A Visual Guide to The Seed of Joy - Part 3

The story of The Seed of Joy continues.

Let's have a look at one of my favorite places in Korea, St. Lazarus Village, on the outskirts of the city of Anyang. It's where Joel Reynoso, Paul's best friend, lives. He's a Peace Corps volunteer in the leprosy (more properly, Hansen's Disease) program. Here's how it's described in the book:

The ‘Hanguk Nabyong Yonguwon’—the Korean Leprosy Institute—gleamed clean and white and block-like before the shaggy mountainside against which it nestled, serenely poised within a small horseshoe-shaped valley near the city of Anyang, about twenty-five kilometres south of Seoul.
A cluster of houses, pig farms, and small factory workshops flanking the KLI and its hospital comprised the ‘leprosy re-settlement village’ called St Lazarus Village. Patients from all parts of Korea came to the hospital to be diagnosed and treated and, if Catholic, to live in the village. At the hospital they received antibiotics to render them non-infectious and physical therapy to ease the discomfort of their deformities. In the village they relied on Father Lee and his chapel for spiritual comfort and on eight Daughters of Charity for daily care. All who came to live there knew that they would die there, but no one seemed to mind. They were lucky, they believed, to live out their lives in the village—debilitated but happy in a little paradise of a valley far removed from bitter years of ostracism on the outside. It was better to live and die peacefully among one’s fellows than to endure a short living death in the outer world.

This is the entrance to the Village. It's a walk of about a mile from here to the KLI, but buses weren't routed there and most of the time you couldn't get a taxi driver to enter unless you insisted strenuously and paid extra. (Because of all the lepers in there, you know.) In all but the worst weather, though, it was a pleasant walk for a vigorous 20-something volunteer.

The valley was ringed with lovely low mountains that sported purple azaleas in the springtime, tawny colors in autumn, and a dusting of snow in winter.

The KLI sat in the middle of the valley against one of the hills. 

The most debilitated patients lived in the upper Village, up the valley from the KLI. There they were cared for by a group of about a dozen Catholic nuns. Sister Constance, an American nun of whom I grew quite fond, is the model for the character Sister Miriam in The Seed of Joy.

The chapel served the spiritual needs of all the residents of the Village. Like Paul in the book, I attended Christmas Eve Mass there in 1979 -- a deeply moving experience.

The grounds had several pieces of religious sculpture: the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary, and the first Korean priest, among others. They were painted bright white and at night they seemed to glow. Sometimes, walking around after dark, I forgot they were there -- and seeing them out of the corner of my eye they scared the living crap out of me.

And finally, here are some miscellaneous shots from around the valley and the Village.

Thanks for reading. Next time we'll continue the story with a trip to Chindo and other locales. 

Don't forget to buy your very own copy of The Seed of Joy and tell your friends about it! It's available in Kindle and iTunes editions.

A Visual Guide to The Seed of Joy - Part 2

Picking up where we left off in Part 1, this is Han Mi Jin, the main female character in The Seed of Joy. She's an English teacher in a middle school in Mokpo, and she forms a relationship with Paul while she gives him Korean lessons. She dies at the end of the story. (This is not a spoiler! We learn this in the very first sentence of the book.)

Mi Jin is active in the democracy movement at her old alma mater, Chonnan University in Kwangju. She makes a weekend trip to Kwangju to join a large group of students in a tussle with the riot police:

"The crowd turned slowly and moved en masse toward the main gate of the campus a short distance away. A group of students unfurled a ten-yard wide banner that read ‘DEATH TO THE YUSHIN CONSTITUTION!’. Singing a rhythmic song that urged the people to rise up and free themselves from tyranny, they marched a dozen abreast in neat rows. A long green line of police in riot gear waited for them just outside the gate. They were dressed in heavy green fatigues and held rectangular shields. Wire grille face plates and helmets that hung down behind, covering their necks, made them look like modernised Japanese samurai in battle gear. Their faces were obscured by gas masks."

Upon her return to Mokpo, she begins teaching Paul to speak Korean. Their lessons are held in a tabang, or tea room. As Koreans typically do not entertain any but their closest friends in their homes, the multitude of tabangs in Korea serve as meeting places for conversation or business. Most tabangs, like this one, are comfortable and slightly tacky. These days, a tabang is more likely to be called a cafe.

On one memorable evening in Mokpo, Paul and Mi Jin climb the stairs leading to the top of Mt. Yudal to enjoy the cool ocean breeze. There are several small pavilions along the way where you can stop. And the view is breathtaking.

Paul returns to Seoul. This is the Peace Corps office, located in the Kwanghwa Mun district. It's around the corner and down the main street from the US Embassy and the Capitol building.

