Your Father’s Country
Alexander Chee
Would I die here? It was August 8, 2017, and I was sitting on the tarmac in Seoul, waiting to fly back to America, and this was my first thought as I saw the president’s tweet threatening the nuclear destruction of North Korea. I was in the last minutes of the trip, trying to edit a photo on Instagram as the other passengers boarded. The photo had been taken from my room in the hotel directly across from Seoul’s City Hall, where I knew to stay because of the discounts on their beautiful rooms due to the many protests. There was a black spot on the lawn from where the conservative protesters demanding the release of the ex-president, Park Geun-hye, had been standing until just before I arrived, and I wanted the photo to include the view of the mountains, the Koreana Hotel—one of Seoul’s oldest, where lovers go to get engaged, for good luck—and the black spot marking the lawn. But all of it wouldn’t fit.
I had come to Seoul to interview the filmmaker Park Chan-wook for T Magazine, and to me, a longtime fan of his, it was the assignment of a lifetime. I had rewatched his films in the weeks leading up to our meeting in order to prepare, and sometime during the flight over, I began to feel as if I were in an as-yet-unmade Park film about a writer sent to interview Park.
Usually, in a Park film, a misunderstood hero or heroine is pitted against the world by what seems like fate and is destroyed and remade by how they cannot escape it, turning them into the butt of a cosmic joke. Coincidences often signal what seem like impossible plots against the main character. The last film I’d been rewatching on the plane was Lady Vengeance, the story of a young woman falsely convicted of murder who sets out to avenge herself on the murderer after her release from prison, painting her eyelids red to mark her mission. She kidnaps the murderer and gathers the parents of the children he’s killed to punish him personally. As I stepped up to offer my passport on arrival in Seoul, I felt a chill as I noticed the red eyeshadow on the young woman officer stamping my passport—the same red eyeshadow as Lady Vengeance. She even looked like her—delicate features, and a stern seriousness despite her colorful eyes, as if she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all.
After that, the feeling kept growing. I even made it something of a game, a possible frame to the profile. The photo I was editing, for example: the spot on the lawn, the shadow of a crowd, with no crowd, long after the crowd had left. Park likes to use images that way. I just hadn’t been able to figure out what my Park film story line was.
And then I saw the tweet.
Just before I boarded the return flight, I realized I didn’t want to leave. After years of being alienated from this country by my father’s family, I had made friends here, had even come to miss Seoul when I wasn’t here. As I searched Twitter for context of Trump’s threat to North Korea, the cosmic joke in my Park film was finally plain. I had found my place here, perhaps in time to prepare to die here too.
The black spot marking the lawn, the shadow of a crowd, with no crowd—that was all that was left to see of the former president, the daughter of an earlier president-turned-dictator, Park Chung-hee, a man who ruled Korea for four terms until he was assassinated in 1979 and replaced by President Chun. She was the first woman president elected to the office and seemed at first to be the opposite of her authoritarian father. Her downfall began, however, with the Sewol Ferry disaster, in which an overloaded passenger vessel overturned while carrying students on a school trip, and more than three hundred people died, including rescue workers. The deaths, her poor reaction to the crisis, and the deadly unregulated nature of Korea’s particular brand of late capitalism shocked the public. She had already been involved in other corruption scandals before this, and protests over the disaster and then the investigation into it grew into crowds filling the streets, famous to us now around the world.
Her final scandal involved the revelation of undue influence over her by a close friend and advisor, Choi Soon-sil, herself the daughter of a powerful man, the head of a Korean religious group known as Yongsae-gyo, often referred to as a cult, and perhaps known to us outside Korea as the “Korean Rasputin.” The friends were in their own sort of Park film: two women with very famous fathers who had emerged from the repressive past of Korea to preside over the country together. One, the public face; one, apparently, the private; and now all they had done seemed to come down to this angry dark smudge on the lawn below my hotel room’s window.
When I checked my notifications, I noticed a comment on one of my pictures of the new water park in downtown Seoul, created by the new president when he was mayor of the city. He’d ordered a poisoned underground river cleaned and had turned it into this. “Aren’t you afraid of getting incinerated? I want you home now.” Instagram is usually an anodyne scroll through the lives of your friends and your favorite artists and celebrities, like a magazine in which you are the only context—politics doesn’t usually intrude, if you can even call the threat of nuclear war “politics.” Stunned, I gave up on the photo and, as I waited for the plane to push off from the gate, returned to Twitter to figure out what this friend meant, where I discovered everyone back in America panicking about the possibility of nuclear war.
I had not been afraid before this. The trip, just five days long, had been, until then, nothing less than a dream. The interview with director Park had included an unexpected invitation to his home. Park is a self-taught auteur and is, to me, one of the world’s great film directors. He lives north of Seoul near the border of North Korea in an artists’ colony, a town created for artists, next to a school for stuntmen, where he dreams up his genre-bending masterpieces. As I sat on the plane, waiting for takeoff, my mind’s eye was still full of the handsome stuntmen sunning themselves on the front sidewalk of the school, as if it were a muscle beach.
At night, after my interviews were done, I had gone out for meals and drinks with my friends there, writers mostly—mostly Korean American and living in Korea for work. There was a playfulness to life there that I hadn’t felt in a long time, running around in the dark of Jongno, posing for photos, staying up late, and eating at the food carts there with a somaek—a shot of soju dropped into a beer. I had spent a lot of time with my good friend Joe, with whom I have a kind of friendship I think of as very Korean, something I’ve only seen between men there, despite us both being Korean American—notable for an affectionate loyalty for which one dares just about anything. Joe had come with me to help me interview Park, for example, even renting the car to go to his house once we were invited, and giving me notes on the translation.
It had all felt like the opposite of the Korea I knew from the 1980s, as if both the country and I had passed through an enchantment, transformed.
