezoned and its residents evacuated from the site. And as the fatal
shootings of a South Korean tourist Park Wang-ja had proven in this mountain resort,
only a few meters of wandering into the restricted area is likely to be met with North
Korean guards equipped with AK-47 and ready to fire.3 Only specially trained North
Koreans, Hyundai Asan employees from the South, and migrant workers from Yanbian
(China’s Korean Autonomous Prefecture) work in the Mt. Geumgang region—which
ironically provides only limited access to North Korean civilians.
Though at the moment of writing, this very tour symbolizing the reconciliation between
the two Koreas remains suspended and most of the restaurants, hotels, shops, theaters and
other facilities are managed either jointly or exclusively by the South Korean company
(Hyundai Asan), it is difficult not to acknowledge that a form of crossing had taken place
during the three days I was in North Korea. I—for the first time in my life—had struck
casual conversations with North Koreans who had neither defected nor had intended to
defect: tour guides, restaurant workers, and even a North Korean party cadre. They,
3
As soon as the 53-year old South Korean tourist was shot to death by a North Korean soldier at the
Geumgangsan resort, South Korea suspended the North Korean tour. The suspension of the tour program
was indefinitely extended when the North refused to cooperate with the South on an investigation into the
case and issued no apologies.
51
though hardly evidence of transgressions and disorders, in my mind, could expand into a
reproducible relation of forces that can be re-imagined into what amounts to a virtual site.
The virtual which I invoke here has very little in common with the “virtual” of the
“cyberspace,” but is akin to what was intended by Walter Benjamin who dreamt of Paris
as a city that would communicate itself through the walking flâneur. Of course, it is a
stretch to compare a North Korea’ special tour zone with the Paris’ Arcades,4 a hallmark
of modernist phantasmagoria where squares, shops, and theaters motivated boulevards of
continual non-stop movement. But to me, the walk along the Geumgangsan ridge
provided a virtual passage that was both a “translation filled with great potential”
[virtuelle übersetzung] and a passante that presented the landscape and the people of
North Korea as if they were a “moving force.”5
Over a couple of four-hour hikes along the Geumgangsan ridge, one encounters several
North Korean guides and party cadres who greet you at every post and are willing to
engage you in conversations on various topics. They range from casual everyday matter
(“what did you have for breakfast today before coming to work?”) to serious politics (“do
you really think the U.S. would abandon its hostile policies towards North Korea if it
successfully develops nuclear weapons?”), which might as well be a dream-like passage
where the Communist North behind the Iron Curtain partially and briefly reveals itself as
if it were the Capitalist South’s alter ego. Every question asked and each question
answered posed threats (somewhere between real and unreal) to each other’s legitimacy
that one could hardly imagine in both the U.S. and in South Korea that have moved far
beyond an era of intense ideological struggle. Even the slightest admission that the U.S.
is capable of producing poetic sounds (as evidenced by the New York Philharmonic’s
visit to Pyongyang that had taken place a couple of weeks before my visit), exercising
4
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
5
Kevin McLaughlin emphasizes the use of the word “virtuelle” in Benjamin’s writing as exemplified by
such statements: “All great texts contain [enthalten] their virtual translation [virtuelle Übersetzung].” This
sentence is derived from Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator” (Selected Writings, I: 263).
Virtuelle here means both “virtual” and “potential.” Kevin McLaughlin, “Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s
‘Arcades Project’,” in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed.
Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 208.
52
tolerance towards minorities (as Barack Obama’s surprising run at the presidency had
been reported), and sharing access to wealth with Koreans (as South Korea’s ascendancy
to the world’s leading rank in many economic fields had proved) made by the young
North Koreans I met took perhaps more than a small amount of courage, while my
cynical questions such as “how often do you travel to Pyongyang” had been motivated by
the stereotype of Communist’s ban on free travel. “There is no social system that does
not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to
seal the lines of flight,” [my emphasis]6 wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Though
it would be a great exaggeration to state that ordinary conversations between North
Korean agents and many visitors from the capitalist region represent perilous, subversive
acts, these virtual passages and exchanges would, I had come to believe, continue to
expand and extend such lines of flight. However, as if even these small openings were
too risky for both Koreas, Geumgangsan Tours were officially shut down on July 12th
2008—one day after the fatal shooting of a South Korean tourist Park Wang-ja took place
on the tour site.
SOUTH KOREA’S POPULAR IMAGES OF THE NORTH
As much as there are one-dimensional images about the U.S. that dominate the minds of
many North Koreans, the prevailing American stereotype about North Korea also
stubbornly insists on the image of Kim Jong-il as a ruthless, mad ruler who dreams of
firing nuclear weapons into U.S. soil. Therefore, it may be perhaps surprising to see that
in South Korea, a sworn ally of the U.S. over the past 6 decades and still a country where
over 30,000 U.S. troops remain, North Korea’s cinematic representation has radically
changed in recent times. In the popular media of South Korea, North Koreans have been
transformed from despicable enemies into characters worthy of redemption. Long gone
are the days when images of North Koreans as unredeemable villains dominated all of
6
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. & ed.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 204.
