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Authors: Linda Sue Park

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He agreed. After we put the bucket and tools away, I turned to him and said, "If you're going to be a printer, we have a lot of work to do."

"'We'?" he asked. "Have you changed your mind already—do you want to be a printer, too, instead of a scholar?"

"No," I said, laughing. "Come inside, I'll show you."

I collected my diary and a pencil, went to Tae-yul's room, and sat on the floor beside him. "I've been working with Abuji for a few weeks now," I said. "I'll show you what I've learned so you can catch up, and then we can study together."

I wrote something and showed it to him. "You'll be a terrible printer if you don't know how to read and write," I said in a stern voice. But I couldn't keep the smile from my eyes.

He started to answer indignantly. "What do you mean—" Then he saw my face, stopped speaking, and glanced down at the page.

"
Ga, na, da,
" I said softly.

"
Ga, na, da,
" he repeated, his voice barely above a whisper.

The first three letters of the Korean alphabet.

We looked at them for a long moment. Then I handed Tae-yul the pencil and watched as he copied the letters in a neat row under mine.

Author's Note

"In the South [of Korea], one particular decade—that between 1935 and 1945—is an empty cupboard: millions of people used and abused by the Japanese cannot get records on what they know to have happened to them, and thousands of Koreans who worked with the Japanese have simply erased that history as if it had never happened."

—Bruce Cumings,
Korea's Place in the Sun

I came across these lines while researching my previous books on Korea, all of which were set several hundred years in the past. For a long time the image of that empty cupboard kept appearing in my mind's eye. As I sought information for what would eventually become this book, I found that there were still bits and pieces, shreds and scraps, of stories in the cupboard. And some of them belonged to my own parents.

My parents told me many stories about their own childhoods in Korea—stories I had never heard before. My father told of receiving that gift of a rubber ball, of being forced to gather pine roots, and of having his first taste of chewing gum! My mother's best friend when she was little was a Japanese boy whose father was principal of the local elementary
school; her father—my grandfather—was vice-principal. And her Japanese name was Kaneyama Keoko.

Although this book is a work of fiction, the historical events detailed in the story actually took place. Leaflets signed by U.S. general Douglas MacArthur were delivered by airdrop; the Japanese commandeered radios and metal; rose of Sharon trees were uprooted and burned by official order. And at least ten young Korean men died in service as kamikaze pilots toward the end of the war.

In addition to his 1936 Olympic gold medal, Sohn Kee Chung held the world record for the marathon for twelve years, from 1935 to 1947. In most record books, you will still find his name listed as "Kitei Son," and his nationality as Japanese. Korea participated in the Olympics under its own flag for the first time in 1948 in London; it was Sohn Kee Chung who carried that flag in the opening ceremonies. And in 1988 he lit the torch to open the Summer Olympics in Seoul.

The character of Miss Lim, briefly mentioned as the person who sent the packet of newspapers to Sun-hee's family, is based on a historical figure, Young-sin Im (a.k.a. Louise Yim). Educated by Christian missionaries, she went on to run her own school and was an active leader in the underground resistance movement. Im was the first woman ever appointed to a high post in the Korean government. Her career ended under a cloud of scandal when she was accused of corruption, a charge she vehemently denies in her autobiography,
My Forty-Year Fight for Korea.
Despite this disappointing end to her political ambitions, there is no doubt that she advanced considerably the cause of equal rights for Korean women.

One question raised in the story remains unanswered at the end. What happened to the girls who were taken away from the schoolyard the day Jung-shin's sister was granted a reprieve? The answer constitutes one of the most horrifying aspects of the war. Between 100,000 and 200,000 women from Korea and other countries conquered by the Japanese were forced to serve as "comfort women," satisfying the sexual needs of Imperial soldiers. After the war the Japanese government denied the existence of such a practice, and the women themselves were so ashamed that none of them came forward to reveal this atrocity. The truth was not revealed until 1979, and it still took nearly twenty years before the women received an apology from the Japanese government.

Tae-yul's mission is fictional, but for the account of its failure and other details of his life in the Special Attack Unit, I am indebted to two memoirs:
Kamikaze,
by Yasuo Kuwahara and Gordon'T. Alfred, and Ryuji Nagatsuka's
I Was a Kamikaze.
Also very helpful in my research for other parts of this book was Richard Kim's
Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.

The book ends in 1945. In 1948, after three years of strife, Korea was divided along the 38
th
parallel, with a Communist government taking control in the north and a nominal democracy in the south. Many people like Uncle were thus separated from their families. In 1950 the Korean War broke out, and the nightmare of "Koreans killing Koreans" began on a large scale.

That war ended in 1953, but the country remains divided today. As of this writing, the first steps on a long and painful road to reconciliation have been taken. Athletes from both countries entered the stadium for the 2000 Olympic Games
in Sydney, Australia, under one flag. In the same year, a few hundred families were reunited through a cooperative effort between the North and South Korean governments. I like to think that among them was a family like Sun-hee's.

Bibliography

Bigelow, Poultney.
Japan and Her Colonies.
London: Edwin Arnold, 1923.

Bishop, Isabelle Bird.
Korea and Her Neighbors.
New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1897.

*
Choi, Sook Nyul.
The Year of Impossible Good-byes.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

Chung, Henry.
The Case of Korea.
New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921.

Cumings, Bruce.
Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Drake, H. B.
Korea of the Japanese.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1930.

Eckert, Carter J. et al.
Korea Old and New: A History.
Seoul, Korea: Korea Institute, Harvard University, 1990.

Frank, Richard B.
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.
New York: Random House, 1999.

Howard, Keith, ed.
True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women.
New York: Cassell, 1995.

Hoyt, Edwin P.
The Last Kamikaze.
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993.

*
Kang, K. Connie.
Home Was the Land of the Morning Calm.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

*
Kang, Younghill.
The Grass Roof.
Chicago: Follett, 1959.

*
Kim, Richard E.
Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.
New York: Praeger, 1970.

Kim, San, and Nym Wales.
Song of Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel.
New York: John Day, 1941.

*
Kuwahara, Yasuo, and Gordon'T. Allred.
Kamikaze.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.

Ladd, George Trumbull.
In Korea with Marquis Ito.
New York: Scribner's, 1908.

Lee, Chang-rae.
A Gesture Life.
New York: Riverhead Books/PenguinPutnam, 1999.

Lowell, Percival.
Choson: Land of the Morning Calm.
Boston: Ticknor, 1885.

*
Millot, Bernard.
Divine Thunder: The Life and Death of the Kamikazes.
New York: McCall, 1971.

*
Nagatsuka, Ryuji.
I Was a Kamikaze.
New York: Macmillan, 1974.

*
Naito, Hatsuho.
Thunder Gods: The Kamikaze Pilots Tell Their Story.
New York: Kodansha International, 1989.

Toland, John.
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945.
New York: Random House, 1970.

*
Yim, Louise.
My Forty-Year Fight for Korea.
New York: A.A.Wyn, 1951.

LINDA SUE PARK
is the acclaimed author of
A Single Shard,
which was awarded the Newbery Medal;
Seesaw Girl;
and
The Kite Fighters.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Linda Sue was born and raised in Illinois and has been writing poems and stories all her life. Her first published work was a poem in a children's magazine when she was nine. Today, she lives with her husband and their two children in western New York. You can visit her website at
www.lindasuepark.com
.

* Of interest to readers age 12 and up

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BOOK: When My Name Was Keoko
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