A matter of context
By Carter Eckert | December 16, 2006
THE CONTROVERSY in the Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee concerning the inclusion of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's book "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" in the sixth-grade curriculum underscores the importance of history in the teaching of literature, especially when the texts deal with a specific historical time and place.
Watkins's book, based on the author's life, focuses on the harrowing experiences of an 11-year-old Japanese girl and her family at the end of World War II in the northern part of Japanese-occupied colonial Korea. It is a well-written, gripping tale of terror and survival, and its first-person narration from the viewpoint of the girl, Yoko, makes it all the more powerful for sixth-grade readers.
Teaching should encourage students to think "outside the box" of American ethnocentricity and highlight human commonalities across cultural and historical divides. Watkins's book goes a long way toward accomplishing these goals. Through the magic of her prose and identification with her heroine, students are transported to a distant and different time and place and can experience Yoko's ordeal and triumph as their own.
But context and balance are important. While Yoko's story is compelling as a narrative of survival, it achieves its powerful effect in part by eliding the historical context in which Yoko and her family had been living Korea. That context, simply put, was a 40-year record of harsh colonial rule in Korea, which reached its apogee during the war years of 1937-45, when Yoko was growing up. While some Koreans fared better than others, many were conscripted for forced labor and sexual slavery to serve the Japanese imperial war machine, while the colonial authorities simultaneously promoted a program of intensive, coercive cultural assimilation that sought to erase a separate Korean identity on the peninsula.
Watkins was a small girl as these events were unfolding and can hardly be blamed for them, let alone held responsible for the occupation itself. But the story she tells is unfortunately incomplete, if not distorted, by the absence of this larger context. For example, she notes in passing that "the Koreans were part of the Japanese empire but they hated the Japanese and were not happy about the war." Since no further context is provided, young readers knowing little of the larger history of Japanese colonialism or the wartime atrocities might be tempted to think of the Korean population as ungrateful or uncooperative toward the Japanese empire of which they were a part.
The author's depictions of Koreans in the "Anti-Japanese Communist Army" are similarly problematic. First, there is some question as to whom she is referring here. There was no organized "Anti-Japanese Communist Army" of Korean soldiers, except for Kim Il Sung (later the leader of North Korea) and his guerrilla partisans in Manchuria, but they did not arrive in Korea until early September 1945, long after the events described in the book. It is possible, of course, that she is referring to some scattered local Korean communist groups, who sought a violent redress of colonial grievances in the Nanam area where the story takes place. Such violence cannot be condoned. But simply to portray Korean communists in 1945 as endemically evil is not only empirically incorrect; it removes Korean communism from the larger historical context that explains its anti-Japanese stance and its appeal to many Koreans. Indeed, throughout Korea in 1945 communists were widely regarded as patriotic nationalists who had risked their lives against a brutal colonial regime.
Dover-Sherborn teachers should be applauded for trying to expand the minds of their students beyond the familiar, and to include works about Asia in their curriculum. But Watkins's book may not serve that purpose well, especially if it is taught simply as a heroic personal narrative of survival, without adequate provision of historical context. This is not an argument for censorship or banning books. There is no reason why Watkins's book cannot be used in the schools. Introduced carefully and wisely, in conjunction, for example, with Richard Kim's classic "Lost Names," an autobiographical novel about a young Korean boy living at the end of Japanese colonial rule in the 1940s, it can help students understand how perspectives vary according to personal and historical circumstances. But to teach "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" without providing historicization might be compared to teaching a sympathetic novel about the escape of a German official's family from the Netherlands in 1945 without alluding to the nature of the Nazi occupation or the specter of Anne Frank.
Carter Eckert is a professor of Korean history at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/12/16/a_matter_of_context/
By Carter Eckert | December 16, 2006
THE CONTROVERSY in the Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee concerning the inclusion of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's book "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" in the sixth-grade curriculum underscores the importance of history in the teaching of literature, especially when the texts deal with a specific historical time and place.
Watkins's book, based on the author's life, focuses on the harrowing experiences of an 11-year-old Japanese girl and her family at the end of World War II in the northern part of Japanese-occupied colonial Korea. It is a well-written, gripping tale of terror and survival, and its first-person narration from the viewpoint of the girl, Yoko, makes it all the more powerful for sixth-grade readers.
Teaching should encourage students to think "outside the box" of American ethnocentricity and highlight human commonalities across cultural and historical divides. Watkins's book goes a long way toward accomplishing these goals. Through the magic of her prose and identification with her heroine, students are transported to a distant and different time and place and can experience Yoko's ordeal and triumph as their own.
But context and balance are important. While Yoko's story is compelling as a narrative of survival, it achieves its powerful effect in part by eliding the historical context in which Yoko and her family had been living Korea. That context, simply put, was a 40-year record of harsh colonial rule in Korea, which reached its apogee during the war years of 1937-45, when Yoko was growing up. While some Koreans fared better than others, many were conscripted for forced labor and sexual slavery to serve the Japanese imperial war machine, while the colonial authorities simultaneously promoted a program of intensive, coercive cultural assimilation that sought to erase a separate Korean identity on the peninsula.
Watkins was a small girl as these events were unfolding and can hardly be blamed for them, let alone held responsible for the occupation itself. But the story she tells is unfortunately incomplete, if not distorted, by the absence of this larger context. For example, she notes in passing that "the Koreans were part of the Japanese empire but they hated the Japanese and were not happy about the war." Since no further context is provided, young readers knowing little of the larger history of Japanese colonialism or the wartime atrocities might be tempted to think of the Korean population as ungrateful or uncooperative toward the Japanese empire of which they were a part.
The author's depictions of Koreans in the "Anti-Japanese Communist Army" are similarly problematic. First, there is some question as to whom she is referring here. There was no organized "Anti-Japanese Communist Army" of Korean soldiers, except for Kim Il Sung (later the leader of North Korea) and his guerrilla partisans in Manchuria, but they did not arrive in Korea until early September 1945, long after the events described in the book. It is possible, of course, that she is referring to some scattered local Korean communist groups, who sought a violent redress of colonial grievances in the Nanam area where the story takes place. Such violence cannot be condoned. But simply to portray Korean communists in 1945 as endemically evil is not only empirically incorrect; it removes Korean communism from the larger historical context that explains its anti-Japanese stance and its appeal to many Koreans. Indeed, throughout Korea in 1945 communists were widely regarded as patriotic nationalists who had risked their lives against a brutal colonial regime.
Dover-Sherborn teachers should be applauded for trying to expand the minds of their students beyond the familiar, and to include works about Asia in their curriculum. But Watkins's book may not serve that purpose well, especially if it is taught simply as a heroic personal narrative of survival, without adequate provision of historical context. This is not an argument for censorship or banning books. There is no reason why Watkins's book cannot be used in the schools. Introduced carefully and wisely, in conjunction, for example, with Richard Kim's classic "Lost Names," an autobiographical novel about a young Korean boy living at the end of Japanese colonial rule in the 1940s, it can help students understand how perspectives vary according to personal and historical circumstances. But to teach "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" without providing historicization might be compared to teaching a sympathetic novel about the escape of a German official's family from the Netherlands in 1945 without alluding to the nature of the Nazi occupation or the specter of Anne Frank.
Carter Eckert is a professor of Korean history at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/12/16/a_matter_of_context/