53
South Korea’s mainstream media, including cinema, television, radio, and even pulp
fiction.7
Most of the North Korean characters crafted by these films veer away from the
reprehensibly violent characters that were stock in all Korean War films and spy action
dramas from the Cold War period. During most of the three decades of military
dictatorship that stretched from 1960 to 1989, the vigilant censorship board then known
as the Public Performance Ethics Committee in South Korea discouraged any depiction
of war that failed to carry messages of anti-communism. For instance, Seven Female
Prisoners (7 i ŭi yŏp’oro, Yi Man-hŭi, 1965), a Korean War film that for the first time
attempted to depict soldiers of the People’s Army humanely, was found to be violating
the then-terrifying anticommunist law.8 The dominant images of the Korean War then
were the arms of a marine reaching desperately out from a trench to rescue his wounded
comrade, handsome faces of South Korean pilots in red scarves who risk their lives to
carry out dangerous missions across the enemy zone, and vicious and raw expressions of
the North Korean soldiers who are motivated by nothing more than killer instincts. In the
1990s, however, as the political mood in South Korea began to shift toward liberalization,
such dichotomous depictions of the war that simplistically characterized every North
Korean communist as a villain and every South Korean nationalist as a virtuous victor
became unfashionable. For instance, The Southern Army (ambugun, Chŏng Chi-yŏng,
1990) opened the floodgate of films that questioned the validity of depicting wartime
communists as one-dimensional enemies. Because of films subsequently released such as
To the Starry Island (Park Kwang-su, 1993), The Taebaek Mountains (Im Kwon-Taek,
1994), and Spring in My Hometown (Yi Kwang-mo, 1995) that attempted to represent the
complexities of the Korean War by focusing on internal psychological conflicts, the
dichotomous structure that required the depictions of all North Koreans as villains and all
South Koreans as heroes became largely invalidated.
7
Herculean efforts were made to vilify North Korea and its previous leader Kim Il-Sung that even
photographs of Kim were banned from all South Korean publications for years.
8
Seven Female Prisoners focuses on a North Korean officer and his psychological dilemma before he
defects to the South during the war. Although it is hardly a film that praises socialism or criticizes the
South, the film’s director Yi Man-hŭi was prosecuted for not following the ideological mantra of the
government, which firmly stipulated “no film will positively represent any member of the People’s Army.”
54
By 1999, the South Korean government had adopted a position of peaceful coexistence
and cooperation with North Korea, known as the Sunshine Policy. Concocted by Kim
Dae Jung, a man who emerged as South Korea’s most prominent dissident leader during
several decades of military dictatorship (1961-92) to become South Korea’s President in
1997, the Sunshine Policy abandoned South Korea’s previous staunch anti-communist
approach which refused to recognize North Korea’s legitimacy. Instead, it sought to
induce change and economic reform in North Korea through economic and other
incentives. This Sunshine Policy, formulated and implemented under Kim Dae Jung,
also thrived under the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration that followed.
The two
sides of Korea further warmed up to each other when Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong-il met
in 2000—the first meeting ever held between the heads of the states of North and South
Korea. With the conservatives voted in office during the 2007 election for the first time
since 1998, it remains to be seen whether South Korea will continue to pursue its liberal
policy towards North Korea.9
If the 1999-released Shiri (Kang Che-gyu, 1999) was the last film to rely on a Cold War
dichotomy to produce a ruthless North Korean villain and to attempt to reclaim South
Korean male agency through the destruction of a North Korean femme fatale. JSA: Joint
Security Area (Park Chan-wook, 2000) was the first film to defuse the stereotype of
North Koreans as South Korea’s less-than-friendly Other. 10 In JSA, the defiant North
Korean soldier, Sergeant Oh (played by Song Kang-ho) is depicted as a kind of hero.
Sergeant Oh is wittier, ideologically more loyal to his country, and psychologically
stronger than his South Korean counterpart, Yi Su-hyǒk (Lee Byung-hun). While Yi Suhyǒk remains traumatized—first by his fraternization with the enemy (Sergeant Oh) and
then by having been forced to kill his friends when his nocturnal visits across the DMZ
are busted by a North Korean commander—Sergeant Oh appears capable of pulling both
9
The conservative Grand National Party won the presidency and the majority of the National Assembly
during the two landslide elections held in 2007 and 2008.
10
See Chapter 10 “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”: Transgressive Agents, National Security, and
Blockbuster Aesthetics in Shiri (1999) and Joint Security Area (2000)” in Kyung Hyun Kim’s The
Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
55
himself and Su-hyǒk out of the “fine mess” Su-hyǒk has created. But despite Sergeant
Oh’s efforts, Su-hyǒk is unable to push himself beyond his trauma, and commits suicide.
In contrast, Sergeant Oh appears to have fully recovered from his crisis by the end of the
film, implying that his fine composure is the prerequisite of a capable soldier. What is
remarkable about the Sergeant Oh character is that he neither compromises his patriotic
allegiance to his country nor is he uncompromising, as all North Koreans who have
ultimately chosen not to defect to the South are presumed to be. Still, such a confident
and positive North Korean character in South Korean films has been extremely rare.
After all, t’albukjas, or North Korean defectors, who seek to get into South Korea for
work—and who are more frequently portrayed in more recent South Korean films—
require both the tolerance of South Koreans and the crucial knee-jerk mea culpa (an
acknowledgement of personal guilt or error) response in order to be eligible for an entry
visa and work permit.
No less than 20 feature-length films were made on the subject of North Koreans by the
South Korean film industry between 2000 and 2007, the so-called Sunshine Policy period.
Like a pious person finally breaking through the deepest of sexual inhibitions, the South
Korean film industry churned out film after film during this Sunshine period using North
Koreans as a character bank. From big-budget blockbuster productions such as JSA
(2000) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) to forgettable B-movie duds such as
Whistling Princess (Hwip’aram kongju, 2002), Love of orth and South (am nam puk
nyǒ, 2003), and orth Korean Guys (Tonghaemulgwa paekdusani, 2003),11 North Korean
characters created by South Korean film industry refused to adhere to the stereotypical
image of the North still insisted upon by the U.S. Ranging from accidental defectors
(orth Korean Guys) to the humane North Korean platoon leader during the Korean War
(Welcome to Dongmakgol) and the effervescent teenaged daughter of the Dear Leader
Kim Jong-Il (Whistling Princess), these films revealed that South Korea has already
parted ways with the United States on how to approach and represent the North. Even
11
All of the B-movies on the subject of North Korea made during this period such as these relied on
convention of comedy and produced a new stock in South Korean film industry: naïve and innocent North
Korean that departed from the sinister ones produced during the Cold War.