The thought I’d had on the way to the airport was Would I live here? and I remembered it as I heard the engines of the plane pulse to life. Was this what it meant, that I didn’t want to leave?
My trouble with my family in Korea began before I was born, when my late father sacrificed his family’s approval to leave Korea after his military service in the early 1960s, married the blond American girl his mother had asked him not to marry when he left, and had three children with her. I was the oldest, and the oldest of my line of Chee, technically the next patriarch. But I was happiest when I did not speak to his family, because these intense conflicts from their past seemed to constantly engulf them, each visit an attempt to ensnare me or my siblings, to enlist us for one side or another. Before his death, my father visited this country most often to settle their fights, and without him, their fights now renewed themselves, and stayed unresolved.
When I look back on the past decade, I can see that the more I became close with my friends, the more I became, through them, closer to the country’s culture and history. I no longer needed to reach out to my family there and put up with their abuse. My family, who had so often criticized me for not knowing Korea better, turned out to be the obstacle.
Even as I read through the mix of disaster fantasies and bad jokes on Twitter, I knew the chances of a nuclear blast at that instant were minuscule. And yet with Trump, you just don’t know. This is a man who bombed Syria over dessert on a Saturday at his club. I never posted the City Hall photo. Looking at it now, I see why. The black spot on the grass looks like the aftermath of an explosion. The montage I was imagining for my character had me in my airplane seat, remembering the new river park, the clean air, the artists’ colony, just before it was all lost to nuclear fire.
There’s another feeling I get from Park’s films that I’ve been thinking about: of a Korea I still remember from the 1980s, when I came to visit my grandfather during the authoritarian rule of President Chun Doo-hwan. I can still remember my grandfather’s driver rolling up the windows of the Mercedes-Benz, hustling us away from the tear gas being used on demonstrators, and me feeling the urgency of the students appearing, suddenly, out of the clouds moving down the streets in the distance. And smelling the gas as it entered through the air conditioner. My grandfather held a handkerchief over his face and passed one to me also.
The Korea I knew around the time of President Chun was one filtered obstinately by my family, an aristocratic family flashy with new money, thanks to my grandfather’s hard work. I remember when I heard about Gwangju and the democracy movement, the reason for the tear gas in the streets, my first thought was My grandfather has a hotel and casino there. I had spent a few nights there on a long trip around the countryside at the direction of an aunt and uncle, and I had spent those nights sitting in a disco, swirling a brandy and Coke around in my glass and listening to singers cover American pop songs in Korean.
Even after we passed through that cloud of tear gas together, my grandfather never once told me about what the students were protesting.
Only when we went on a trip to a mountain park later that same summer did I get closer to the truth: a young man introduced himself to my brother and me as an organizer of those protests—he was the first one to tell me about the Gwangju democracy movement. He recognized us as Americans and wanted to inform us about the movement and the protests. “We are trying to reunify Korea,” he said. He told me there was a student movement in North Korea also, and when I asked if he had communicated with them, he said, without faltering, that he had not but that they knew these students existed. They were sure of it.
This is the kind of person Park makes films about, and it is part of why I love his work. Park’s films tell stories about people possessed by a love that borders on the fanatic, people who will risk their lives for someone they’ve never met but are sure exists. The films portray the desperation behind that sort of a senselessly romantic fatal gesture—and the humanity of that person as well.
The single visible sign that something was wrong with the country, to me, besides the protests, was the armed guards in the airport when we arrived, whose weapons shocked me. I was told that they were present as a part of preparedness for North Korean attacks. I would think of them years later when I saw armed guards in American airports, and then in our train stations too.
The last time I was in Korea, for family business, which typically meant family struggles, I went to see a Korean fortune-teller in Seoul. This is not undertaken lightly—they deliver truths you cannot easily escape from, if ever. He was blind, as was his wife, and he lived in the fortune-teller neighborhood, an in-demand advisor to very powerful Koreans. He’d been a soccer player as a young man, and a blow from a ball had cost him his sight but had also left him with this gift. A friend had arranged our meeting—her family had been going to see him for years. She came with me and translated. He told me many things, most of them good, and then, as he finished, he said, somewhat abruptly: “Korea is a beautiful country, but there is much about it that is not beautiful. But it is your father’s country, and so it is your country too.”
His fingers had been moving along the braille surface of his laptop, his way of reading his notes, and it had fascinated me. But what he said to me was not something he had been reading—his fingers had stopped moving as he spoke. His suddenly still hands underscored for me the shock of his words—that this was my country also—and I felt how much I had wanted someone to tell me this. Not the way my father’s family had, as if they owned me. But the way this man had, as if I belonged.
Most of my sense of belonging here has been built that way—away from my family. It is not very Korean, but it is the only way I know to belong. I had long confused my ambivalence over my connection to Korean culture with my ambivalence toward my family. No longer.
Would I die here? As the plane lifted off the ground and I could see the city, I remembered again the dark spot on the grass in front of City Hall. Yes, I knew I would if I had to. That day it meant dying apart from my husband, my family and friends back in America. But I knew I would die here if I had to, and it would be a happy death, because it was born from that same shock of belonging, some deepening of the earlier one. As the plane returned me to America, I knew I would die here because I wanted to live here. That these were the same feeling.
In the last seconds before we took off, I was still in that Park film, but the story had shifted. The writer who believed he was going to die was going to survive. The film now possibly about a writer discovering that Korea is the free country with a democratically elected president, elected by a majority, and the United States is the one with the man elected undemocratically, and bent on ruling as a dictator.
I don’t know where my Park Chan-wook film ends. If it’s over, or if I’m still in it. Maybe the ending is in Seoul, at some distant point in the future. I almost look forward to when I will know.