The Korean Mind. Boye Lafayette De Mente
Chinese.
The great Amhuk Ki ended on August 15, 1945, when Japan was defeated by the United States and its allies and Korea quickly reclaimed its sovereignty. But one kind of dark period ended only to have another one start just five years later. The United States agreed that Russian troops could occupy the northern half of Korea and disarm the Japanese troops there, while the U.S. forces would do the same thing in the southern half of the country. Both sides were to withdraw their forces from Korea as soon as the Japanese troops had been disarmed and shipped home. The United States fulfilled its commitment, but the Russians refused to withdraw from the northern half of Korea and quickly set up a Communist government under the leadership of Il Sung Kim, a dedicated Korean Communist. The Soviets then shipped most of the Japanese troops in North Korea to Siberia to be used as slave laborers rather than sending them home. (By the time these ex-Japanese soldiers who survived enslavement in Siberia were finally allowed to return to Japan in the 1950s, they had been so thoroughly brainwashed in communism that they immediately began staging strikes and sit-ins against the Japanese government and the American military forces in Japan, becoming an international embarrassment to Japan.)
Il Sung Kim, with massive Soviet aid, immediately began building up a large army of North Koreans and fortifying the line along the thirty-eighth parallel that had been selected as the boundary between the Soviet and American zones. But all was not calm in South Korea either. As soon as the U.S. withdrew its forces from the southern half of the peninsula, political factions began fighting over which group was going to run the government.
Finally, in September 1947, the United Nations called for elections in both the northern and southern portions of the country. The Soviet Union refused to allow North Korea to participate in the process, so elections were held only in the South. On August 15, 1948, three years to the day after the end of World War II, the UN presided over the establishment of the Republic of Korea, with veteran politician-patriot Syngman Rhee as its first president. Three weeks later the Soviet-backed Il Sung Kim proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Korea, with himself as president.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched a full-scale invasion of South Korea, capturing Seoul within a matter of hours and pushing the ill-prepared South Korean forces into a tiny pocket at the end of the peninsula. The United States, with UN approval and help from fifteen other UN member nations, quickly rallied a counterattack under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded American forces in the successful war against Japan and was then commander of the Allied forces occupying Japan.
The Allied counterattack succeeded in pushing the North Koreans out of South Korea, but when the Allied forces continued to pursue the North Koreans beyond the thirty-eighth parallel, China entered the war on the side of North Korea. Allied forces suffered enormous losses, and once again Seoul fell to combined Chinese and North Korean forces. General MacArthur proposed to attack China’s staging areas north of the Yalu River in Chinese territory and was fired by U.S. president Harry Truman because Truman and his advisers were afraid that would result in all-out war with China.
With Allied forces bowing to political pressure to stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, the fighting finally ended in a stalemate on July 27, 1953. Peace talks were begun in a special complex built hastily in a three-mile-wide demilitarized zone straddling the boundary between North and South Korea.
The war devastated both North and South Korea. In addition to some 1.5 million people killed on both sides, hundreds of thousands of families were torn apart by the division of the peninsula into two parts separated by a barrier that was one of the most heavily guarded strips of land in the world.
The second Amhuk Ki of the twentieth century was over for South Korea, but by that time communism had an even firmer grip on the northern portion of the peninsula and was imposing a different kind of darkness on the hapless people there.
Anae 안애 Ah-negh
Wives: The Inside People
Few societies have limited, or twisted, the lives of women as much as Korea’s Choson dynasty, which began in 1392 and formally ended in 1910. Under the influence of a Confucian ideology that restricted the role of urban women to childbearing and housework and farm women to childbearing, housework, and farmwork, the Choson court created a society in which the two sexes were segregated into different worlds.
Women were not allowed to meet, talk to, or associate in any way with any males outside their own families. When passing men—on the rare occasions that they did—they were required to avert their eyes. But the tradition of segregating males and females goes back much further in Korean history. The word for wife, anae (ah-negh), basically means “inside person” and reflects the image of wives that had existed in Korea since ancient times.
From the beginning of Korea’s recorded history, which more or less dates from the peninsula’s falling under the hegemony of China in 108 B.C., until modern times lower-class women were treated very much like property. To survive in this environment, women had to develop extraordinary resilience and willpower, characteristics that were regularly put to the test by internal strife as well as invasions from the outside.
In all social classes marriages were arranged to benefit the families. Wives could not initiate divorce or prevent husbands from divorcing them. Young women were regularly sold into slavery. Groups of young women, selected especially for their beauty, were also regularly sent as tribute to the harems of the imperial capital of China.
Korean women began to fare somewhat better in the last decades of the nineteenth century, by which time the Choson court had become virtually impotent and the country was being threatened by Japan as well as Western powers. But the few changes that did occur then mostly benefited a small number of unmarried girls from noble and well-to-do merchant families who were allowed to venture outside their walled homes, attend school, and participate in limited social activities. These first breaks with Confucian-oriented society generally did not extend to wives.
Korean wives were to remain virtually locked in the Middle Ages until the 1960s, by which time Korea had embarked on a remarkable economic as well as social transformation that was to sever many of its Confucian roots and greatly loosen the remainder of its ties with the past. This time the revolution was to benefit married as well as single women. By the 1980s Korean wives had caught up with their Japanese counterparts and in many respects had begun turning the tables on their work-harried husbands.
Like their Japanese neighbors, present-day Korean housewives are in day-today charge of their childrens’ education and generally act as the family bankers. Among the blue-and white-collar working classes, husbands generally turn their salaries over to their wives, keeping only a weekly or monthly allowance. Wives play equal or leading roles in deciding on major expenditures. Wives also initiate and manage most noncompany social events in which their families participate. About the only area that is still regarded as a strictly male obligation is the leading role in rituals honoring ancestors, but this too is gradually weakening.
One of the most important cultural changes in the lives of Korean anae was the almost mandatory rule that they give birth to sons or be divorced. Sons are still highly valued in Korean society, but without the force of law requiring strict obedience to the rites of ancestor worship and enforcing patrimony, male children are no longer absolutely necessary for Korean wives to maintain their roles and status.
Korean wives are no longer denied the right to enjoy aejong (aye-johng), or “love and affection.” Aein (aye-een), “lover” or “sweetheart,” is no longer a taboo word in the vocabulary of the young, and like their counterparts in other countries, more and more unmarried girls, formally addressed as Agassi (ah-gahs-she), which is the equivalent of “Miss,” take it for granted that it is morally permissible for them to have aein before they marry, and they are willing to confront society at large on the issue.
At the same time, kyurhon (kure-hoan), or “marriage,” is no longer viewed as a trap that condemns them to a life of servitude and loneliness from which there is virtually no escape. The possibility of ihon (ee-hohn), or “divorce,” is only one part of the changing scene for Korean wives.
A generic term for “housewife” or “mistress of the house” is chubu (chuu-buu).