56
the most despicable North Korean character of recent times, Sin (played by Jang Donggun) from Typhoon (Taep’ung, Kwak Kyông-t’aek, 2005), was given a tragic childhood
on which his malice can be blamed. Once fervently anti-Communist, South Korea’s
recent films helped to demonstrate that it had already removed North Koreans from its
list of fictive villains.12
A few of these films featuring North Koreans were quite successful, but most of them
were not. Though Shiri and JSA, two blockbuster films made at the turn of the 20th
Century, pivoted around North Korean characters, North Korea as a subject matter had
become hackneyed and stale by the mid-2000s. Driven in part by the liberal views of
South Korean film directors and producers, and inspired by the global appetite for the
hallyu (Korean Wave), which demanded easily digestible plotlines incorporating ColdWar ingredients, screens in South Korea had for a while featured a continual stream of
stories that centered on North Korea or North Koreans. However, much as the
commercial fad for North Korean dialects and retro-style bars and restaurants that served
dishes named after North Korean cities passed after peaking in 2003, the South Korean
public quickly lost interest in these kinds of films. By the end of the Sunshine Policy era,
it became clear that neither the reunification comedies such as Underground RendezVous (Mannamŭi kwangjang, Kim Jong-jin, 2007) nor serious t’albukja dramas such as
Crossing (Kim T’ae-gyun, 2008), could radically alter the downward turn of the public’s
interest on the subject matter of North Korea.
Despite the plummeting public popularity of such films, a number of common tendencies
and patterns among them emerge upon closer examination. First, the plotlines tend to be
about border-crossings that take on transnational dimensions beyond just North and
South Korea. Many of them focus on t’albukjas, whose numbers are growing each year.
(Though reliable data is unavailable, some estimate that more than 100,000 t’albukjas are
scattered all over Asia, only a fraction of whom have been allowed into the South.)
Because so few North Koreans have been let into South Korea, most South Korean films
12
Filling the void of villainous roles instead were surprisingly, Americans, as evidenced by such
blockbuster hit films as Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) and The Host (2006).
57
featuring t’albukjas take place in locales outside of Korea such as China, Russia,
Uzbekhistan, and Mongolia among others. Second, when they exploit conventions of
melodrama between a South Korean and his or her unfortunate Northern counterpart,
they frequently do so according to the formula that tends to “other-ize” North Korea as a
naïve new subject who must learn to adapt to the capitalist values in order to avoid tragic
death. Third, in these romantic tales about relationships between North and South
Koreans, Northerners are usually depicted as female subjects.13
One of the main objectives of this paper is to argue that just as the Sunshine Policy is in
essence a liberal policy that perceives the North as the Other (undemocratic, resistant to a
capitalist marketplace, impenetrably Real in a postmodern universe that cannot be neither
absorbed nor absolved by the West) and that ultimately seeks to change North Korea
through reform, the tendency of South Korean films to liberalize their depictions of North
Koreans reflects South Korea’s desire to other-ize North Korea. This liberal form of
other-ization is critical in the mode of knowledge-production, albeit somewhere between
real and fictional, by which South Korea comes to understand its Northern counterpart. It
is a cultural mission, which accompanies the political tenor of Sunshine Policy, that
departs from the Cold War precepts that simplistically sought to vilify and annihilate the
North, and instead tries to inculcate the beauty of market reform and globalization to the
North. This process of other-ing, in due time, aims to transform North Korea (in the
popular imagination at least) into a subject willing to embrace reforms that remain in the
best interest of a South Korea hoping to provide peace and stability in the region without
having to engage the real North Korea into another nightmarish war.
Perhaps the best way to track this kind of argument is by following the depiction of
Korean diasporic women from either North Korea or Yanbian Prefecture in China in
recent popular South Korean films. Such characters play significant roles in the
blockbuster thriller Typhoon, comedy Wedding Campaign (aŭi kyǒlhon wonjǒnggi,
Hwang Pyǒng-guk, 2005), and Innocent Steps (Taensǒ ŭi sunjǒng, Park Young-hoon,
13
Of course, exceptions to this rule remain. A recent film, Crossing (Kim T’ae-gyun, 2008), actually
foregrounds a reluctant male talbukja who escapes the North in order to find penicillin needed for his dying
wife.
58
2005), which centrally features a Korean Yanbian woman. All three films enjoyed wide
theatrical releases in South Korea. Typhoon tells a story that stretches over at least five
countries (China, Thailand, North Korea, South Korea, and Russia) during a twenty-year
period (1985-2005). Though the film focuses on a male character Sin (though the more
widely used Romanization of this common Korean surname is “Shin,” the film
deliberately has dropped the “h” to accentuate his degenerate profile), a renegade North
Korean who has sworn to destroy both South and North Korea since it had betrayed him
and his family when they tried to cross the border from China, highlighted also is his
long-lost sister, Ch’oe Myǒng-ju.
Myǒng-ju, when found by the South Korean
authorities in order to lure and capture Sin, is a North Korean prostitute who is already
dying of a terminal disease in Vladivostok. In another film released in the same year,
Wedding Campaign, the narrative follows a young North Korean woman in Uzbekistan,
Kim Lara, who longs for a South Korean passport and entry into the country. In the third
film, Innocent Steps, a South Korean professional dancer revives his career as a trainer
when he accidentally marries, Ch’ae-rin, an undocumented Yanbian woman in a “fake
marriage scheme.”
