Crossing the Line

is a documentary on James Joseph Dresnok, “a US army private who in 1962 stunned the world by walking across the violently contested DMZ that cuts Korea in two and defecting to the communist North” (from the DVD jacket). It was good. Not all documentaries on North Korea are. I picked it up with mixed feelings of obligation and curiosity and was pleasantly surprised by its balanced portrayal of the defectors and the North Korean society. The director, Daniel Gordon, is English, and in the interview with the director, he said that having grown up in a society where there is really no parading of patriotism (?), he could approach both North Korea and the U.S. with their heavy flaunting of patriotism as a neutral observer. There’s this great scene in the documentary where a scene of the Kim Il Sung statue is succeeded by a scene of the Abraham Lincoln statue in Richmond, Virginia, Dresnok’s hometown. Their poses are strikingly similar with an outstretched hand symbolically beckoning the herd to follow their lead.

I remember reading the Jenkins story in Time a few years back. Jenkins was also a US soldier stationed in South Korea who defected to the North. He married a Japanese woman who had been abducted by the North Koreans. (Twenty years his junior!) The woman was able to get back to Japan decades after she was abducted, and decided to stay in Japan instead of going back to the North where her husband and two daughters are. Jenkins, because he’s a deserter, would face extradition and a court martial followed by imprisonment if he went to Japan. After some political orchestration, actively engaged in by the Japanese sympathizers of the Jenkins family, the family did end up together two years later. Jenkins, in exchange for a lenient treatment by the US army, did an exclusive interview on his life in North Korea with a journalist. He regretted the choice he made to defect and criticizes the North Korean society as a tyrannical society that grants no individual freedom. He also criticized one of his fellow defectors, Dresnok, for bullying and beating him.

Crossing the Line was in the making when all this happened. Dresnok, who seems to be happy with his life in North Korea, calls Jenkins a liar and contradicts most of what he says.

Around the time when Dresnok defected, at the height of the Cold War, four US army soldiers crossed the DMZ from the South to the North. Their motivations, while speculated about, remain partly mysterious to the end. The director says that in the case of Dresnok, he probably had a better life in North Korea then he would have had he not defected. He became a kind of minor celebrity in the North because the North Korean government made the four American defectors star in a propaganda movie which became popular in the North. They played the Americans in the movie.

I grew up at a time when everything North Korean was demonized in the South. Even in the democratic South, I grew up amidst heavy propagandas and government-guided “mental education projects”. While information about North Korea is scarce now, it was even scarcer back in the 80s, and I never had a good sense of what North Korea is like. I watched this TV documentary that aired this summer when I was visiting home, “Crossing the Border of Paradise.” It’s about North Korean refugees who cross the North Korean/Chinese border and later cross multiple borders in Southeast Asia in search of a legally recognized refugee status. There was this one scene that really caught my eye between two sisters, one living in South Korea now and one still living in the North. One of the two sisters had crossed the border and ultimately made her way to South Korea. She wanted to get her sister out of North Korea to join her in the South. So she smuggled her sister out. And they’re talking, face-to-face, in a motel room in the border town. The younger sister refuses to leave North Korea. Why don’t you want to leave? The older sister asks her. Mom’s dead, dad’s dead, it’s not like you have relatives in the North. People are starving to death. Why don’t you want to leave? The younger sister protests. You have to stick it out especially when the times are bad. These are bad times, but they will pass. You have to endure and persevere. Then times will change. The older sister finally gives up. The reporter asks the younger sister again at the end of the sisters’ conversation, “Why don’t you want to leave?” The girl sighs and says in a low voice, “됴국이지요” . . .  It’s the motherland.

I don’t know why that scene hit me so hard. Because the girl’s stubborn adherence to her land of birth, her loyalty and affection to all that she’s known for her entire life, seem to go against the utilitarian and pragmatic understanding of economic migration? And against the celebration of transnationalism and a borderless world nowadays in the academy?

