The Beat January 2003

Koreans To Remember
50 Famous People Who Helped Shape Korea
By Richard Saccone
Published by Hollym, 242 pgs, W12,000
Reviewed by Kim Mo-Po

Don‘t be fooled by the cheerfully colorful cover as I was; Koreans To Remember: 50 Famous People Who Helped Shape Korea covers 1500 years of bone chilling violence and bloody turmoil on the peninsula.

This short book briefly recounts the lives of 50 notable Koreans, from the year 560 C.E. until the present day. Written in a dry, surgical style that reads smoothly like a “Who's who” throughout the ages, KTR is an excellent starting point for an English speaker looking for a clear chronological overview of Korean history.

The author, Saccone, is an American who spent 10 years in the R.O.K. studying Korean history. He selected his fifty subjects by polling Koreans as to which historical figures they thought were the most important ones foreigners who wish to study Korea should know about. The resulting cast is quite varied: politicians, royalty, soldiers, philosophers, religious figures, businessmen, scholars, artists, and patriots.

Saccone‘s voice is withdrawn in a way that lends credibility, and he writes from as Korea-centric a perspective as is possible for a foreign author. I mention this because the great Koreans he writes of include freedom fighters like Ahn Chung-gun, the assassin of Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi, Yun Pong-gil, who bombed a Japanese delegation in Shanghai and Kim Koo, who gunned down a Japanese army officer to avenge the murder of Queen Min. It echoes the truism that one country's hero is another's terrorist.

While there‘s not much sex, drugs or rock ‘n roll inside, I counted three beheadings, six assassinations by handgun (one accidentally killing the wife of the intended victim), four kidnappings (two by North Korea), one gang stabbing, one attempted assassination with nitric acid, one death by hepatitis, six prison tortures, one dismemberment (of 16 year old independence fighter Yu Kwan-sun by her Japanese captors) and six capital executions (beheadings withstanding). We can only hope the next 1500 years turn out a bit more mellow.

The lightest, most enjoyable figures of KTR are King Sejong, who ushered in a golden age of peace and created the hangeul alphabet to make reading accessible to the masses; Queen Sondok, the first female ruler of Korea, who used her precognitive abilities to accurately predict and thwart attacks by the other kingdoms, and my all time favorite Korean, the outlaw monk Wonhyo, who encouraged the other monks to break their vows of celibacy.

If anything, after reading KTR, you'll have a clear basic picture of Korea‘s ’Three Kingdoms period‘, the Shilla, Koryo, and Choson dynasties, and of the Japanese colonial rule to the Korean War to the modern age of the Republic. You‘ll also start recognizing a lot of the huge bronze statues decorating the parks and monuments throughout the peninsula. Koreans to Remember is an eye-wide-opener for the average foreigner such as myself, who dropped into Korea knowing nothing of it's past struggles for autonomy.

*This review was sponsored by Kyobo Bookstore.