All three films depict North Korean/Yanbian women as characters who are both
unwavering in their goals and capable of redemption, in the process establishing new
stereotypical characterizations of North Korean women. The moments of exculpation for
these North Korean female characters who had been forced to endure long periods of
suffering (Myǒng-ju dies in the middle of the narrative, Lara has to spectacularly jump
over the gate of the German Embassy in Tashkent to seek amnesty in the free world, and
Ch’ae-rin has to escape from a seedy nightclub where she was sold as a young prostitute)
can be said to reflect an acknowledgment of North Korea and Yanbian suffering—in
other words, they function as a kind of cultural mea culpa by South Koreans who have
long neglected the North Korean and illegal migrant worker situation. This mea culpa
found in popular narratives has much in common with the melodramatic “race card” that
has been widely exploited by political agents, for instance, in the United States through
59
novels and films such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 14
More
specifically, for the first time since the colonial period (1910 to 1945) when minjok
(nationalism based on homogeneous ethnicity) had first entered the public’s
consciousness because of the Japanese’ insistence upon making Koreans their secondclass citizens, these films about North Korea and other diasporic groups pronounce that
new versions of ethnic or intra-ethnic victimization have emerged in South Korean
popular culture. North Koreans undoubtedly are the leading subjects in these “race card”
melodramas, but also the Korean diasporic group from Yanbian, the Korean autonomous
prefecture located in the northeastern part of China, are very frequently cast. This paper
argues, though they initially promote minjok-juŭi (nationalist) and humanist agendas, that
the films made during the Sunshine Policy-era ultimately inspire and help create onedimensional stereotypes about North Koreans in the South that rarely move beyond the
“pathetic” Other-ization.
A closer examination of films like Typhoon, Wedding Campaign, and Innocent Steps
further clarifies how South Korean production of North Korean subjects continues to
serve the interests of a South Korea that is trying to come to terms with an internal
psychic and economic crisis of an anxious male subject. That anxiety is itself a displaced
symptom that engages the neighboring nation’s women without being either
conscientious or self-reflective about them. This in turn affirms a self-deluding Otherization that could be described by Edward Said’s notion of the “metropolitan
transfiguration of the colonial dilemma,” 15 a condition that could be said to be no
different from a hegemonic nation’s racial-ized construction of the colonized. Here I
insist that the relationship between North and South Korea is one that is no different from
one between Occident and Orient characterized by Said as “a relationship of power, of
14
Linda Williams writes how “it might be more useful to consider how extensively race cards have been in
play in the racial power games of American culture…To win at the ‘game’ of race is to lose the larger
game of life in which unraced competitors already play with a full deck.” Williams argues how the
wretched signs of racial-ized victims have reconstituted each and every form of American melodramas. See
Linda Willliams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J.
Simpson (Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 2002), 6-7.
15
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 184.
60
domination, and of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” 16 Just as much as
Flaubert’s depiction of an Egyptian courtesan represented a woman who could never
speak for herself, in these films, South Korea is figured as a “metropolitan male subject”
who is suffering from psychological angst while non-Capitalist North Korea and Yanbian
are positioned as the pristine gender-ed “Others” that help alleviate his malaise of
overachieved urbanization, messy modernization, and the inevitably collusive
relationships between business, politics, and capitalist expansion.
TYPHOON
Touted as the most expensive film made at the time of its release in South Korea ($15
million),17 Typhoon is loaded with action sequences. When an American naval ship that
has been attacked near the Taiwan Straits has a nuclear weapon receiver kit stolen from it,
Sin, initially identified as a nation-less pirate captain, is discovered to be the mastermind
behind the theft. The South Korean intelligence team, headed by the naval officer Kang
Se-jong, soon realizes that Sin intends to spray nuclear waste over both South and North
Korea using the propeller energy of a typhoon that is approaching the peninsula. Sin,
who speaks in thick North Korean accent, wants revenge. Both North and South Korea
had betrayed him and massacred his family twenty years previously when they attempted
to defect to South Korea. Needless to say, Sin is destroyed at the end of Typhoon by the
South Korean officer, but not before leaving behind a bad taste of sentimental guilt in
South Korean audiences for having created a monstrous “racial-ized victim” (though he
shares the same Korean heritage) caused by South Korea’s intolerant sociopolitical policy
towards North Korea, North Korean defectors, and anyone who bear their markers.
The most powerful performance in this action-packed but substance-less film belongs to
Sin’s sister, Myǒng-ju. Past South Korean films involving North Korean women, such as
Shiri, relied on a more typical Cold War formula wherein women were carved out of
16
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 5.
17
The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Kim Ji-woon, 2008) broke this most-expensive-film-made-yet record.
61
monstrous feminist bodies and envisioned as violent double-agent terrorists. Myǒng-ju’s
character is denser than the more one-dimensional terrorist, but she still remains a
fatalistic woman who can never emerge beyond her fatalistic victimhood. Having been
separated from her brother twenty years before, Myǒng-ju has barely been surviving as
an opium addict and a prostitute in Usurisk, a Russian town near Vladivostok, where a
sizeable population of Koreans has settled since the turn of the 20th century. Though only
in her 30s, Myǒng-ju has the body of a septuagenarian. She suffers from a brain tumor,
her vision is barely functional, and her frail arms are covered with bruises. Shots of
penicillin are all that keep her terminally ill body alive. Taken to a cottage by Kang, who
has misled her into thinking he is an investigator hired by her brother Sin, she soon finds
herself surrounded by a team of Korean CIA. She refuses at first to be used as bait to
capture her brother, and manages to steal a gun from Kang. But her resistance ultimately
collapses after Kang tells her that her brother has done unforgivable things to innocent
people.
This revelation prompts Myǒng-ju to reminisce in a thick North Korean dialect about
how their entire family had crossed the Tumen River in 1983 to seek freedom from the
totalitarian terror of North Korea, only to be fooled into believing that the Chinese
government had struck a deal with the South Korean government to send them back to
North Korea. Facing torture, an indefinite period of incarceration, and even decapitation
upon their return, Myǒng-ju’s family tries to escape, only to be shot down by Chinese
guards. The two surviving members of the slaughtered North Korean family, Myǒng-ju
and her brother Sin, had vowed as a result never to trust either South or North Korea, and
instead, to seek revenge against both. Kang Se-jong’s father, a South Korean officer, had
also been gunned down by North Koreans in the early 1980s while commanding troops in
an assignment against a North Korean spy submarine, so he remains sympathetic to
Myǒng-ju. She has unfairly suffered the nomadic life of a t’albukja with neither
citizenship nor a home, forced to wander about the plains of Manchuria without welcome.
