Names and Palimpsest in Linda Sue Park's 'When My Name Was Keoko'
When My Name Was Keoko
Linda Sue Park
Format: Hardcover, 208pp.
ISBN: 0618133356
Publisher: Clarion Books
Pub. Date: March 2002
Linda Sue Park's When My Name Was Keoko (2002) is a deceptively simple tale of a family living in occupied Korea. Economically written, the story is told in alternating chapters from the perspective of the children of the Kim family, Sun-hee and her older brother Tae-yul. The novel has a biographical feel to it, in part because of its historical background (it spans the five years during the second world war), and partly due to the convincing voices of its young narrators. The story of wartime Korea and the Kims--Abuji (father) the school's vice-principal, Omoni (mother), Uncle the printer, brave Tae-yul, and perceptive Sun-hee--intersect with themes of childhood, naming, and language with cultural imperialism.
When My Name Was Keoko begins with the Kim family reeling from the latest law imposed by the Japanese: all Koreans must take Japanese names. "'Let them! Let them arrest me! They will have my body but not my soul--my name is my soul!'" declares Uncle. Abuji comes up with a name that will appease the authorities and satisfy his family too: the Kims' ancestors lived in the mountains, and Kim means gold. Renaming his family the Kaneyamas (meaning "gold mountain" in Japanese") is a small rebellion against the law that itself is a symbol for the extent of Japanese imperialism.
The identities, right down to the names, of Koreans are subjugated to the empire. Sun-hee is rechristened Kameyama Keoko, and Tae-Yul is Kaneyama Nobuo. It is the time of the 1940 Olympics. The family listens as a Korean runner competes and wins under his Japanese name Kitei Son and under the Japanese flag, an event that Sun-hee regards with awe when Uncle is arrested and beaten for defacing newspaper photos of Kitei Son. Uncle, furious that Korea's pride should be stolen by the Japanese, protests by scribbling Kitei's birth name and wavy lines over the rising sun of the Japanese flag.
The flag is like neighbour Mrs. Ahn, who refuses to learn more than to count to five in Japanese: "'One hand. Five fingers of thought--that is all I will give them. Not one finger more.'" These are two of the many symbols that figure in the novel as a synecdoche (specific/part representing the general/whole). While recovering from injuries inflicted by the authorities, Uncle draws a forbidden picture of the Korean flag for the children, telling them to bow to it and never forget it. Later, when the Japanese confiscate precious rice and supplies from Korean civilians to aid the war effort, this clandestine patriotism is repeated by Tae-yul's crude carving of the Korean flag on the bottom of a bowl.
For decades, Japanese history and language are taught in schools; only those old enough to have lived in unoccupied Korea can read Korean. Japanese character writing or kanji, is mandatory in schools. Much to the chagrin of Tae-yul, who knows that there is nothing worth learning in school if it is the oppressor's history, Sun-hee learns to love and excel at kanji. With the eye of an artist, she appreciates the beauty of kanji and makes up stories to match the ideograms. Only later does she realise what it means to not just appropriate Japanese writing, but to openly admire it. Schoolboys taunt her with the epithet "chin-il-pa", or Japanese-lover, after she wins an award for high grades in kanji. When Abuji (father) explains that kanji and Korean writing both derived from the much older Chinese character writing, Sun-hee is both astounded and relieved. To be skilled at kanji is therefore not traitorous but a way to honour her ancestors.
Yet what is language but a most effective tool of the oppressor? From the education system to print media, from the renaming to the enforced block roll calls, language is a means of inclusion and exclusion. Sun-hee discovers this truth as she grows up:
"How could an alphabet--letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves--be important?
But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper.
It was all about words.
If words weren't so important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away."
Therefore, a secret word, meaning, action, or symbol is a form of resistance. Most insidious is Uncle's print shop, where he is by day a panderer to Japanese clients and by night the printer and writer for a resistance newspaper. The newspaper is written in both Korean and Japanese, since much of the populace grew up under Japanese rule. Abuji secretly writes for the newspaper after Uncle leaves, a fact not discovered until after the war is over. Eighteen-year-old Tae-yul, in order to throw the Japanese off the scent of his fleeing Uncle, volunteers to join the army.
Tae-yul's letters from Japan can scarcely contain anti-Japanese sentiments or information about the war, but even censors and the prevailing language are undermined by the agreed-upon 'code'. Through the code, he communicates to Sun-hee that he will be a kamikaze in a secret mission, and that Japan is losing the war. Underneath the plain desciptions of military life, "'his letters have messages of importance beyond the actual words'".
A less self-concious example of the power of words is that of Sun-hee's journal, written in kanji, and full of vague if earnest poems and prose about Uncle and everyday things. When a soldier finds the journal and dismisses it as childish scribblings before destroying it, Sun-hee tries in vain to retrieve the pages from the burning stove. Abuji tells Sun-hee later, "'they burn the paper, not the words'", inspiring her to write another journal. Later on, she writes in her new journal, "'You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man./ And you will find that his thoughts rise again/ in the mind of others--twice as strong as before!'"
When My Name Was Keoko concludes on a note of hope and progess, with the end of World War II, the restoration of the Korean flag and names, and Sun-hee teaching Tae-yul the first three letters of the Korean alphabet. What does it mean to write a book about Korea in English? Is this a Korean story, a Korean-American story (Park drew on experiences of her immigrant parents for Keoko.), or does it matter? The success of the book lies in how deftly Park reconciles the universality of the story and its characters with the value of its historical context.
Links
Colonial Period - Korean Studies at UC Berkeley
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