On October 26, 1979, while Paul is in Seoul, President Pak Chong Hui is assassinated by the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and his bodyguards at a dinner party in Seoul. News of the event was suppressed until the following morning, after tanks had been set up around the city.

People gathered on street corners, listening to the radio for news about the investigation and any movement by the North Koreans. Luckily, North Korea chose not to misbehave during the crisis.

Within a few days of the assassination, the Capitol and the Kwanghwa Gate were hung with black and white bunting.

Masses of people flowed down the sidewalk ...

To pay their respects (or to appear to do so) at the shrine that had been set up in President Pak's honor.

The funeral was broadcast live throughout the country.

Finally, Paul and the other volunteers in Seoul were cleared to travel back to their homes down-country. This is the model for Paul's house in Mokpo. It's of a traditional design and has the classic tile roof with the raised corners. Nowadays these "hanok" houses are seen as cultural treasures and many of those that remain are highly prized.

The death of President Pak ushered in a period of heightened security throughout South Korea. In Mokpo, the roof of the train station served as a platform for a pair of .50 caliber machine guns. I didn't know what the government hoped to accomplish with those guns up there, but they sure made me nervous. Maybe that was the point.

Eventually, the presidential assassin, Kim Jae Kyu, went on trial. He reenacted the shots he fired at the president at the dinner party that ended badly. For the president. Kim was hanged not long after.

Thanks for reading. There's much more to come from the world of The Seed of Joy: a trip to Chindo, wintertime, and the long buildup to the Kwangju Uprising.

And remember: Buying a copy of the book and recommending it to your friends is good karma and may bring about world peace and prosperity. We'll never know unless you try, will we?

A Visual Guide to The Seed of Joy - Part 1

Permit me to indulge in a little bit of shameless self-promotion for my recently-published novel, The Seed of Joy. In the e-publishing world of today, without the backing of big publishers, it's expected of authors to be vocal advocates of their own work. What better way to do that than to highlight the factual underpinnings of the book? If you're presently reading the book, I hope these pictures will help you visualize the scenes that I wrote about. If you haven't bought the book, may the pictures pique your interest and nudge you toward checking it out.

The Seed of Joy is the story of two young people caught up in the chaos of rebellion. South Korea in 1979 was a country ruled by a dictator, Pak Chong Hui. After his assassination, a new, worse junta took his place. The nation's college students, especially those in the southern provinces, grew increasingly restive until the provincial capital Kwangju erupted into a violent clash known as the Kwangju Massacre. More than 2,000 students and average citizens were killed by government troops. Against this backdrop the two protagonists, Paul and Mi Jin, find meaning in their lives.

The places and events in The Seed of Joy are real. Much of the book is based on my own experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea.

Here is what The Seed of Joy looks like:

The story begins and ends in Mokpo, South Cholla Province, South Korea. As described in the book, it’s “the black sheep of the family of South Korean cities: a snot-nosed brat of a place on the south-west corner of the Korean Peninsula, the subject of countless folk songs in which a woman weeps because her lover has been exiled there.”

Mokpo has a mountain: a 750-foot double peak called Mount Yudal against which the city seems backed into a corner. The other side of the mountain fronts onto the sea. If you take the winding steps up the main ridge to the top of the mountain, you’re alternately treated to spectacular views of the city on one side and the sea on the other.

The main character, Paul, is a US Peace Corps volunteer assigned to the Mokpo City Health Center. This is the building as it appeared in 1979. The health center has since been relocated to a much bigger, more modern building.

The Tuberculosis Control Office was primitive by today's standards, but good work was done there. The public health workers (all women) spent most of their days going out and about through the city looking for new patients and tracking down those who were not taking their meds; interruptions in the lengthy drug regimen could result in drug-resistant infections, a huge problem in Mokpo. I went out home-visiting whenever I could.

Mrs. An was one of my favorite co-workers. She served as the model for Mrs. Mun, Paul's main co-worker. "Mrs Mun spoke no English and had no interest in learning any. Her best attribute, the one that had smoothed Paul’s way at the health center from the beginning, was something like a sixth sense, an uncanny ability to penetrate his atrocious Korean grammar and limited vocabulary and understand almost anything he tried to say. She continually gauged his level of skill and chose her words and structured her sentences at a level that he could understand."

A "kwajang" is an administrative chief. At the Mokpo City Health Center, Kwajang-nim did little work that I could see. From the book: "Kwajang-nim was a solid, well-fed, self-satisfied man in his fifties. He was, in Paul’s opinion, peculiar and a little spoiled, but not a bad sort after all. He could be much worse. Paul had heard stories from his Peace Corps colleagues, most of them probably exaggerated, about the antics of other kwajangs at health centres across the country: some of them went on violent rampages at the slightest departure from routine. Others never came to work at all, and still others demanded sexual favours from their female employees. Kwajang-nim’s own eccentricities were not outlandish enough to inspire such stories. He did come to work every morning, though late and chauffeured by the ambulance driver. He raged occasionally about small matters, but Paul suspected he did so only to keep his workers from ignoring him. He seemed to take little notice of the women who worked for him. His most annoying traits, in Paul’s eyes, were his utter lack of interest in the work of public health and his assumption that Paul’s function at the health centre was to be his personal language tutor."