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The film’s most painful scene takes place when South Korean intelligence agents who
have surrounded Sin and are close to capturing him gun Myǒng-ju down. By throwing
herself between the agents’ guns and her brother, she sacrifices her dirtied, beaten-down
body, producing the pathos of a film that seeks to dramatize the tragedy of the people
(t’albukja) who have been left outside the protection of either the Communist North or
the Capitalist South. However, her death, which takes place halfway into the narrative,
never moves beyond mere pathos: Myǒng-ju is never given the chance to say that her
rights as a Korean citizenship had been infringed upon, that “Even though I am a Korean
and I hate Communism, my rights to enter anti-Communist South Korea were denied. I
have suffered, and therefore I deserve retribution.” Her resentment is buried as little
more than a fiber of pathos, one that is moreover ultimately usurped by the film’s far
more prominent action sequences. Myǒng-ju is never allowed the agency that could
actually allow for her proper repatriation and recognition of her citizenship.
WEDDING CAMPAIGN
The story of Wedding Campaign revolves around the real-life crisis facing local men in
South Korea’s countryside who have been forced to remain bachelors because no eligible
women are left for them to marry. The film’s premise thus combines two of South
Korea’s largest social issues: first, the rising number of male farmers who are unable to
find brides as the number of women in the countryside is continually being drained by the
cities; and second, the growing influx of migrant workers and t’albukjas who provide
cheap labor in South Korea. The decreasing number of local women in South Korea’s
countryside and the increasing number of female North Korean defectors and migrants in
the South have led the South Korean film industry to develop dramas that exploit the old
Korean proverb, nam-nam-buk-nyǒ (南南南南), which roughly translates as “the best men
are found in the south and the best women in the north.”
Man-t’aek is a 38-year old farmer who has yet to find a suitable mate. This failure is not
just Man-t’aek’s own personal problem, but also an issue that impacts his entire family:
Man-t’aek is his family’s first-born son and needs to produce a male heir who can
63
continue to perform annual ancestral rites for his family. His father is long gone, but his
grandfather worries about Man-t’aek’s wedding prospects, and his 63-year old mother
still needs to “work her butt off” without foreseeable help along the way. His best friend,
Hi-ch’ǒl, a taxi driver, encourages Man-t’aek to explore the possibility of finding a wife
in Uzbekistan, where a sizable Korean settlement has existed since the Stalinist Era.
Man-t’aek and Hi-ch’ǒl pay $2000 each to a Korean-Uzbek matchmaking company and
land in Tashkent after a 7-hour plane ride. Coming from rural homes, Uzbekistan’s
capital Tashkent’s charming urban milieu and ample number of tall single women
impress both men. However, the marriage scheme turns out to be far from a smooth ride
for either man. Hi-ch’ǒl thinks that he deserves better than the affable and modestly
attractive woman who has been assigned him. Man-t’aek’s problem is even more
pronounced. He has a congenital tremor when in the presence of women, and
unsurprisingly, he fails at each and every date that his translator Lara arranges for him.
After all opportunities for Man-t’aek have been exhausted, he realizes in a Jane Austenesque plot twist that it is his matchmaker Lara with whom he has ultimately fallen in love.
Lara is a t’albukja who has been eagerly awaiting her chance to begin a new life in South
Korea. She has arranged for a counterfeit South Korean passport to be prepared for her
by her boss, but he insists that she pay the full amount she owes. She is US$2000 short,
an amount she’ll be able to earn as a fringe bonus once Man-t’aek successfully finds his
mate. It turns out, however, that the Korea-Uzbek wedding agency has been deemed
illegal by the Uzbek government. The boss is also nowhere to be found, and without him,
Lara’s passport is long gone. Both Man-t’aek and Hi-ch’ǒl face deportation with neither
a refund nor a wife.
Lara, now an illegal resident in Uzbekistan, would also face
expulsion to North Korea if caught by the authorities. However, unlike Myǒng-ju, who
remains a persona non grata in both North and South Korea, Lara earns the respect of
Man-t’aek, who promises her that he will return to Uzbekistan to fetch her.
Neither pity nor guilt motivates Man-t’aek to fall in love with Lara. Though a t’albukja,
Lara exemplifies both professional competence (as indicated by her linguistic skills in
64
both Korean and Russian) and career motivation (she needs to earn $2000 to buy her
passport to South Korea) that are desirable traits according to South Korean men. Lara is
both healthy and resourceful, and in many ways, bears no stigma of the famine-stricken,
backward Communist North. While this causes her character to stray from past
characterizations of North Korea, neither can she be described as a realistic portrayal of a
t’albukja. If it is indeed a mea culpa that is being invoked in these films, it would seem
that the predominant ideology in South Korea has yet to move beyond a hegemonic
American attempt to separate ruthless North Korean leadership from the innocent hungry
masses who are seeking refuge elsewhere.
In Wedding Campaign, the notion of South Korean provincial men rejuvenating
themselves results, ironically, in a fantastical depiction of a North Korean woman who is
in many ways more business-minded and transnational than the South Korean male. The
film ends with Korean intelligence men visiting Man-t’aek in his hometown to ask him
whether he knows of Lara, a t’albukja, who identified him as her guardian in South
Korea upon her entry. In this respect, Wedding Campaign also moves into the mea culpa
discourse that dominates many South Korean films about North Korea. By helping the
North Korean woman, the inept South Korean man who shudders at even the scent of a
woman has become revitalized. It is only a matter of time before unattractive and clumsy
South Korean Man-ch’ǒl reunites with savvy and resourceful North Korean Lara, who
needs a fresh new start in South Korea. Realistic or not, the plot’s emphasis on the
insufficiency of the South Korean men allows a North Korean woman to assume the role
of aiding and revitalizing their masculinity.
