Eleventh Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth
International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement Lecture
April 9, 2015
Alice Campbell Alumni Center
BYUNG-HO CHUNG
Department of Anthropology
Hanyang University, Korea
I am truly honored and humbled to receive the Sheth International Alumni
Award for Exceptional Achievement. This is one of the many surprises that this great university has given me over the years. What I have done is far from a high achievement or any grand institutional success. My work has been a process of informal experiments in crossing borders and finding opportunities for small improvements. Today I would like to share with you my experiences in borders as a migrant, as an anthropologist, and as an activist.
The first international border that I ever crossed was at O'Hare airport in
Chicago. My parents had decided to immigrate to the United States because they were worried about my continuing troubles with the South Korean government. In high school I, along with some of my friends, had been jailed for publishing a newsletter resisting the military dictatorship of the time. I made it out of jail largely unscarred. Not all of my friends did.
In college, my social activities developed around night-schools for laborers and childcare centers for poor children. The authoritarian military regime considered these kinds of activities for the poor to be socialistic and dangerous.
As we crossed the Pacific Ocean, my father told me that he passed me the rights of the head of the family. He told me, "A young man like you will be a better leader to restart our family in a new world." I was 24 years old.
O’Hare airport buzzed with people of all races and all walks of life, filling
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me with excitement and anxiety. On a television screen, I saw an African
American man giving a speech to a huge crowd. Underneath the man’s passionate face I read the words “Martin Luther King Day.” It was January
15 th , 1980. I could not understand all the words he spoke, but I trembled each time he repeated those powerful words, “I have a dream.” From that moment on, America, my new home, became the Land of Martin Luther King.
Graduate Studies at UIUC
When I came to the United States, I wanted to study Anthropology at the
University of Illinois. But, I was in no way prepared for admission into such a prestigious program. My undergraduate GPA was low (since student activists in Korea at that time, didn't care for such things). And, my English was poor, 'cause we despised of the students following the American GI's to learn the imperialist language. More crucially, my undergrad advisor, who later became the head of KCIA, refused to write a reference letter for me.
Nevertheless, the professors at the anthropology admissions committee, surprised me by granting me a chance to study in the graduate school, trusting my self-introduction and study plan, and a sincere reference letter by a young Korean research assistant at the psychology department of the U of I. (And, I married her later.).
At U of I, I learned that the most important virtue for anthropologists is relativism in cultural understanding, the ability to set aside one’s own prejudices and prejudgments about people and their culture in order to truly understand where they come from. Compared to the American students who grew up in freedom and affluence, it was easier for me to understand and relate to the difficulties of the third world such as problems of peasants, urban slums, or even the Apartheid of South Africa. For me, the problem was
Japan, Korea's historical foe. When I took Professor Plath's class on Japanese culture, it was hard for me to accept in my heart what I could understand in my head. Overcoming these prejudices led me to some of the most satisfying work of my early career.
Konan-Illinois Center
When I was finishing my fieldwork in Japan, University of Illinois surprised me again by offering me the directorship of the Konan-Illinois
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Center, an exchange program for undergraduate students called, "A Year in
Japan." Sadly, the U of I professor who was supposed to fill the position died unexpectedly, leaving a vacancy to fill on short notice. U of I surprised not only me but a lot of people at Konan University, too, by appointing a Korean
ABD in his early thirties, who was not native in either English or Japanese language, to be the director of an American University program in Japan.
Japanese society at that time was (and still is, to some extent) very sensitive in cultural hierarchy and highly prejudiced against Korea.
My first major challenge as a director of the exchange program was to resolve a problem in the home-stay arrangements for students. 31 Japanese families volunteered to host American students, but one family withdrew suddenly when they found out the student they were assigned, Keith, was
African American. The administration of the Konan University, which was responsible for home-stay arrangements, decided to resolve the issue by having Keith to live alone in a dormitory for the year. As U of I’s representative in Kobe, I made it clear that I would not allow the program to proceed under such discriminatory circumstances, and I learned I was not alone in my sense of injustice. A local Japanese professor helped me make phone calls to local Japanese families. All the middle class families we contacted near campus refused, but one woman who owned a store in a local market offered Keith a warm welcome, saying "He is only a boy, isn't he?"
On the first day of the program, we held an election for class president.
That boy from Detroit, Keith, raised his hand and said, "You might wanna have a Karl Lewis as a representative of American students in Japan." (Karl
Lewis was the Usain Bolt of the 1980's.) So, in 1988, Konan-Illinois Center had set a precedent for what America did 20 years later with President
Obama. As Student President, Keith May gave greetings to audiences all over Japan throughout that year.
