White Badge | Asian American Bookview

White Badge
by Ahn Junghyo
SoHo Press, New York, 1989, 337 pp, $13
A Korean veteran struggles and fails to readjust to civilian life after returning from the horrors of the Vietnam War -- a masterful evocation of the tragic similarities and absurd contrasts between the Vietnam war and the realities of peacetime life in modern Korea. (Translated from the Korean by its original author.)
EXCERPT

e're in big trouble," Pak Nahmjun, the director, began to squeal even before we took our designated seats around the new oval table. Summoned to the "emergency" meeting were the managing editor, the three editorial chiefs, the production manager and the general affairs manager. "It's already July, and the vacation season will start in a few weeks. Soon we begin handing out vacation bonuses, but business looks very bad on the delivery and collection chart. Sales are dropping fast; the usual summer slump in the publishing business is here again. And this year the returns of books from local stores have increased sharply. We need some emergency measures to tide us over this serious crisis. We must have one of two quick bestsellers to keep our cash flow in the black."
     At every meeting, Director Pak wanted someone to come up with a project that would sell at least 100,000 copies in a month. Nam Hosik, chief of the Second Editorial Department, suggested we might have an easier summer if we could buy the right to publish Destiny in the Winds, an epic novel appearing in a local daily newspaper, as soon as its serialization was concluded in mid-August. But everybody at the meeting knew that suggestion should have been made at least two years earlier; four other publishers had been competing to buy these rights for over a year, each offering from 5 to 10 million won in advance payments against royalties, with no obligation to refund it under any circumstances.
     Lee Wonse, chief of the First Editorial Department, tried to persuade the director, again in vain, that this publishing house might as well try some surefire project, such as a heavily commercial novel about the affluent and materialistic business world, with sufficient pornographic doses to vault it onto the bestseller list immediately.
     "How about the translation side?" This was a recommendation invariably made by Choe Inhwan, the managing editor, at almost every meeting called by the managing director to squeeze an impossible bestseller out of us. "Have you read any good books lately, Mr Han?" he asked me, and I thought this question sounded like a book advertisement. "Maybe we can find a good book for translation that would sell."
     I told them about the books I had read lately: The Truth That Killed by Georgi Markov, who was dubbed the Solzhenitsyn of Bulgaria, Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth, William Kennedy's Ironweed which had won the Pulitzer Prize in the United States but was completely unknown in Korea, and Arthur Miller's Salesman in Beijing.
     "Salesman in Beijing?" asked Director Pak. "What's 'Beijing'?"
     "It's the same as Pukkyong. They used to romanize it 'Peking' in English, but it is now spelled 'Beijing'."

     "Oh. Is that a new Arthur Miller play? I saw the other play about the salesman."
     "This is not a play," I explained. "Arthur Miller visited Pukkyong when Death of a Salesman was produced there, and this books is about his experiences in China..."
     I was aware that I was making a mistake and I should shut up or talk about something else, but somehow I kept discussing what was totally irrelevant to this gathering. I was supposed to explain to them what recent books would be bestsellers if translated and published in Korea. Instead I lectured them on transitions in Chinese culture since Mao Zedong's death. The hordes of Honda and Suzuki motorcycles that had been polluting the air of the Saigon streets now fell upon Red China on its way to continental conquest; Pacmen were gobbling up the computerized symbols of modern Western civilization in the video game rooms of Shanghai; the mandarin community observed developments in the Persian Gulf and the dangerous confrontation between President Marcos and Senator Aquino through news broadcasts on television sets imported from Japan; Tess of the D'Uvervilles, the movie, was shown in the Chinese cinemas; Star Wars and The Winds of War were translated into Chinese; the younger generation ate beefsteak with forks and knives and drank martinis at Westernized restaurants as China, the Middle Kingdom of the Universe, slowly, lazily, opened its eyes and took in the breathless changes going on in the global community...

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