INNOCENT STEPS
If over 50 years of post-Korean War Korean films have produced powerful Americans—
both white and black—as the most dominant form of ethnic other and the unsullied
signifier that precipitated Korean men’s devirilization, recent years of economic
prosperity have brought about a renewed Korean interest in finding its inferior ethnic
other in its Asian neighbors that has, in reverse, helped to remasculinize the nation.
65
While South Korea’s economic recovery and the restored democracy of recent years have
helped to weaken the popular image of de-masculinized Korean men held up against the
powerful image of American occupiers, several narratives of phallic revitalization still
continue to be made in Korean cinema.
Beyond the North Korean women, these
remasculinization plots also exploit the bodies of Korean diasporic women from Yanbian,
from which the impotent and desecrated men can be nourished and reinvigorated. Such
use of what is familiar to us as typically colonial and racial-ized dynamics supports this
paper’s contention that contemporary Korea no longer qualifies as simply a victimized
subject reeling under foreign military occupation. It has become a consummate center
that also perceives a need to sexually adopt its own colonized other in order to resolve its
crisis of urban decay and intellectual angst as the backbone of the “racial-ized
victimization” discourse embedded in the mea culpa.
If Albert Camus had captured through his depiction of Arabs what Edward Said
characterized as the “waste and sadness” of French imperialism, the melancholia and
anxiety of Korean men could be said to have sprung forth from a paradigm that belongs
to both the First and the Third Worlds. Thus the otherness of the immigrant worker is
both defamiliarized and made familiar. After all, to use the term “colonized” to depict
the North Korean immigrant workers in South Korea is no small irony—not only because
the North has never been colonized by South Korea, but also because it is often
impossible to distinguish between South Koreans and many immigrant workers from
North Korea, Yanbian and other Chinese territories, just by looking at their faces. Many
of these immigrant workers (especially those from Yanbian and North Korea) are capable
of speaking in standard Seoul tongue after a few months of settlement. Yet the
heightened awareness of their positions as disenfranchised Other within the same ethnic
group in recent times continues to sprout up around the all-too-familiar bifurcated notion
of South Korea as an impotent, desecrated Fatherland and the immigrant women as a
locus of maternal imagination.
66
Innocent Steps centrally foregrounds aging male protagonists whose dreams of making it
big in the city have been shattered by both injury and ineptitude. Innocent Steps, a star
vehicle that sought to appeal to teenage girls and that performed strongly in the box
office, selling more than 2 million tickets in Korea, 18 features several themes and
elements. First, extending the theme explored in the aforementioned films, the
transformation of the aimless and unprincipled lives of the central male protagonists who
occupy dilapidated corners of urban Korea: Na Yǒng-sae undergoes a process of
revitalization through the love he develops towards a Korean woman from outside who
unexpectedly enters his life.
Second, Ch’ae-rin, the woman from Yanbian, who is
seeking a better future in South Korea, embodies the fantasy of the male protagonist by
providing an interminable well from which purity, innocence, and loyalty pour out. Third,
because Ch’ae-rin had been randomly matched with the male protagonist in a classic fake
marriage scheme to provide legal residence in South Korea in exchange for cash,
Innocent Steps naturally deconstructs marriage as an accoutrement of love and at the
same time reaffirm the possibility of love only as a principle and economy of fantasy that
is denied in reality.
I have argued that the most prevalent trend in Korean cinema during the past two or three
decades has been its turn towards remasculinization. 19
Identifying the desire for
“dominant men” as the dominant trope of the New Korean Cinema of the 1980s and the
1990s, I elaborate on Korean film texts anchored around the transformation from pathetic,
masochistic, and aimless youth to responsible manhood destined to acquire political
agency. Even though the politicized, post-traumatic recovery of the Korean male subject
no longer persists as the dominant narrative leitmotif of the new millennium, I claim,
images of the wretched men who have had their dreams and ideals taken away in the city
still linger as a vestige of an almost-formulaic recipe for South Korea’s commercial
cinema. I cites Whale Hunting (1984, Pae Ch’ang-ho), as a representative film where the
mission of a man is realized in a rural space where families and pastoral values still
18
At the time of its production, Mun Kun-yǒng, only 18, was arguably the biggest star in Korea. Innocent
Steps was based on a script developed by producers intended to exploit the popularity of Moon.
19
See Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2004).
67
provided identification—both collective and putatively organic—that temporarily
alleviated the anxiety and libidinal principles of urban exposure.
Yǒng-sae in Innocent Steps shares similar predicaments as the male protagonists created
twenty years earlier. All of these South Korean male characters, in other words, have
served as exiles in their own homes. In Innocent Steps, Yǒng-sae, a professional dancer,
has been defeated by his rival, Hyun-se, in a national sports dance competition and has
lost his lover as a result. He is no longer concerned about keeping himself in shape and
remains a slacker idly waiting for time to pass by. When Yǒng-sae is introduced after the
opening titles, he is seen stretched out on a sofa surrounded by empty bottles, an ashtray
filled to its brim, instant noodle cups, and other items that characterize both his
purposelessness and unkemptness. Nothing in his immediate residencies reinvigorates
Yǒng-sae, who is already past his prime. It is only the purity of these outside women
who can re-awaken the passion and the dreams of men whose hopes had long vanished in
the city ruled by greed and money.
Innocent Steps points briefly to prominent Chinatown in the Karibong-dong district of
Seoul where urban spaces suffer from desecration, de-industrialization, and dilapidation.
