Mark Peterson is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
In my last piece, I introduced you to the "munjip" — the collection of writings published posthumously for prominent scholar-officials in traditional times. As a measure of social status, it occurs to me that this was an even higher level of accomplishment than the "mungwa" exam. In the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty, there were about 15,000 men who passed the mungwa exam, but only about 3,000 were honored to have a munjip.
I recently met an old friend. He’s a very old friend; in fact, he died in 1979, but I “met” him through the massive book he left behind. His name is Yun Nam-han, a professor at Chung-Ang University, and when I met him it was at his home that had been turned into a wall-to-wall, shelf-to-shelf, crowded library — no, archive. I wondered how his wife put up with his having taken over the whole house with shoeboxes full of 4-by-6 index cards. I was introduced to him because I wanted to find articles written over time about adoption and inheritance issues as I was preparing my Ph.D. dissertation. Yun was compiling a topic index on everything ever written in a "munjip."
I’ve had an epiphany. This one is about Korean printing technology. The basic question is: Why, if the Gutenberg press spawned the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment and the end of feudalism in Europe, did not the same thing happen in Korea 200 years ahead of Gutenberg when Korea developed its own metal movable type?
Recently, I was privileged to attend the 30th International Conference of the Toegye Studies Association — this time held in Taiwan. The Toegye Studies Association was established to learn and perpetuate the teachings of Yi Hwang, who is most familiar to us as the man whose image is on the 1,000 won note. He is on the most common denomination of currency because he is, in effect, one of the “founding fathers” of Korea — we put the founding fathers and mothers on our money, do we not? He has been the most appreciated of all of the scholars of Korea, a nation that reveres scholars.
Korea has a Nobel Prize for literature. Finally. And there was a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to former President Kim Dae-jung. But where are the other prizes?
First of all, congratulations, to Han Kang and Korea as well. The prize goes to an individual, but the nation shares in the recognition. This is the second Nobel Prize for Korea. The first was the peace prize awarded to Kim Dae-jung for his efforts to attain peace with North Korea. My question is, where are the other Nobel Prizes?
The point to be made is that there are no low class names.
In the last few weeks, I posted a video about problematic Korean surnames, and in the process, I learned more about a subject I thought I already knew well.
Recently I met an old friend, Bruce Snow, who arrived in Korea a month before me in 1965. We talked of old times in Korea and recalled the perilous night in January 1968, when our house and the neighborhood in Cheongun-dong was shook by gunfire and night-time flares that lit up the night sky like it was day. It was the North Korean raid on the Blue House on Jan. 21, 1968.