Apart from the main avenues that traveled the length and width of the city, Mokpo's streets were somewhat ramshackle by modern standards.

What face did I see in my mind's eye when I wrote about Mi Jin, the main female character in The Seed of Joy? This is a pretty good approximation. Her name is Lee Yo-won, and she played the female lead in the Korean film May 18. Interestingly, May 18, like the book, is about the Kwangju Uprising; I recommend it, even though the romantic parts are a bit sappy.

Come back to this blog again soon - there's more to come with more pictures from The Seed of Joy. Please leave a comment to tell me what you think.

And most importantly, buy the book! It's available from Amazon.

A Cold Winter in Korea

Korean winters are famously cold; ask any Korean War veteran. Growing up in Wisconsin, I was used to cold winters. So when I went to South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1979, I figured I was prepared to take whatever northeast Asia could dish out. In statistical terms, winters in Korea were not that much worse than in Wisconsin. Temperatures rarely got lower than the 20s at night. The difference in Korea was that it was much harder to get warm.

In December, 1979 I moved from the almost subtropical climes of Mokpo, in South Cholla Province, to St. Lazarus Village near Anyang, near Seoul. The Village was a leprosy settlement run by a Catholic priest and a group of a half-dozen or so nuns. It also was the site of the Korean National Leprosy Institute. The nuns had a large dining hall halfway up the wooded hillside that they normally abandoned in winter in favor of a smaller, warmer dining room inside their dormitory. The hall had a large room with lots of windows, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It also had a small room, heated Korean-style with a wood-burning sub-floor heating system, where a cook would live. The sisters let me live in that room and have the run of the entire building. I strung a clothesline in the dining room and did my laundry in the kitchen sink.

Life was good -- until winter came.

Koreans traditionally heat their homes by heating the floor. In a culture in which people sit, eat, and sleep on the floor, that makes good sense. When the floor is good and warm, the air up to three feet above it is comfortable, too. But the moment you stand up, you notice the temperature difference between your head and your feet and feel compelled to sit back down again.

Evenings were good. Upon coming home from work I grabbed a few pieces of wood from the woodpile, shoved them into the receptacle under the floor, lit it, and soon the floor was nice and toasty. It stayed that way for the rest of the evening. Before retiring for the night, I took a quick trip outdoors to stoke the fire and put a few more logs on. By early morning, though, the fire had long ago gone out and I was shivering under the covers. I usually went to bed fully clothed.

"Fully clothed" means something different during a Korean winter. For me, here were my layers:

• Top -- t-shirt, long-underwear shirt, turtleneck, flannel shirt, a sweater vest, and a thicker sweater vest. If I went outside or into the dining hall to hang up my laundry, I added a down jacket.
• Below -- briefs, long-underwear pants, wool trousers.
• Feet -- regular socks, heavy woolen camping socks.
• Head -- the ever-present stocking cap.

And I was still cold.

By the way, that's a towel drying on the line.

Shameless self-promotion

My novel, "The Seed of Joy," is now available on Kindle and from iTunes. Please have a look. Great karma follows those who read and review! Here's the blurb:

Paul Harkin, a US Peace Corps Volunteer from Indiana, comes to Korea on his first trip away from home. The Peace Corps gives him more than he ever bargained for - from a comically inept public health official, to violent political strife in the cities, to a hard winter in a leper colony. But when he falls in love with Han Mi Jin, a troubled, politically active schoolteacher, he defies the Peace Corps, the United States government, and the Korean martial law authorities to take up her cause. Caught up in the bloodshed of the Kwangju Uprising of May, 1980, he wrestles with love and loss, freedom and responsibility.

Is This the Face of Michelangelo?

One of the first historical novels I read, at about the age of 13, was Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. This biographical novel of the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti spawned my lifelong interest in the Renaissance and all the great artists of the age: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and a host of others. Michelangelo created David, Moses, the Pieta, and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

In 1999, a carved marble tondo was identified as a possible sculpted self-portrait of the master himself. Check out the story on Discovery.com to learn more.

ePublishing As We Once Knew It

A little over a decade ago, someone got the bright idea of digitizing books that could be downloaded onto computers and hand-held devices like the Palm Pilot. The advantages seemed enormous: no cost of paper, or of ink, or transport of heavy volumes across the country. No need to print a large quantity of books and pray that they would all sell. Now, finally, the big publishers would welcome us aspiring authors with open arms. With lower costs comes higher tolerance for risk, right? Well ...