Seducing Mr. Perfect

Seducing Mr. Perfect, starring Um, Jeongwha and Daniel Henney is I think Korea’s first Korean-English bilingual movie. The version that I watched is by no means a standard edition, so I’m not sure if the theater edition or the DVD edition has any subtitles. But watching the movie without subtitles, I realized that the movie is quite significantly bilingual. It probably had to be since Daniel Henney doesn’t speak Korean. It’s a really cheesy romantic comedy, with a cliche girl-meets-boy plot and quite a bit of bad acting. So I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. Still I found the fantasy of the movie interesting, and the politics of language it displaces worth writing about. It manages to touch on everything that I think is problematic about Korea’s love of English.

To summarize the plot, Um is a mid-to-low level team manager at a Korean firm. An outgoing, chic and sassy woman, her only “fault” is that she believes in love. She’s the giving type and has been wronged by a series of guys who too gladly took advantage of her devotion to them. Daniel Henney is a gyopo (Korean American) who has been assigned by the American head of the firm to head the Korean branch. He holds the exact opposite view of love from Um. It’s a game, and you have to know the rules of the game and play by the rules to come out as the winner.  Somewhere along the line of numerous conflicts, Um gets Henney to be her relationship coach while vowing to herself that she’d prove him wrong by seducing him. As she slowly realizes her growing feelings for him, her ex-boyfriend returns, and Henney is tailed by an American woman (who is his friend but whose relationship to him ultimately remains unclear). All of a sudden, Henney is reassigned to a U.S. branch and as his day of departure is impending, tries to close a deal of merger with a Japanese firm. It comes out that Henney’s grandfather used to work as a laborer for this Japanese firm (a janitor?) and that Henney wants to acquire this Japanese firm as a tribute to his deceased grandfather. Of course, Um steps in with an eloquent speech and makes possible the merger. And Um and Henney themselves merge (metaphorically speaking) as they both come to own up to their feelings for each other.

The movie portrays one of the most common fantasies of Korean romantic comedies: a pretty girl acquiring upward mobility through falling in love with or marrying a rich guy. What I find significant about the movie’s take on this time-old trope, though, is the fact that it sets the trope within the post-IMF social restructuring. While it’s not explicitly stated in the movie, it makes perfect sense to read the Korean firm as having been bought by a U.S. firm when the IMF crisis hit. The U.S. firm assigns a Korean American to be in charge of the Korean branch.It’s a race-based assignment. The cultural brokering in global capitalism makes strategic use of race and gender.

Very summarily put, the IMF crisis brought about a whole series of restructuring in the Korean economy. While the Korean economy has often been looked at as run by elite economic bureaucracies and intimately tied to the state (as most East Asian economies are), Korean firms are said to have voluntarily undertaken serious deregulation to survive the blows of the financial crisis. Which, by the way, tripled the rate of unemployment and pushed a third of the population below the poverty line in its immediate aftermath. American management personnel like Henney in the movie came in and guided the deregulation and restructuring process.  English was always a privileged language in Korea after the Korean war, but the status of the language soared with the need for a bilingual workforce that can mediate the English-speaking managerial class and the Korean-speaking managerial class.

The romance of Um and Henney relocates post-IMF mergers into the realm of the private sphere. The rough edges of the restructuring scene (millions of layoffs and a severe disciplining of labor) disappear into the pretty tug-of-war between the boss and his employee. The gender hierarchy of patriarchy (where it is expected for man to stand over woman) makes invisible what other hierarchies exist between Um and Henney along the lines of nationality and language. At the same time, Korean is feminized and English masculinized as Um wallows in her emotions in Korean and Henney delivers his pragmatics of managing relationships in English. The fantasy of the movie is that Um ultimately conquers Henney through her emotional capaciousness. The last scene where Henney sits cross-legged across from Um’s parents asking for their permission in dating Um shows Korea’s embrace of the foreign element. In fact, it’s not just an embrace but an attempt to make Korean what is American.

Through its fantastical imagination, the movie suggests that in the realm of culture, the Korean economy’s dependency on the U.S. and the privilege of English can be reversed. In the realm of the private sphere, that is. Outside the romantic relationship of Um and Henney the order of things do not change. They need not change. In its uncritical use of the genre of romantic comedy the movie ends up being just another Korean girl’s dream to meet a rich, English-speaking man. Oh, throw in hot in the mix too.