I’m
interrupting the series on the organ tour of southern France to post a blurb on
a book just submitted to the publisher last week. The intense final efforts
to finish this baby (while also doing taxes) were largely responsible for my being MIA
in the blogosphere for nearly two months.
You might not
think a modern woman scientist and a Victorian travel writer would have much in
common. Yet in this travel memoir, I find myself channeling Isabella Bird
Bishop, a nineteenth century adventuress, who visited some of the same Korean
countryside I did a century later. The Korea I visited was no
longer her mysterious Hermit Kingdom of Asia but rather a divided and
dangerous world. During the century between our visits, Korea was abandoned
by China, deceived by Russia (and by the U.K. and U.S.), annexed by Japan, and finally 'liberated' by the
USSR and the U.N. Subsequently, the peninsula was subjected to a devastating three
year war and further fractured by Cold War ideology. The Korean War, in fact, never
officially ended.
This peninsula has recently emerged onto the world stage as both an economic success
story (South Korea) and an ideological, political nightmare (North Korea). Korea, Are You at Peace? is the personal story of a Western woman living
in the East, observing and trying to understand twenty-first century Korea and its
culture, as viewed against a historical backdrop provided by a late-nineteenth
century woman travel writer. Insights of others who
chronicled the devastating twentieth century in Korea are included in the narrative.
Korea, Are You at Peace recounts my experiences
as a teacher and U.S. military contractor, living, working, and traveling for two years in South Korea. I came to admire the courage and endurance of
the Korean people, but it was impossible not to sense their pain and anger, nor to
marvel at their extraordinary energy and resilience. Several intentions underlie
my desire to make these experiences public.
- To provide a brief, readable, historical overview of Korea, with the hope that Americans may better understand the country—its past and its people.
- To compare Korea, the reclusive Hermit Kingdom of Asia at the turn of the 20th century, with a radically altered Korea at the turn of the 21st century—a divided peninsula and a political tinderbox.
- To describe what it is like to be an American military contractor in a foreign land and to offer insight into the cultural discord engendered by an American military presence on a local foreign population.
- To narrate the often humorous challenges of a Western woman traveling alone in East Asia.
For a concise,
accurate, and sympathetic history of the Korean peninsula, read the Appendix of
this book. For an engaging narrative of Korea and its past century, read the
whole book.
