The word han actually comes from the Chinese, and as Gary Rector, a writer and editor who lives in Seoul and is one of the few Americans ever to be naturalized as a Korean citizen, explained, “The Chinese character shows a heart and it shows a head that’s turned away.” Yi described han sentiment, somewhat dismissively, as “a peculiar mixture of tragedy and comedy,” and Rector, who was interpreting for me, elaborated: “Han is an anger and resentment that build up, and at the same time a feeling of frustration or a feeling of desires that are unfulfilled. So resentment, frustration, bitter longing are lumped together.” Other explicators stress han’s cumulative nature, the steady accretion of a pattern of lesser injuries into one large and abiding sense of woundedness. Humiliation is a key ingredient of han, which is where its ironic or comic side comes into play: the self-mockery of the self-loving who are all too aware of their weakness. It is touted as a keenly Korean emotion because it recognizes the contradictions of the Korean experience: traditionally, the intense nationalism and yearning for purity, so close to German ideas of volk, coupled with an overwhelming experience of victimhood, and, for the past fifty years, the bitter reality of national division. Han at its tenderest is melancholic and wistful, and in its darker forms militant and vengeful; in either case it is freighted with dissatisfaction and the temptations of extremism. Yi, who describes himself as “basically apolitical,” prefers to acknowledge that “there’s always a kind of duality to our existence.” Nevertheless, as he grew up grappling with the burden of his patrimony, he could not find a way to balance the competing public and private claims on his allegiance.
- Philip Gourevitch — Letter from Korea: Alone In the Dark : The New Yorker
- Philip Gourevitch — Letter from Korea: Alone In the Dark : The New Yorker
Short URL for this post: http://tmblr.co/ZRvhbyFcly76
