This Cold War Museum that is the Divided Korean Peninsula

Of Prisons and the Open Road

By titling his memoir The Prisoner, Hwang implies that the most defining element of his life were the five years he spent in prison. During his incarceration, organizations like PEN America and Amnesty International lobbied for his release. He was finally granted a pardon by President Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and released two years before his sentence was due to end. Six of the book’s fourteen chapters detail the time he spent in various institutions and they offer at once a kind of ethnography of the cultures made by the imprisoned, an analysis of the architecture and technologies of incarceration, as well as remembrances of his own experiences as a prisoner of conscience who spent a considerable degree of time in solitary confinement, although, as he announces on the second page, he was never tortured. What imbues these chapters with an additional level of irony and pathos is that the most punitive aspect of his incarceration was arguably his being prohibited from writing, so none of what appears in The Prisoner was actually written during that time.

His ethnography of the imprisoned offers the surprising revelation that political prisoners like himself were, by and large, relatively well-treated compared to the rest, and he notes that most of the other incarcerated population were members of the working class who had been most exploited during the processes of modernization that the Park Chung-hee regime forcefully imposed on the country: people who had been viewed as “human garbage from the perspective of South Korea’s cliquish, competition-heavy society,” and whose “crimes were, in the end, evidence that it was our society that was diseased” (172–73).

He also offers a fascinating account of how the modern South Korean prison system was built upon an infrastructure created by the Japanese during their colonization of the peninsula, evident in the incorporation of some of its terminology. He makes striking observations about the mixture of Japanese and Western technologies of incarceration evident in the buildings, noticing for instance how the semi-circular layout of one particular facility “was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon made reality” (167).

However, as scholars of the incarceration regime in the United States have shown, elaborating and retooling the insights of Michel Foucault’s pioneering work in this regard, penal institutions are simply the most condensed manifestation of a carceral logic of surveillance operant in the culture at large: as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has put it, “prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere” (242). Hwang indicates the tendrils of this surveillance state by his encounters with various “handlers” from of the South Korean government he encounters as he begins to achieve renown as a writer and activist as well as the arrest of many of his fellow artist-activists.

More broadly, the memoir also draws a line between that authoritarianism and the country’s transformation into an economic and industrial power—one of the so-called Asian Tigers—providing a compelling account of how this rise was borne of significant repression and violence. The virulently anticommunist and authoritarian state that took shape under Park Chung-hee was devoted to promoting a ruthless program of economic development, modernization and industrialization. Such an order constituted, as Jini Kim Watson has argued, the typical rather than exceptional form of governmentality in the “free world” order that the United States sought to establish, the Pax Americana it sought to impose.2 In recounting how he moved from one industrial construction site to another during the 1960s, Hwang offers a ground-level perspective on the pathway to industrial modernization that Park forced his country to follow, a form of development that depended on an “intimate relationship between the South Korean state. . . and family-owned big businesses, known as chaebol [like Samsung or Hyundai, for example],” a marriage that proved quite effective in, among other things, “suppressing labor activism” (J. Lee 25).

Interestingly, while Hwang’s fiction became popular in South Korea partly because of his depictions of the damage to traditional ways of life and the unfreedom that resulted from the “militarized modernity” imposed on the nation by Park (Moon), the memoir also gives expression to the author’s own romantic attachment to the mobility of itinerant laborers. While Hwang’s sympathetic treatment of the working class who suffered greatly during this era recalls somewhat the sensibilities of a John Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair, his evocations of his teenage and early adult years highlight an intense homosocial camaraderie that was an integral part of his travels, evoking a romance of the open road and idealizing the brotherhood of working-class men that might recall for some readers Kerouac and the Beats or even Emerson, Whitman and Twain.3

Writing War(s)

In addition to the economic and carceral violence of the South Korean state, The Prisoner also conveys the pervasive ways in which the violence of war has shaped the nation’s history. It actually contains two war narratives that weave together to stunning effect.

In the seventh chapter, which is devoted to his childhood years (1947–56), his family having fled Pyongyang (which would become the capital of North Korea) in 1947 and settled in Seoul. He provides an account of war from a civilian perspective, contributing to a growing body of English-language literature on the topic.4 Most dramatically, his reminiscences bring into focus the experiences of children who found themselves caught in the crossfire of combat, coming across unexploded ordinances, and risking death by fleeing the violence atop of trains. He notes that while they “did not seem to have felt too frightened or sad” and often seemed to make a game of their attempts to survive, their trauma was often simply disguised: “I’ve seen how such children later grow up floundering in pain, unable to handle the scars of war” (292).

