58 Anniversary Celebrity TV Journalist Becomes Culture Diplomat
‘Culture Is Useful Vehicle for Interaction With Outside World’
By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff Reporter
Park Jung-sook, CEO of Asia Treasure Network aimed at helping inter-racial children in Korea, is an individual donor for a seven-year-old boy living in the Philippines. In 2005, she went on a tour of the Southeast Asian country to see the life of the little boy at first hand.
In an interview with The Korea Times last week, Park said she was ``shocked'' after seeing the way of life in the poor area where the little boy was living. Extreme poverty drove some mothers living in the area to keep finding a new husband when a former spouse left.
``I met a woman who raised five children from two of her former husbands and the current one. When her two ex-spouses left, she found a new husband to make ends meet. Marriage out there was a way to feed her children,'' she said.
The mother of the five children told Park that she had seen ``Jewel in the Palace,'' and suddenly burst into tears upon recognizing her as the star of the Korean drama, Park recalled.
``She held my hands and kept saying, `Thank you.' I do not know exactly why she thanked me. But I clearly see that it was the power of culture that helped two people living in different worlds to feel a kind of unity,'' Park said.
Park, an assistant professor at the Institute of International Education of Kyung Hee University will be a special representative of The Korea Times.
``Korea was a recipient of international aid, and external assistance played a large part in helping the nation come this far in terms of the socio-economic status the people enjoy at present. Now it is time for us to give back to the international community,'' she said.
The 38-year-old called culture a useful vehicle that can help Korea ``interact'' with the outside world.
Park, a former broadcast journalist, is back after she left television in 2004. She had hosted several morning and talk show programs with the three major television networks here ― KBS, MBC and SBS ― from 1994 to 2004.
A career transformation occurred during the four years she was out of the public eye. The chic television journalist transformed herself into a cultural diplomat spreading the beneficial effects of international aid and social services to international relations as well as foreign diplomacy.
``Over the past decades, Korea has made international headlines several times due to its double-digit economic growth rates during industrialization making it one of the four Asian dragons, and the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s,'' she said.
The global media frenzy revisited the country when the Asian currency crisis hit Korea in 1997-1998, she said.
Some global economists dubbed the sudden drastic change in the country's economic status ― from a high-flying economy to a victim of the crisis ― the ``crisis of success.''
``Despite the series of dramatic transformations it has gone through in the past, Korea is still considered by the outside world as a country that is out there, rarely interacting with the rest of the world. This is probably because the way we have presented ourselves to the world was too unilateral, not responding to them,'' Park observed.
She teaches culture diplomacy every Friday as an adjunct professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Park, who was recently appointed by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) as a goodwill ambassador, argued Koreans could reach out through their culture to people living in underdeveloped nations.
``Japan has contributed its financial resources to establish social infrastructure by paving roads, building railways and harbors in the underprivileged world. The way Korea has changed the world is very different from Japan. We send out dedicated volunteers who educate the people out there so that they can think about better lives and making a difference in their communities,'' she said.
Park said Korea's investment in developing countries with its global outreach programs will definitely pay off in the long run.
``I have already had several positive reactions from people in underdeveloped countries. They remember Korea as a good donor country. They came to have a good image of Korea through KOICA volunteers,'' she said.
Dual Legacy of Acting Career
Park recalled her one-time acting career left a dual legacy on a personal level. In the soap opera Jewel in the Palace (2003), she played the role of Queen Munjeong, the mother of King Myeongjeong of the Joseon Kingdom. The drama was a big hit all over Asia.
``Personally, the drama had such a huge effect on me that I felt I lost, and Queen Munjeong lived in my heart,'' she said.
``There is no question that my appearance in the drama as an actress dealt a blow to my career as a professional broadcast journalist. After the Jewel in the Palace, I received several calls for actress jobs, but none from news programs,'' she said.
Before the soap opera, Park had hosted several talk show programs as a freelance journalist for 10 years.
``I made up my mind to leave the TV screen so that people would forget my one-time acting career. I thought I can take advantage of my time by learning new things and reeducating myself,'' she said.
In fall 2004, Park suddenly left Seoul to initially take part in a non-degree program at Columbia University, New York.
Park said she became an ardent reader of The Korea Times at that time. She has set the paper's Web site as her main homepage since then. When she clicked the icon of Internet Explore, the web site popped up.
``I started reading the paper online as I was curious as to what would be accurate words and expressions in English that I had in mind in Korean. I have been subscribing to the paper for four years since then. It has helped me a lot,'' she said.
Some time later, Park contributed her column about ``hallyu'' (the Korean wave) to the paper when she was at Columbia.
`Organic Power'
Her acting career with Jewel in the Palace led her to leave the television industry, as she wanted to cut the idea that ``Park is an actress.'' The impact of the soap opera, however, has not ended.
``Whenever people at Columbia talked about Korea, the issues were always related to problems. They were discussing the North Korean nuclear program, violent protests in South Korea and the backlash against the free trade agreement between South Korea and the U.S. and so on,'' she recalled.
``But one very positive thing was going on there. It was hallyu. The cultural phenomenon played a larger role in shedding light on the brighter side of the country,'' Park said.
She was thrilled and determined to seek a master's program in international relations at Columbia to dig into the effect of the Korean wave on regional politics in Asia.
Park characterized the trend as ``organic power,'' arguing it would help resolve conflicts in Asia and completed her master's thesis on the topic.
She refused to use soft power, which is widely used to refer to non-coercive, non-payment-based influence such as culture, when talking about the Korean wave.
``The reason I thought organic power is a more accurate term than soft power when referring to the Korean wave case is that culture tends to be bottom up, not top down,'' Park said.
``Meanwhile, it is said that power states can generate soft power and it affects weaker states. Therefore it's unlikely for less influential countries to have a meaningful effect on ones that have superior soft power,'' she added.
