I saw what I assume to be the world premiere stage production of Richard E. Kim’s _The Martyr_ last night. Saying that it’s the world premiere is kind of fancy, but what I mean by that is that I was surprised (and glad) that someone thought to adapt the novel for stage. Richard E. Kim is a first generation Korean American writer who wrote and published in the 60s and 70s. One of his novels was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I think it was the Martyr. He quickly faded out, though, and since his works are set in Korea and not in the U.S., he is only marginally regarded as an Asian American writer. I read him in my advisor’s class where she was trying to rethink the canon of Asian American literature.
The play was good if not mind blowing. The sets were great, the acting was good. Some scenes, though, relied too much on lengthy dialogues. Overall, I think it was a decent adaptation for the stage. One interesting change in this play was that they changed a young man in the novel into a young woman. I wonder what they were trying to do. The young man (Park) in the novel is an atheist deeply skeptical of his father’s (one of the martyred ministers) faith. By turning this man into a woman, I wonder if the play didn’t try to soften the father-son conflict and introduce a gender dynamic. It worked out well for the play.
It seems like there’s a growing interest in the Korean War among Asian Americanists. My advisor’s work on the Pacific wars touches on that; Daniel Kim seems to be working on it; and one of the incoming graduate students expresses interest in it too. Maybe it’s about time that the Korean War is studied and analyzed not just from a historical perspective but also from a cultural perspecitve. I welcome that, you know. Otherwise known as the forgotten war, the Korean War has much to offer in terms of exploring the dynamics of democracy and neoliberalism. I hope, though, that American academics who work on this also look at the Korean representations and studies of the war.
So many MPs out on the streets near Gwanghwamun last night. The anti-FTA protests are much bigger than I thought. Maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but I feel like there’s a lot of social unrest in the Asia Pacifi right now.