The eleventh chapter constitutes a more typical war narrative, as it details Hwang’s experiences as a South Korean Marine who was deployed to Vietnam. He was among the 300,000 South Korean combat troops who were sent to Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 to fight in support of the US military. As Charles K. Armstrong puts it, “Vietnam was a goldmine for South Korea,” earning the country over a billion dollars in US various forms of aid, which proved crucial to its program of modernization (533). Hwang recalls how he came to an awareness of the war’s capitalist dimensions and Korea’s “subimperial” role (J. Lee) when he was assigned to a unit investigating the black market in Danang. He realized that the most powerful dimension of US empire was its saturation of entire regions of East and Southeast Asia with the values, practices and technologies of capitalism, a theme he explores at length in the novel Shadow of Arms.

Most powerfully, Hwang came to realize that “There wasn’t much difference between the farming villages in the country that we’d left behind and the hamlets dotting the jungles of Vietnam” and that the men he killed “were Asian, like me, and had their own families and friends and dreams of the future” (456, 463). He laments that South Korean soldiers committed atrocities similar to the ones that infamously took place in My Lai.5 In suggesting this link between the two wars, The Prisoner does intimate that “they emerge out of what is, in many ways, a continuous history of American, Japanese, and Chinese imperialism in Asia” (Kim and Nguyen 59–60).

A Blueprint for Revolutionary Writing

One of the most compelling aspects of The Prisoner is Hwang’s recollection of the decades of activism he engaged in as a significant figure in the democratization movement. In addition to conveying how intimately his political and literary work were related, even if they at times felt in conflict, these sections of the memoir also read almost like a blueprint for cultural revolution à la Fanon or Gramsci, a kind of manifesto that brings into focus the particular role that artists and intellectuals can play as organic intellectuals in movement politics. Hwang was a founding member of the Association of Writers for Freedom and Praxis, or Chasil, which “became the main coordinating organ for writers’ resistance” when it was formed in 1974 (Ryu 5). During the 1970s, the Park regime established what was termed the “Yushin system,” which was modeled on the authoritarian form of governmentality that had been created by the Japanese elites during the colonial era (Cumings 363). As Youngju Ryu recounts in Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea, “literature became the privileged site of representing a sociopolitical reality that directly contested the official narratives of the state” and writers like Hwang became revolutionary figures (5).

In addition to providing the biographical and political contexts for understanding the composition of his novels which issued trenchant critiques of the state—such as The Guest, Shadow of Arms, and The Old Garden, which are also available in English translations—The Prisoner also details the multiple forms of cultural activism he and other writers engaged in.6 One of the most memorable was a form of agitprop or street theater known as madanggeuk. Hwang’s account of how he and other artists repurposed a traditional courtyard dramatic form that involved masked performers into an effective vehicle of activism unfolds into a theorization of the role that “folk” cultural forms can play in moving from a Gramscian War of Position to one of Maneuver.7 As Hwang recalls, such plays were necessarily collective endeavors—bringing together “a director, actors, a writer for scripts, and artists” as well as “students, citizens, workers, and farmers”—that could be “performed guerrilla-style in any open space” and that made use of the mass media of the time: cassette tapes, 8mm film, and mass-printing (531–32).

Hwang’s remembrances open a window into the experiences of the intellectuals who forged a vibrant counterculture in the 1970s and 80s that was mobilized around the figure of the minjung, a term that, as Namhee Lee explains, refers to the “‘common people’ as opposed to elites and leaders or even the educated or cultured” and it “came to signify those who are oppressed in the sociopolitical system but who are capable of rising up against it” (N. Lee 5).8

Counter-Intelligence

Arguably the most powerful generic intervention that Hwang makes in The Prisoner comes in its third chapter, which covers the years 1986–89 and recounts the author’s visit to North Korea, a journey that would eventually land him in prison. He writes against the two genres that have most shaped Western conceptions of North Korea, as Christine Hong and Sunny Xiang have argued: the defector narrative and the Cold War intelligence report. The former, as epitomized by such works as Kang Chol Hwan’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (2001), offer up to English-speaking readers the pathos of hapless subjects victimized by a totalitarian state run by an exceedingly strange Asian despot and in vital need of rescue by the humanitarian West, a rescue that would necessarily entail regime change (Hong 768). The latter is “both an estimative and an ethnographic genre” that, in reference to Communist Asians, purports to make intelligible a subject that is contradictorily defined as essentially inscrutable (Xiang 7). The Prisoner subverts these dominant narrative representations of North Korea: firstly, it offers a non-sensationalist travelogue of the time he spent in that country and a more complex portrait of Kim Il-sung; secondarily, while it certainly subjects to critique a dystopian surveillance state and carceral regime, a staple of the defector narrative, this authoritarianism is embodied by both Korean governments.

