Title: An Examination of a Time of Hardship, A Revelation of Identity: A Case Study of Yi Chong Un, a Voice from the Japanese Colonial Period and More
Abstract: Every man has a history, a history which should be cherished in its essence. The life of man, then, is the making of history; every moment, every trial, every triumph writes the history of today for ourselves and for our posterity. Few realize how rich and valuable an individual’s history can be, yet these treasures of personal histories are all around us. Untold, the stories of those who were will last only in the memories of those who lived them. We are blessed, then, in oral histories, a chance to share experiences past, an opportunity to bestow the touch of time upon the minds of our future. Here, I elapse into the history of my family through the remembrances and words of my grandfather, a man who found place in his history to pave the path for my present and inspire my future. Yi Chong Un was born on January 14, 1922 in Buyo, Korea to a family of seven children. In the midst of the Japanese colonial era, during which Japan annexed the peninsula and enacted policies of modernization and assimilation, he embarked, alone, upon a journey which would carry him across the sea to a nation which had subjugated the Korean people under its rule since before the twentieth century — Japan. At the age of sixteen, Yi Chong Un found himself displaced in Wakayama, Japan and amongst an unfamiliar people in a time of crucial change and instability, a time when the future of the Korean people was shrouded in unsurety. At such a critical age, both struggle and experience, memory and learning would gradually mold his sense of identity and existence into maturity. Here, in Japan, unceasingly remembering his home and his family in Korea and courageously looking forward to his future, Yi Chong Un would come to embrace his roots and his situation as a Korean adolescent in the unknown waters of Japan. Through hardship and struggle, the man who emerged was one sure of his station, simultaneously unfazed and sculpted by the influences of the Japanese, a man well on his way along the path to discovery of past, present, and future. Now, at the age of eighty-five, Yi Chong Un, my halabugee (grandfather), recalls the moments of his adolescence. We, thus, encounter not only the account of one of countless Koreans who experienced life under the Japanese, but the story of the gosaeng (hardship) and haengbok (happiness) of one young man on his road to self-discovery during this crucial period. Such confrontation, questioning, and discovery is reminiscent of the account of Helie Lee, the Korean-American author of Still Life With Rice, as she struggles to strip herself of self-erected barriers to her past and her heritage in order to embrace her history and to form her own identity. Initially, Helie does not, simply cannot comprehend how her Korean mother and grandmother can stand with such surety in their Korean identity. She almost bitterly observes, “They are both the same, so proud and certain of their identity. They annoyingly intimidate me…the more I attempt to figure out these two women, the more confused I become as to who I am and where I belong.” How can these two Korean women, dispelled from their homeland where they may comfortably speak their own language and practice their own traditions, possess so much pride and surety in their identity in America, a foreign land where they are looked upon as alien and misplaced? Oh, how envied is such assuredness in place, in identity, how Helie so longs for such comfort and strength. Retracing the struggles of her mother and grandmother, experiencing their histories as strong Korean women, Helie is able to “realize for the first time that I am my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s granddaughter,” forever familiar and cherished because they “share the same history, share the same blood.” Here, I retrace my grandfather’s story, my history, for I am his blood. His struggles are the foundations of my own; his life enriches my own history and his experiences nourish my conscience of identity. We embark.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-26
Language: en
Type: article
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