Massacre in Korea & disOriented

Pablo Picasso's ``Massacre in Korea'' (1951) depicts four naked women and their children in front of a mass grave. Opposite the women, four knights aim their guns and swords at them, alluding to Franciso Goya's masterpiece ``Los Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo.''

Kyoung H. Park

By Kyoung H. Park

Pablo Picasso's ``Massacre in Korea'' (1951) depicts four naked women and their children in front of a mass grave. Opposite the women, four knights aim their guns and swords at them, alluding to Franciso Goya's masterpiece ``Los Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo.''

Tears roll down a woman's cubic face, while the knights stand with their chests and faces covered by silver armor and masks. Between the women and men, Korean hills stretch solemnly upwards amidst a cloudless sky.

Though not as prominent as ``Guernica,'' Picasso painted ``Massacre in Korea'' as he both abandoned his communist ideals and reproached US military force. By doing so, he captured Korea's most tragic chapter in its 20th century history ― an ideological division which led not only to the first armed conflict of the Cold War, the Korean War, but the separation of the Korean peninsula and people in 1953.

My grandparents, both fraternal and maternal, were North Korean. My paternal grandparents used to live in Wonsan, a trading port city on the westernmost part of the East Sea, while my maternal grandparents lived in Kaesong, Korea's former capital during the Koryo dynasty (918-1392).

Just in their early 20's when the war began, all four fled from bombs, fire and violence, and settled in and nearby Seoul. I can only imagine, for they will not tell me in detail, how it is they managed to survive the warfare or raise a family of seven. What I do know is from my parents, who over dinner would tell me about the extreme conditions under which they were raised: meals rationed based on Confucian family hierarchies, public humiliation by teachers for not being able to afford school tuition.

My parents spent their young adult lives in between odd jobs until they were old enough to marry and immigrated to Santiago, Chile in 1980. As their parents (my grandparents) were from North Korea, and all possibilities of returning home had by then disappeared, they considered South Korea a country as foreign to them as Chile, the country in which they settled and raised their family.

In Santiago, Korean history and culture was incomprehensible and of such a painful nature that I chose to suppress its legacy rather than embrace it. During the weekends, my parents watched Korean TV news and shows, which were recorded on videotapes and exported to Korean video-stores abroad.

Korean ``Han'' characterized the sentiment of these programs; ``Han'' is most closely translated into English as lament, grudge, regret, self-pity, hatred ― or all of the above. The most notable TV shows were those of family reunions in which North Koreans were allowed to return to South Korea and reunite with their families.

After hearing the life-stories of the show's participants, one person would call out for their long-lost mother, father, brother, or sister, and as that person ran on stage towards a much-longed reunion, the whole audience (and my parents) would break into tears.

Despite a ceasefire signed in 1953, North and South Korea have not yet signed a peace treaty, which implies that the Korean peninsula has been in a state of war for 58 years.

Three living generations of Koreans have been deeply scarred by history and as time passes, the North/South Korean divide has become an unresolved conflict which causes either extreme sentiments or utmost apathy in Koreans. For my generation, still in their 20s, the Korean War is history and its aftermath a cultural matter more than an issue of life and death.

Through oral family histories, textbooks, books, and films, the North/South Korean division has been learned, processed and accepted as a matter of fact.

I began living in South Korea three years ago on a personal quest for identity as an ethnic-Korean. I cannot think of a better way to share my discoveries than through the work I love, which is to write for the theater.

Starting with collected fragments of family history, I assembled them together as puzzle-pieces trying to understand the grander narrative of where I come from.

While doing so, I stumbled upon huge gaps in it, as past pain and suffering is often swept under carpets of embarrassment and shame. I confronted the awful truth of the choices my family had to make in order to survive, the rupture of familial traditions when my parents decided to emigrate, and the repercussions of living an immigrant life in a culture foreign to ours.

The process was mysterious until it dawned upon me that gaps in our history were deliberate choices to be a silent about pain that could not be spoken; or rather, gaps in our history were a silent acceptance of pain that could not be avoided.

My play ``disOriented'' began at the Royal Court's Young Writer's Program in London during the fall of 2007.

While writing it, I struggled to understand its structure ― a series of family scenes clashing against each other as if they were a culture war, pacified only through one of Korea's most elegant performances ― the Korean fan dance.

With the guidance of the Royal Court, I developed a second draft, which was presented as a reading at Ma-Yi Theatre's 2008 LABFest in New York City (the largest collection of new plays by Asian-American writers) and as a bi-lingual staged reading at Kyung Hee University's School of English Language and Culture.

Witnessing the performance of the play for the first time in English and Korean, I listened to the responses of the audiences to work on a third, extended, version of the play that will be presented as a workshop production by the Diverse City Theatre Company in New York City this month.

Writing ``disOriented'' has been a journey through which I have discovered the family history my father promised to tell me only once ``he wrote his novel.''

However, what haunts me about this play are its characters and structure. Similar to Picasso's ``Massacre in Korea,'' I focused my story on the greatest casualties of war: women and children.

I chose to explore the matrilineage of my family as the stories of my maternal grandmother, mother, and sister (who passed away soon after birth) embody, in my mind, my family's ability to overcome death, sacrifice for family, and search for truth and beauty in the most challenging of times.

However, working with artists in London, New York, and Suwon on the earlier drafts of this play, I've come to realize that the politics that have shaped my family history also shape this work.

The clashing scenes in ``disOriented,'' which I constantly questioned for being confusing and frustrating, slowly began to unveil themselves as my need to reconcile past and present, North and South, East and West, and a division we, as Korean people, still seek to overcome.

Kyoung H. Park is author of ``disOriented,'' which will be presented as a workshop production by Diverse City Theater Company under the direction of Carlos Armesto. Performances will be on February 14th and 15th, 2009 at Theater 54 in New York City. He can be reached at kyounghpark@gmail.com