Hwang does echo aspects of North Korea that most foreign writers have emphasized, noting that there are “few people, cars, or shops on the street, many placards with slogans or statues and buildings dedicated to Kim Il-sung, pedestrians wearing drab clothes, a limited choice of products in department stores, shoddy goods, and a citizenry with no idea what is going on in the rest of the world” (119). Nonetheless, he points out, the country “still seemed to be more or less maintaining its self-reliance. You could see many young people and families out and about on weekends, relaxing on the banks of the Taedong River or near Moranbong” (119).

More dramatically, Hwang complicates how Kim Il-sung, the founding patriarch of North Korea, has generally been depicted in the West, as basically a mixture of Joseph Stalin and Fu Manchu. Echoing the language of the intelligence briefing, Hwang asserts the need to see this leader and his life “objectively” because of his obvious importance “as part of the first generation of socialist revolutionaries that includes Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh,” and goes on to offer a complicated picture of this historically significant figure (140).

Hwang’s accounts of his conversations with Kim, whom he describes as “a natural storyteller,” are fascinating (125). Kim discusses a dizzying range of topics: the complexity of the border situation with China, the status of other pro-democracy activists in the South, his youthful days protesting the Japanese occupation, his sympathy for the suffering of ordinary people during wartime, his surprising concern about the overly centralized nature of socialist bureaucracies, his admiration for chaebol like Hyundai, and his positive appraisals of several literary works, including Hwang’s own writings as well as those of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and the classics of Soviet Communism.

In addition to conveying Kim’s “unexpected intellectual depth” (140), however, Hwang also notes how the President’s “genial demeanor” could give way to “a sudden, cruel expression that would cross his face if something displeased him,” which spoke to the “hidden cruelty” enabled him to “efficiently kill the many competitors who had formerly been his comrades” (129). Ultimately, however, highlights a tension between the “compassionate dimension” of Chairman Kim and his “policies”—“his many errors of judgment have brought misery to the North Korean people, especially his role in dividing Korea” (142). While he notes that the leaders of the United States and South Korea also bear a good deal of responsibility for suffering caused the Korean War and its unending aftermath, he suggests that it is for good reason that “history will continue to remember him as an internationally notorious dictator” (142).

Conclusion: “This Cold War Museum”

While Hwang has long been vilified by the South Korean Right as a Communist, he makes clear that he is ultimately no apologist for the North Korean state: “To get this out of the way, I do not support the ideology of the North Korean communist regime, and all I wish for is the peaceful reunification of the divided North and South”; he further describes himself as part of a group of activists who “believed that when South Korea became a truly democratic society, we could change North Korea for the better” (6). On this topic, Hwang has much in common with Paik Nak-chung, a South Korean literary critic who was also active in the democratization movement, who has coined the term “the division system” to capture the symbiotic relationship that has emerged between the two Koreas. The division system occupies an intermediary position between the capitalist world system in which it is enclosed and the systems of the two Koreas. Paik offers up this concept in the hopes of helping to “understand more clearly the complicated (and structured) way the two different systems—that is, sets of social institutions—of the North and the South reproduce themselves in a curious entanglement with each other” (4). “To say that the social reality of division has taken on a systemic nature,” he explains, “is to say that with the solidification of the division this particular social structure has literally taken root in the daily lives of Koreans on both sides, and it thus has acquired a considerable level of self-reproducing power” (5).

That this intra-Korean history is part of an ongoing global history is a theme that Hwang strikes in the final words of his memoir, in which he offers a more expansive as well as personal interpretation of the memoir’s title: “Having spent my life as a writer in the prison of time, language, and this Cold War museum that is the divided Korean peninsula, I know the fragility of this freedom in which I live” (610). While Hwang likely wrote these words around 2015, just prior to the memoir’s initial publication in Korea, his phrase “Cold War museum” remains timely. For one thing, North Korean soldiers are currently fighting on behalf of Russia, this time in Ukraine. And perhaps more dramatically, the threat posed by that regime to South Korea was invoked by President Yoon Suk Yeol on the night of December 3rd, 2024, when he declared that the country was now under martial law. In response, thousands of outraged citizens poured into the courtyard in front of the National Assembly where lawmakers soon gathered to adopt a resolution demanding that the order be rescinded, which it soon was. While Yoon’s order was actually in effect for only six hours and he was impeached by the end of the year, this power grab seemed to engender a kind of collective PTSD among many Koreans, as the country seemed like it might descend into the authoritarianism that Hwang details in his memoir. This anxiety persists at the time of this writing, as his right-wing allies seek to prevent him from being held accountable for his actions.

