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.