Karibong-dong (in Yeongdungpo) was a vibrant industrial center with hundreds of
factories located there during the Park Chung Hee-era (1961-79) only to have most of
them shut down since then. Not even the spectacle of a dance competition can lighten up
the film’s urban ambiance. Yǒng-sae, whose own performing career had been
prematurely ended because of a leg injury, is reborn as a dance trainer, when he is
matched with Ch’ae-rin, the woman from Yanbian, who knows neither standard Korean
nor professional dance moves. No longer accompanied by a competent partner, Yǒng-sae
must first train the girl who has landed on his lap after her identity was swapped with her
sister, a professional dancer.
Innocent Steps continue to excavate and exploit markers of the provincial that are no
longer drawn from local women but rather from women outside of Korea. Ch’ae-rin has
been dispensed through a fabricated marriage with Yǒng-sae. Her hard-working ethics
68
combined with her loyalty towards even her “fake” husband contrast sharply with the
qualities of Yǒng-sae’s previous Korean girlfriend, who had betrayed him for greener
pastures within the film’s first ten minutes. Cast in the roles of Ch’ae-rin is perhaps the
biggest young star in Korea: Moon Geun-young (Mun Kun-yǒng). Moon, who at the age
of only 16 catapulted into the ranks of A-list Korean actresses, plays the girl from
Yanbian in Innocent Steps. Moon Geun-young, with her naturally flat nose, uneven teeth,
and tiny physique, represents an anomaly among Korean actresses today and
disassociates herself from the desires and yearnings for the West or the libidinal economy
of the city generated by the emission of sexual lust and consumerism. As a matter of fact,
born and raised in Kwang-ju, a city in the Southwestern part of the peninsula, Moon’s
popularity is uniquely derived from her unspoiled provincial background. She therefore
cannot easily be accommodated into the sexualized labor marketplace despite the fact that
the she is sold to a pimp the minute she sets foot on Korean soil. Maintaining the binary
between the desecrated and corrupt Korea that sprawls endlessly into ugly urbanization
and the nurturing provinciality embodied by the Yanbian woman can only happen after
she is denied entry as a migrant sex worker.
Fearing that secret inspectors from Korean immigration are on their trail, Ch’ae-rin and
Yǒng-sae decide to pose for wedding pictures that they’ll pin onto their apartment wall.
This precipitates a moment in Innocent Steps where Ch’ae-rin and Yǒng-sae slip into a
fantasy landscape where they both attempt to construct a story of how they first met and
fell in love. While training for their dance competition, they start jabbing at each other
about their fictive love story—one that is both possible and plausible to the authorities—
between a female guide from Yanbian and a Korean bus driver. In dreams, they tour the
sites together: the Suwon Castle, the World Cup Soccer Stadium, and the Korean Folk
Village, until love ignites between the two. Since their marriage is only a pretense, this
too is an imagined memory. Yet this fantasy tour of monumental sites in Korea reveals
an ironically subversive attempt to undermine Korean history both traditional and modern.
All three sites—a ruin of a fortress destroyed during modernization and the war that had
to be reconstructed in the 1970s, the venue where the Korean national soccer team in
2002 won matches in controversially refereed games against technically superior
69
European teams, and the folk village erected during the tyrannical Park Chung Hee
regime (1961-1979) in order to attract foreign tourists—all historicize an identity of
Korea that is neither natural nor genuine. Like this self-referential acknowledgement of
the sites’ superficial, postmodern foundation, the love that transpires between Ch’ae-rin
and Yǒng-sae is stuck somewhere between genuine and invented feelings. If indeed their
forced marriage escapes the grim qualities of everyday realities—economic misery for
the Korean man and deportation for the Yanbian woman—who is to say that their love,
with its melodramatic ending, is more real than the fake wedding photo pinned up on the
wall of their apartment? Which is more real? The “I love you” messages exchanged
between Ch’ae-rin and Yǒng-sae through email and seen in the fantasy sequence or the
dance between the two that’s a training procedure for a competition that does not exist
outside the film’s diegesis? As is expected in every melodrama that features “fake
marriage schemes,”20 Innocent Steps flirts with a tragic plotline. Though revitalized and
all set to compete for the national sports dance championship, Yǒng-sae breaks his legs
right before the important finals. Ch’ae-rin, initially a novice, now has matured into a
professional dancer and desperately seeks a partner. Since Yǒng-sae is unavailable,
Ch’ae-rin has no choice but to accept Yǒng-sae’s rival, Hyun-se, as her partner during the
competition. She of course wins the national title, but only because Yǒng-sae has
accepted his role as a trainer rather than an active professional dancer, which completes
his transformation into a responsible manhood. Though Ch’ae-rin’s predicament initially
is rooted on a turf of artificially constructed Otherness, because she is still ethnically
Korean, the moment she adopts survival tactics of capitalism (internet skills and agile
20
Prior to Innocent Steps, in Korea, there was another high-profile film made on the subject matter of “fake
marriage scheme” between a Korean man and a Chinese woman: Failan (P’ailan, Song Hae-sung, 2001).
Failan, a realist film inspired by social issues, sold only about 400,000 tickets, but did receive a lot of
critical attention. Failan’s remake rights were also sold to the U.S. The opening sequence of Failan
parallels that of Innocent Steps where Kang-jae (played by Choi Min-sik), the film’s male protagonist, is
first seen sleeping in a tawdry game room in Incheon, a Western port city about 30 miles from Seoul.
Incheon is a city where Chinatown in Korea was first settled during the late 19th Century. Kang-jae’s drama
begins on the day he receives a letter from a Chinese woman for whom he had signed a fake marriage
document years ago in exchange for cash. The letter from dying Failan (played by a Hong Kong star
Cecilia Cheung) moves Kang-jae, who begins to recollect her memories. Unlike Failan’s memory that had
framed Kang-jae as a generous man, she, as a matter of fact, unbeknownst her, had been sold to a pimp
working at a seedy nightclub, only to have her illness, tuberculosis, nix the transaction. She eventually
found work at a dry cleaner/laundromat located in a small provincial town. Failan was so diligent with her
work at the dry cleaners that at one point her owner declares her to be a “human washing machine.”
