Park Sang-seek is known as a political science professor-turned-to a diplomat in Korea. Therefore, this collection of his short stories is a kind of surprise to me. I knew him in the 1970s when we taught at two different universities in Tidewater, Virginia. He returned to Korea as a resident scholar of the foreign minister’s think-tank. He was one of a very few African scholars among the Korean intellectuals. Then, he returned to the US as Boston’s Korean consulate general, later to the ambassadorship of UNESCO in Paris, and then of Singapore. After his retirement from the rector-ship of Kyunghee University International Studies Program, he published this book.

His career path in academia and diplomacy is somewhat distant from this collection of short stories. However, his literary work is not totally strange because he majored in English literature at Seoul National University. In early 1960s, he came to the United States for his graduate work in political science and international relations and taught at a college in Tidewater. Then, he did not reveal his literature background and writer’s ambition to me. After his retirement, he returned to his youthful ambition to write a short story book.

This book presented a portrait of a young writer in the 1950s. Short stories in this collection made me return to my youthful days in the 1950s as well. 1959 was the year I graduated my high school and entered college. Korea was the land of tears as Park titled his first literary book. The Korean War, 1950-1953, destroyed South Korean society completely. Poverty was rather a luxurious word on the society in which I grew up. Three meals a day made a person affluent. A great majority of Korean people could not feed three meals a day. There was no enough jobs to those who were seeking. Only a few could enter high schools and only very few could enter colleges. I belonged to the affluent society. Park was my senior by seven years.

South Korea’s per capita income was about 76 US dollars in 1967 when I left Korea for my graduate work at Indiana University. Land of Tears was South Korea that lasted until late 1970s after a series of five-year economic development plans achieved their goals. Young people now in Korea cannot fully understand nor comprehend the Land of Tears. The Korean War and post-War South Korea in poverty-stricken economy must have been the most powerful motivator to Park to become a writer. That period of the Korean history have been recorded by many poets and writers, but forgotten and not enough. So this collection of short stories is appreciated.

As an adolescent, he himself witnessed the Korean War and poverty-stricken country in the post- War Korea. As a college student, he wrote a prize-winning short story. His literary ambition was high. Short stories in this volume were his works in the 1950s during his college days. His entry to Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs made his writer’s ambition withhelf for some time. Sixty years later, he reopened his old manuscripts and published Land of Tears.

The first story was a conversion of an 8th century Silla poem to a short story. This was only one exception from the dreadful Korean War stories. It is based on the Silla Hyangga, in which an old man dedicated the beautiful flowers from the steep cliff to a young beautiful woman. The Song of Devotion was dedicated to a young woman by an old man who hid his love to a young woman who wanted the azalea picked up the flowers from the high cliff. No one could dare to pick up the flower, but the old man who loved her.

Some stories were Park’s fictions from revolutions or coups in developing nations in the 1950s and 1960s. The Wings of Icarus was based on a revolution in Kuwait and Thicker than Blood was based on a military coup in Vietnam. Turbulent politics and young revolutionary coup leaders were well sketched by this writer. The Legend of Lake Rotorua was a story based on a Korean young man in New Zealand during the Korean War. The places of these stories were outside Korea, but the time was based on the 1950s and early 1960s. Park’s imagination as a writer was flying very high and far to Middle East, Southeast Asia and New Zealand. The Wings of Icarus is a Greek myth and Lake Rotorua were not familiar vocabularies to me. Park must have acquired the Greek myth and a proper noun of Rotorua in New Zealand from his broad reading power of literature in the 1950s. I acquired these vocabularies much later when I became mature and I travelled world-widely.

A couple of short stories were on the corruption of the Korean bureaucracy in the 1950s. Everyone wanted a job or position inside the government bureaucracy. In a sense, there were two jobs available, one was farmer and another was bureaucrat. Then, small amount of money and gifts of apple box to the higher-up authorities were regarded as bribes and corruptions. The young soldiers’ training camp showed unnecessary mental and physical tortures to young trainees in the 1950s. Looking back, petty corruptions were laughable and the violence in the military organization was not pardonable. Crimes might be dictated by the time and space.

The Seven Shadows toward the end of this book was somewhat metaphysical and philosophical story reflecting a young man’s ambition as a writer, incorporating messages of four major Korean writers in the 1950s and the 1960s. A Dream in the Gray Zone might represent the mundane hopeless lives of a couple of artists, wounded North Korean soldiers, POWs who chose South Korea after the Korean War. All South Korean people struggled for living in the 1950s and 1960s. Young wounded North Korean refugees to the South must have more difficulties. Park tried to write stories as a neutral observer on them. These two stories could be existential reflections of Park’s inner world as a young artist in the 1950s.

The last story, The Pigeon and the Coin, was set in Paris. Tourists threw the coins into the fountain waters. Park tried to find the psychology of human beings throwing coins to the fountain. The author was interested in finding who was the first who threw the coins to the water and why. Then, he posted a Korean dictator who was ousted from the power discovered the Korean coin engraved with his face in the coin in a Paris fountain. Many coins in many nations were engraved with their political leaders, often dictators in developing nations. Of course, this was a fiction. The Korean president, Syngman Rhee, who was ousted from power by the college students’ street demonstrations in 1961 was to settle down in Hawaii where he spent his life as an independence fighter against the Japanese colonial rule in 1910-1945.

Land of Tears shall be one significant collection of short stories in the Korean literary history from post-war Korea, inquiring the existence of human beings in poverty-stricken political, social and economic conditions.

<Reviewed by Yearn Hong Choi>