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Home  Contemporary Issues
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Contemporary Issues
The contemporary issues project promotes cross-cultural understanding through public lectures, panel discussions, symposia and workshops that present the rich diversity of Korea and U.S.-Korea relations in historical and contemporary contexts. These programs feature authors, scholars, artists, practitioners from the nonprofit sector, politicians, business leaders and others who are willing to share with the American public their unique expertise on Korea and U.S.-Korea relations.
The focus of this project area is an in-depth exploration of the social, cultural, economic, political, historical and security dimensions of the U.S.-Korea relationship. The objective is to foster a greater awareness, appreciation and understanding of the complexity of these underlying factors, which fuels the power of imagination that is the indispensable wellspring of the capacity for empathy. While divergences of perspectives between Americans and Koreans on many fundamental issues may be inevitable, it is equally inevitable that these divergences must be brought within the realm of imagination to be channeled toward productive engagement based on mutual respect.
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Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard
President, Korea Economic Institute
Don Oberdorfer
Chairman, US-Korea Institute at SAIS
Thursday, August 9, 2007
5:00 PM-5:30 PM ♦ Registration and Reception (Open bar and hors-d'oeuvres)
5:30 PM-7:00 PM ♦ Presentation and Q&A
The Korea Society, 950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, New York City
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)
In recent years, North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability has gone from being a disturbing prospect to a frightening reality. The Six-Party Talks to end Pyongyang’s nuclear programs have generated some optimism, with the latest round resulting in the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor, but daunting obstacles loom over further progress. How did we get here?
Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard, author of Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb (Brookings Press, June 2007), will share his perspective that North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is a result of a breakdown in U.S. foreign policy. His presentation will be followed by a moderated conversation with Don Oberdorfer, chairman of the US–Korea Institute at SAIS.
Co-sponsored by the Asia Society and US-Korea Institute at SAIS.
About the Speakers
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 April 24, 2007
It may seem improbable in a nation that’s grown steadily wealthier and more self-confidant for decades, but for a generation of South Koreans, the literary symbol of their national mood is a little person. The novel in which he appears, The Dwarf, by Cho Se-hui, is probably the most important piece of Korean fiction written since 1945 said Bruce Fulton, professor of Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia. At an evening lecture and reading at The Korea Society, Fulton introduced his audience to The Dwarf and explained its deep resonance with Korean readers.
Published in the late 1970s, The Dwarf isn’t quite a novel in the conventional sense: it’s a series of 12 stories united by common characters—a lower middle-class midget and his family, his neighbors and a set of powerful chaebol leaders—that mixes vivid realism with occasional flights of fantasy.
Cho’s writing bridges two of his era’s literary schools of thought. One held that writers should be guided by an ethos of social realism and political relevance. The other emphasized the importance of a distinctive style. Cho included both, and added much that was distinctly his own. A member of the han,gul generation (the first wave of Korean writers who had been educated in their native language) Cho felt the need to create a truly national work and so wrote in a simple syntax that made his work accessible to Koreans of all educational levels.
For his readers, Cho’s substance was just as accessible as his style. During the period, South Korea’s military government was embarked on an ambitious industrialization drive. It promised Koreans that new economic development would create a better quality of life. But where it didn’t discuss industrialization’s grim downsides, Cho did. The Dwarf’s characters are beset by chronic unemployment and hopelessness, pollution, poor public services and an unrelenting ethos of consumption. Though Korea is much more prosperous today than when Cho wrote, it’s no small detail that Koreans are still reading The Dwarf.
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 May 8, 2007
Mystery buffs are always looking for a new plot twist or setting to enliven their whodunits. Few recent books oblige as fully as A Corpse in the Koryo, a murder mystery novel set entirely in North Korea. Written under the pseudonym James Church by a veteran Western intelligence official with years of experience with the DPRK, A Corpse in the Koryo is a rare glimpse into a society that most Americans know only through stereotypes.
The Korea Society gathered a panel of three experts with years of experience in the DPRK, as former officials of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, between them: Stephen W. Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; Choi Young-jin, the Republic of Korea's permanent representative to the United Nations; and Lucy Reed, a partner at the international law firm of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. They assessed the novel's realism and parsed the policy issues it raises.
A Corpse in the Koryo follows the travails of Inspector O, an investigator in North Korea's internal security bureau, who unwittingly finds himself wrapped up in a murder case. In order to solve it, Oh has to peer into the shadowy places that exist between North Korea's security establishment and its criminal underworld.
The panel was unanimous in its praise for the book. Representative Choi compared it to spy classics like Gorky Park and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in its ability to convey the suffocating atmosphere of a totalitarian state. Citing the "show, don't tell" standard of good fiction, Reed added that Church manages to create an ambiance of surveillance around O without ever telling the reader that O is being followed constantly.
The audience was curious to know whether the places and people Church had created were true to the realities of North Korea. Bosworth said they were, adding that Church had captured the essence of North Korea, in that it's "a society of ordinary people forced to act in very bizarre ways."
Though it's ultimately a work of fiction, the panel was also unanimous in the opinion that A Corpse in the Koryo provides a glimpse into the DPRK that could be of real use to policymakers. Inspector O's superiors, for example, embody the central dilemma of North Korea's elite: they know the system is dysfunctional, but because their status affords them great privilege, they have little interest in acting against it.
It might even suggest a way towards more productive U.S.-DPRK negotiations. "We should negotiate with North Korea as it is," said Bosworth, referring to A Corpse in the Koryo's realistic portrait of a troubled but stable society, "not as we imagine it to be."
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 April 17, 2007
There
are millions of Asian Americans in California and a surprisingly large number of
them are named Grace Lee. At an evening program, The Korea Society screened The Grace Lee project, a quirky,
personal documentary that investigates why so many Asian American parents give
their daughters the name, and what the name’s sociological implications may be.
After the screening Winnie Tam, lecturer
in Asian American studies at HunterCollege, discussed how the widespread use
of names like Grace Lee shapes perceptions of Asian American women in the United States.
In
a series of interviews woven with humorous monologues and reflective vignettes The Grace Lee Project meets nearly a
dozen Grace Lees. Their parents named them with the expectation that they’d
grow up to be dutiful, piano-playing overachievers. Some fit the mold. Others,
such as a Grace Lee who was active in the Black Panther Party during the 1970s,
have broken it. As the film delves into issues of shame, responsibility and
parental expectations, it discovers that regardless of their path in life, all
Grace Lees have faced similar obstacles in creating their own, unique place in
the Asian American community.
“Does
any other name shout ‘generic Asian girl’ like Grace Lee?” Winnie Tam asked
rhetorically as the lights came back up. The name “Grace Lee” is just one of
numerous factors that create a sense of anonymity and interchangeability around
Asian women in the American imagination, Tam continued. Before Asian women even
arrived in the United States, traditional Confucian culture
minimized their individuality, viewing them generically as wives, daughters and
sisters. The American immigration system, which based admittance on family
relations, continued the tradition and today, even scholars of the Asian
American experience focus on the historical importance of men, treating women
as ancillary.
Tam
noted that this process makes individual Asian American women invisible in
contemporary American discourse. She urged the audience to consider women in their
own right when they think about Asians in America.
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