Mark Peterson is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
My experience in Korea began almost 59 years ago — in November. Arriving one month ahead of me in October was my good friend, Bruce Snow. Recently, I met him and we had the chance to reminisce about the Korea of 1965.
The Lake in the Woods, or “Sup sogui Hosu” in Korean, is the name of the “village” that comes alive every summer for students learning Korean in a residential immersion context in the Minnesota North Words. All of the 14 language villages hosted by Concordia Language Villages since 1961 under the auspices of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, carry the name “Lake in the Woods” in each of the target languages (Arabic is “The Oasis” — lakes are in short supply in the Arabic-speaking world).
Recently on my YouTube channel, I recorded an interview with a "K-pop” Korean language student. I was asked by the National Institute of Korean Language to make a video to investigate the way the Korean language is being studied and learned by Americans.
Recently, one of my colleagues discovered a recording of my graduate school advisor, Edward W. Wagner, on a 1985 KBS program. He was interviewed about his work and the development of the Korean program at Harvard. I was so, so delighted to watch the video and see a younger, vibrant professor and friend. My last memory of him was when I visited him at the senior care center when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer's. Now, to see him as a young sixty-year-old, a man just a little older than the man who taught me Korean history in graduate seminars, brought back a flood of happy memories.
One of the projects I’m working on these days is a documentary film about a Utah National Guard battalion that fought several major battles in the Korean War and yet returned home miraculously with no fatalities. I’ve written about the 213 Field Artillery Battalion here before, but today, I thought I’d bring you up-to-date on what we are finding in our background research for the film.
Call me quixotic, but I have founded, formally, the genealogical association of the future for Korea. It is actually the genealogical association of old Korea, that I am trying to revive for a framework of family history research in the future.
I was in Korea recently as a guest of the Sungkyunkwan — not the modern university, but the original Confucian academy that is over 1,000 years old. Today, the Sungkyunkwan is the headquarters for the Confucian organization. The conference I attended was a training session for leaders of Confucian organizations from across the country — the hyanggyo and seowon in every area of Korea. I was asked to talk about my views of the standing of Confucianism in 21st-century Korea.
Congratulations, Korea, on another display of democracy with your recent elections. I lived in Korea at a time when the practice of democracy was in question, but today, in some ways, Korea is more democratic than my own country, the United States.
I want to pay tribute to my “samonim” in today’s editorial. Samonim means the wife of one’s teacher. One of my most influential teachers was Ed Wagner, my thesis adviser and major professor at Harvard. I wrote a piece paying tribute to him several years ago (Sept. 22, 2019). At that time, thanks to the connection provided by my old friend and retired editor of The Korea Times, Hong Soon-il, (who died two months ago at the age of 93), I reconnected with my samonim,Namhi Kim Choi Wagner.