While fascism is a term that has been justifiably evoked to characterize the growing popularity of such authoritarian leaders across the globe and most dramatically in the United States with the reelection of Donald J. Trump in 2024, Hwang’s memoir invites us to consider how the playbook such politicians follow may have also been scripted in places like South Korea. For if our world is threatened with becoming “a Cold War museum,” this rich phrase reminds us that the totalitarian regimes we tend to associate with that era were manifested not only in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Kim Il-sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but in the “‘free world’ authoritarianisms” that emerged in nation-states like Park’s Republic of Korea (Watson 5). As such, we might wonder if the itinerary implied by a slogan like Make America Great Again retraces the path traveled by countries like South Korea during the Cold War. In the brilliant perspective on this era she offers in Cold War Reckonings, Jini Kim Watson asks us to confront the lesson one might draw from such examples, namely that “authoritarian rule is not only compatible with (sometimes stupendous) economic growth, but emerges as the political form necessary for a certain kind of postcolonial economic development” (6). Perhaps what we are witnessing in the United States, in part, is a kind of import substitution, the emergence of a home grown copy of a mode of governmentality that we exported with devastating consequences during our emergence as a global imperial power during the Cold War.

Daniel Y. Kim is Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. He is the author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU Press, 2020) and Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Notes

1. 1. See, for example, Baik, Cho, Hong 2020, D. Y. Kim 2020, J. Kim, J. O. Kim, M. Kim, Park, and Xiang.

2. 2. See Hong 2020, Kwon, and Watson.

3. 3. Ryu offers an incisive account of this tension in Hwang’s works

4. 4. D. Y. Kim 2020, J. O. Kim and Park.

5. 5. Armstrong refers to considerable “anecdotal” speaking to “the brutality” of South Korean troops in Vietnam (533). See also chapter 5 of Nguyen.

6. 6. Another significant work attached to Hwang’s name is Gwangju Uprising, which offered an account of a rebellion against South Korean martial law that took place in 1980 that was brutally suppressed by the military, and which played a pivotal role in the democratization movement. A revised English-language translation of this work has also recently been published Verso.) See also Watson, N. Lee, and D. Y. Kim July 2020.

7. 7. See also N. Lee and Son.

8. 8. The Prisoner also provides insights into how Hwang was able to leverage the literary humanitarian community through his connections to PEN International and writers like Susan Sontag in his activism, offering a countervailing view from critiques of such forms of humanitarianism and (neo)liberal cosmopolitanism (Brouillette; Slaughter).

Works Cited

1. Armstrong, Charles K. “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam.” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, Sept. 2001, pp. 527–40. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/146727101760107415.
2. Baik, Crystal Mun-hye. Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique. Temple UP, 2019.
3. Brouillette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford University Press, 2019.
4. Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Illustrated edition, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2008.
5. Cumings, Bruce. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. Norton, 1997.
6. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.
7. Hong, Christine. “Manufacturing Dissidence: Arts and Letters of North Korea’s ‘Second Culture.’” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 23, no. 4, Nov. 2015, pp. 743–84.
8. Hwang, Sok-Yong. The Prisoner. Translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell, Verso, 2021.
9. Kim, Daniel Y. The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War. New York University Press, 2020.
10. Kim, Daniel Y., and Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The Literature of the Korean War and the Vietnam War.” The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 59–72.
11. Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010.
12. Kim, Joo Ok. Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War. Temple University Press, 2022.
13. Kim, Monica. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History. Princeton University Press, 2019.
14. Lee, Jin-kyung. Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010.
15. Lee, Namhee. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Cornell University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=3138110.
16. Moon, Seungsook. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Duke University Press, 2005.
17. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Harvard UP, 2016.
18. Paik, Nak-chung. The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea. University of California Press, 2011.
19. Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2016.
20. Ryu, Youngju. Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea. University of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
21. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. 1st ed, Fordham University Press, 2007.
22. Sok-yong, Hwang, et al. Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea. Translated by Slin Jung, Verso Books, 2022, p. 512.
23. Watson, Jini Kim. Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. 1st ed., Fordham University Press, 2021. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1sfsdhj.
24. Xiang, Sunny. Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War. Columbia University Press, 2020.