Though Kang-jae is killed by members of his own gang at the very end, the film insists that he was able to
regain purification of his soul through his love for Failan.
70
dance moves) and ideological discourse of phallocentrism (curing of the male hysteria
and impotence), she is fully integrated into a nation that habitually claims one of the
highest percentages of ethnic homogeneity in the world. Innocent Step’s melodramatic
closure satisfies both the male fantasy and nationalist discourse that seeks to exploit
victimization and pity based on gender-ed ethnic differences.
CONCLUSION
Korea has for a very long time been a country that prides itself on its ethnic homogeneity.
Despite the fact that the number of non-Korean residents in Korea has been increasing
over the past two decades, it is inarguable that all of the documented uprisings of the
recent past have been rooted in strife over region, class, dictatorship, and colonial policy,
and not ethnicity. The representation of North Korean and immigrant female workers in
recent South Korean films registers the emergence of a new variety of melodrama that
exploits victimization and pity based on ethnic differences. In other words, despite the
fact that North Koreans do not separately constitute an entirely new ethnic group, I would
argue that the 60 years of two separate Koreas—spanning more than three generations—
compounded with the influx of strong wave of recent immigration make it impossible to
continue to presume a “one-people” theory. Even a small crack of exchange between the
two such as the Geumgangsan Tour, which potentially constitutes a line of flight,
unfortunately has proven to be costly for both North and South Korea. Too many years
have elapsed for one to insist that all Koreans are bound by the same cultural, behavioral,
linguistic, and physical commonalities. After six decades of economic, political, and
military ties with the U.S., wouldn’t South Koreans share more common ground with, say,
an American than with a North Korean? The segregated status between the North and
South for almost three generations that has never even officially sanctioned marriages
between members of the two regimes has prompted even Joongang Ilbo, one of the
leading dailies, to print a front-page special report article on Nov. 21, 2006, under a
sensational headline, “Ch’ehyǒng kyokch’a…injong i tallajinda” [Difference in Body
71
Type…Change in Ethnic Group]” 21 that questioned the validity of ethnic sameness
between the two Koreas. This article claims that beyond the ideological difference, there
remains a serious gap between North and South Korea on several areas such as the body
shape because of the differences in nutrition and medical care, which has led to virtual
contestation in the category of same ethnic classification.
Though such reports are surely exaggerated for they do not fully consider comprehensive
scientific and cultural data, there is a general agreement among both North and South
Koreans that the differences between language, cultural behaviors and physical
appearances of the two have been growing. Unless the severe form of segregation and
division ends, these growing differences will ultimately challenge whether Koreans can
be considered a single essential ethnic group at all. Exploiting such difference as a
melodramatic ingredient of pathetic victimhood is the construction of North Koreans or
immigrant women as racial-ized subjects erected in the South Korean popular discourse.
The poor victimized female bodies of Myǒng-ju, Lara, and Ch’ae-rin, all of whom
attempt life-threatening escapes from the totalitarian regime of the North Korea or
underdeveloped region of China, only to be shunned by the prosperous South Korea,
render meaningful visible signs of difference. The sick and bruised North Korean women
in these films create a virtual space in the South Korean popular discourse, much as the
beaten body of Uncle Tom evokes a specific liberal reaction in the U.S. As such, these
characterizations are in some ways a throwback to a distant era that far predates the
postmodern and industrialized South Korea where families were once uprooted from
rural communal spaces and women carried with them pojakis (clothing bundles) to
escape from high tenant rents by evil landlords or Japanese colonialists.
“Nationalism,” remarked an African character in Raymond Williams’ novel Second
Generation (1964), “is in this sense like class. To have it, and to feel it, is the only way
to end it. If you fail to claim it, or give it up too soon, you will merely be cheated, by
other classes and other nations.”22 For many South Koreans during this new decade of
21
Joongang Ilbo, “Chehyong kyokcha…’injong’ i dalrajinda” [Difference in Body Type… Change in
Ethnic Group], November 21, 2006: A1.
72
the 2000s where a stable national identity had been grappled with through its historical
colonized stance with both Japan and the U.S., North Korea and the Yanbian women
posed another post-ideological entity that they also needed to engage: one perhaps that
was more complicated than the fight against Communism itself. Contemporary South
Korean melodramas that feature pathetic women from Outside insist on both the
sameness that is derived from ethnic homogeneity and the difference precipitated by the
undeniable chasm between affluent South Korea and starving North Korea. The plight of
t’albukjas and Yanbian women in the present-day is real, but the one translated into
melodramatic plotline of these entertainment films reiterates a virtual mea culpa whose
primary intent is to produce tears for affluent South Koreans.
The renewed interest in identifying China or North Korea as South Korea’s ethnic other
helps to shore up national identity in the South rather than diminishing it. Despite the
climate of economic free trade and the promotion of a “borderless world,” this revitalized
nationalism has proven to be more durable in Korea than any other ideological mantras
that have swept over the country for many decades. Instead of defamiliarizing the
enormity of stable national citizenship, all of these films that foreground victimized
women as racial-ized other reaffirm the notion that the most salient site of citizenship is
established through the imaginary singular mode of nationhood where the “un-virtu(e)al”
flagship of homogeneous ethnicity still holds strong sway.
22
Terry Eagleton, The Eagleton Reader, ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1998), 359.
73
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Eagleton, Terry ed. The Eagleton Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1998.
Joongang Ilbo, “Chehyong kyokcha…’injong’ i dalrajinda” [Difference in Body Type…
Change in Ethnic Group], November 21, 2006: A1.
Kim, Kyung Hyun. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke
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Richter, Gerhard ed. Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and
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