I was in the first wave of published e-novelists. My first novel, The Seed of Joy, a historical novel about South Korea, was picked up by Online Originals, one of the very first epublishers, in 2000. I wrote a monthly column for an epublishing website called KnowBetter.com. My publisher even invited me to London to give a talk about the author's view of epublishing. I got my picture and a blurb about my book in The Bookseller, a publishing trade magazine in the UK. We were poised for a literary renaissance, a springtime of new writing, new voices, new media. The world looked bright. Bluebirds chirping and all that.

[Sound of a needle scratching across an LP record...]

Then something happened. Epublishing got off to a bad start; it was ahead of its time. Andrew Starling, a UK writer, wrote a piece in 2006 that partially explained why. Remember, this is from five years ago:

Money. Internet users are notorious skinflints, they expect everything for free. The MP3 business got off to a flying start with the old free Napster and similar Peer to Peer sharing of illegal music. Young punters liked free MP3s and many have been happy to move with the times and progress to paying for them. The same will probably apply to literature. My fiction on www.foxglove.co.uk now gets over 100,000 readers a year. This is a higher readership than many traditionally-published writers get, but the key is that it's free.

Technology. Who wants to read a book on their laptop or PDA? The answer is in the paragraph above – lots of people, as long as they don't have to pay for it. The move from cathode ray screens to flatpanels has made reading on-screen easier, but it's still not as comfortable as reading a book. The question is, will the Sony Reader change this? In the medium term, I think the answer is yes. You have to remember that when the MP3 format first appeared, lots of people said it would never work because there'd be no sleeve notes and covers, no added value in the emotional experience. They were wrong.

Nervous traditional publishers. Sometimes I wonder if traditional publishers want ebooks to succeed, or whether they would prefer to drown epublishing at birth. My main reason for saying this is their pricing policy. How can anybody justify charging $7.99 for a regular ebook? The distribution costs are minimal, there's no printing charge. At a stroke, 80% of the costs of publishing a book have disappeared. Bear in mind that books are sold to retailers at around 50% of cover price, and printing might be 10% of cover price, and distribution costs a bit more. Epublishing is dirt cheap, yet mainstream publishing houses are often charging just 25% less than they would for a hardcopy book. Only the specialist ebook publishers get their pricing right, at less than $6.

 Andrew was right about some things and wrong about others. Ebooks don't have to be free to sell well, but a common price point these days is around $2.99. That's with independent epublishers, not the traditional publishers who do ebooks on the side; it's cheap enough for readers to take a chance on a book without risking much. He was right about the Sony eReader (and similar devices later) making reading easier, but he didn't see the coming of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and other ebook readers that are helping spur the growth of the industry. Here's what he said about the future of epublishing:

As things stand, I'm not convinced that epublishing has a great future. Legal music downloads account for about 2% of music sales, and it looks like ebooks are going to account for a similar miserable percentage of book sales, at least in the short term. The main problems are screen-reading and digital rights management (DRM).

A lot has changed since then. I rarely buy CDs anymore; I get most of my music (legally) through MP3 downloads. Likewise, if I want to buy a book, I favor ebook versions unless I know for certain that the title I want is available only in print.

If we learn anything from Andrew's take on epublishing, it should be this: Five years ago, he was wrong about a lot of things. Five years from now, we stand to be just as wrong.

 

Authors I like

It's been said that people know you by the company you keep. When it comes to the authors I admire most, I don't presume to be in their company; rather, I've set up a little shrine in my office where I burn votive candles before their images. Not literally, of course. But here they are:

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Need I say more?

James A. Michener. A tireless researcher, a first-rate writer, and the man who put massive, meaty, satisfying historical novels on the top of the bestseller lists. I've read Tales of the South Pacific, The Source, Hawaii, Chesapeake, Centennial, and The Novel and loved them. Poland, Alaska, and Mexico, not so much. I didn't like The Bridges at Toko-Ri at all because in 9th grade English I was forced to read it; maybe I'll pick it up again. His writing style is workmanlike and nearly transparent: it never gets in the way of the plot or the characters. You breeze through his books by wanting to read just a few more pages at each sitting.

H. Rider Haggard. Author of King Solomon's Mines, She, and dozens of other books, Haggard invented the 'lost world' genre of fantasy fiction. His writing combines rip-roaring action with Victorian uprightness and British colonialism, with a huge helping of the supernatural thrown in. Men everywhere owe him a debt for coining the moniker 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' in reference to our significant others.

More to come later: Pearl S. Buck, Charles Dickens, Boris Pasternak, and others.