David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
Can plastic surgery hide national history?
Courtesy of Elina Volkova
By David A. Tizzard
I’ve spent over two decades living here and seen just how good Korea is at the glow-up. It’s a nation that loves looksmaxxing. Things get shiny. Polished. Airbrushed and tucked. From celebrities’ faces to citizens’ ID cards, everything gets cleaned. Including the history. The industries of memory have been working on the national identity with the same clinical precision as is applied to noses and eyelids. Korea remembers itself primarily as a victim while forgetting the moments when it exercised power over others.
On June 23, 1965, South Korea struck an agreement with Washington to send its troops into Vietnam. They contributed approximately 325,000 troops to the Vietnam War, the second largest foreign military contributor in the conflict. In doing so, they earned an estimated $5 billion dollars. The Miracle on the Han River, the hardworking Koreans in the textile factors, fields, and foreign lands is true. But it would not have likely happened without war. A war that created the country. A war that divided the country. A war that funded the country. All of them demarcated as separate events when, in reality, the nation here is living through one experience. It’s just that we’ve become very good at building monuments to the parts we like and forgetting where we buried the rest."
I recently reread Viet Thanh Nguyen’s "Nothing Ever Dies" for a graduate seminar I was teaching. It’s a fascinating book, wonderfully written, and makes some very provocative arguments. The most famous and repeated line from it occurs on the very first page: All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. It’s an exploration of the Industries of Memory; of soft power and narrative.
Nguyen says that we often remember wars like individuals: separate and distinct. Giving each one clear starting and end points as well as a few particular characteristics from which we can identify them. World War II becomes the "good" war and Korea the "forgotten" war. And yet, despite our inclination to do this, all wars have murky beginnings and inconclusive endings. The wars often continue a preceding one or foreshadow a conflict to come. Meanwhile, the names are used to instill certain memories and do not always point accurately to the geographic location or the belligerent. It is the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Korean War…but never the American War (at least not in the Anglosphere).
All this should remind us that the 20th and 21st centuries have been an ongoing set of conflicts. Almost akin to one continuous war which erupted at various points around the globe. Nguyen describes it by saying, “The real American War was this entire American Century, a long and uneven expansion marked by a few periodic high-intensity conflicts, many low-intensity skirmishes, and the steady drone of a war machine’s ever-ongoing preparations.”
And I feel he is right about the way we name and demarcate wars. The Korean War happened because of World War II, which happened because of World War I, which all then in turn caused the Vietnam War, and so on. That might be a somewhat simplistic reading of history but I am struck by his perspective. Maybe in a century or two, we might name and date these recent wars very differently from how we do now.
Moreover, if we look at the timeline from the perspective of the Global South, we don't see a sequence of wars. And we don’t use the same dates. Instead we see the violent, systematic re-ordering of the world. A century-long project of clearing the ground, by any means necessary, for the modern economy we inhabit today. Much of what we call the Korean War or Vietnam War can be understood as the aftermath of the collapse of the imperial order. The wars were not the cause of the division; they were the desperate, violent attempts to manage the void left by crumbling empires.
Even now, the naming of a war is political and it depends on where you are. Here in South Korea, the war is known as “Yuk E Oh” (meaning six, two, five). It unambiguously claims that the war started on June 25th and therefore the full responsibility of the North Korean state when they sent their tanks over the border in the early hours of that Sunday morning in 1950. In North Korea, they call the conflict the Fatherland Liberation War. China calls it The War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. In English, we call it The Korean War. The English title has the effect of removing American agency from the conflict. It also centres it geographically rather than focusing on the belligerents. Nevertheless, the war eventually became a conflict between American soldiers (and, of course, the many other nations who helped) fighting Chinese soldiers on Korean soil.
There are more wars happening right now. But those wars aren’t unique events either. They are all continuations of previous wars. And, they are very likely to lead to future wars as well. This is not to say that war is inevitable or it is our destiny. Rather that until we understand war correctly, we will never be able to combat it in the way that we should.
Korea likes to wear the mantle of the victim: the eternal bridesmaid of the 20th century, bruised and brutalized by Japan, toyed with by America, and haunted by the North. And yes, there is undeniable truth in the tragedy. But if you watch how this country moves today, you’ll see it has learned its lessons from its former masters all too well. Korea has successfully transitioned into a sleek, chic global minipower.
The reality is that South Korea’s rise was built on a foundation that required a very specific kind of forgetting. The brutal, dehumanizing chapters of the war in Vietnam didn’t just vanish. Movies such as (the admittedly excellent) "Ode to My Father" scrubbed them clean in an industry of weaponized memory. Many young Koreans are completely unaware of their country’s involvement in Vietnam. And, when confronted with it by their own powerful and now global cultural industry, it becomes a story told from their nationalist point of view. This is, of course, understandable. But it means that the Korean atrocities, ones for which some Vietnamese demand apologies, empathy, and understanding are forgotten. The war continues, not in the fields, but on the screens. In the national economies. In the cultural might and global attention each country now receives.
At the same time, the North remains the "un-human" other. Because Pyongyang cannot contest the stories told about them by the West and their South Korean counterparts, they remain trapped in the frame of the alien. Director Lee Chang Dong said it best: “We’ve set borders, dismissed the others as barbarians, and used the fear of barbarians to create more barbarians among us.” That’s what war does. It makes barbarians of us.