And, the Korean director decided that "Understanding contemporary
Japanese culture from the Periphery” would be the slogan for the year's program. We exposed the students to some of the usual cultural programs for
Americans, such as Kabuki theatre, Tea ceremony, and flower arrangement.
However, we also brought the students to visit communities that lay outside of, and were often looked down on by mainstream Japanese culture. We took them to Ainu villages in Hokkaido, Korean markets in Osaka, a women
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divers' village in Ise-shima, and a few Alternative schools and communities.
That year, our students have challenged Japanese stereotypes about what it means to be American and also learned how different segments of Japanese culture are struggling to define themselves.
<Slides: Konan-Illinois Center and A Year in Japan Program>
East Asian Workshop for Peace and Reconciliation
While in Japan, I met a Buddhist monk, Tonohira Yoshihiko, who was leading a small group of volunteers to excavate the remains of the forced labor victims from the war. During the Japanese colonial period, over a million Koreans were drafted into forced labor in Japanese mines and in the construction of roads, dams, and airports throughout Japan. Many of them worked till death, and some were secretly buried in the woods. Tonohira and his volunteers were working to excavate and identify Korean skeletons to return to their families in Korea. I promised him, "When I go back to Korea and become a professor in anthropology, I will come back here with my students and work with you".
Nine years later, in the summer of 1997, I was finally able to keep that promise by instituting a program called "Korean-Japanese Student
Workshop for the Excavation of the Remains of Forced Labor Victims".
They dug up the historical truth, and tried to find a way to work past the historical scars and prejudice of the Koreans and the ignorance and denials of the Japanese. They worked and played together, ate and slept together, and drank and talked together throughout the night. When the first remains were excavated, this young generation also shed tears together. Through this experience, they built a deep friendship and sense of community that could not be achieved through superficial exchange programs that usually overlook these historical realities.
This project grew into an ongoing exchange program including fieldwork in Korea to find the surviving families of these victims. In the past
18 years, over a thousand participants have worked together on these projects.
In the process, they learned each other’s languages, and studied and worked
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in each other’s countries. Many fall in love, some broke up, but some got married and had children.
<Slides: Excavation of Victims and the Workshop for Reconciliation>
Okedongmu Children in Korea
In the summer of 1995, a severe famine hit North Korea. I was shocked to see the horrendous pictures of children dying of hunger just a few miles away, across the DMZ. In response, my colleagues in the Korean cooperative childcare movement and I started a relief organization called "Okedongmu."
“Okedongmu” is a Korean phrase that means friends walking together with arms around each other’s shoulders. We wanted South and North Korean children in this divided reality to dream of a unified future. We started a fund-raising campaign called "Hello, My Friend!" Children in the south drew their faces and wrote letters to initiate a conversation with their peers in the north. The adults added presents of their own, money to aid in famine relief.
In return, children in the north sent their drawings and letters to the south.
The process of realizing of this dream, however, was anything but smooth.
The South Korean government at the time restricted even children's cultural events for the relief of North Korean children, and blocked the transport of any foods or medicines from the South to the North even through international organizations. To send a small amount of relief supplies to the starving children, we had to face steep walls of cold war politics and coldblooded bureaucracy of both South and North.
A typical episode happened in a negotiation process to send anti-parasitic drugs to North Korea. During my fieldwork among the North Korean refugees near the Chinese-Korean border, I learned that most of the North
Korean population were losing much of their already insufficient nutrition to intestinal parasites. At a meeting in Beijing, Okedongmu offered to send drugs that would kill the parasites in most people with just a tablet a year.
The North Korean official, however, brusquely declined our offer, saying,
"We do not have such a dirty problem in our Republic with high public hygiene". I went into deliberation and changed the name of the same drug as
"nutrition enhancer" instead of "anti-parasitic drug". (It does have an effect of 10-12% increase of nutritional absorption.) The North Korean official with medical background surely knew that I was the same drug. Nonetheless,
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he said with a wide smile, "Of course, we can receive this kind of drug".
After that negotiation, Okedongmu quietly supplied over 10 million tablets of "nutrition enhancers" a year for almost half of the North Korean population for 4 years without any media publicity. With this kind of effort, we have earned the trust by North Korean officials as a reliable partner with no political or religious intentions.
Over the years, through complex negotiations, with consideration for the other side's political culture, we were able to establish a soymilk factory which serves thousands of children every day, a formula milk factory for infants, a children's hospital for diarrhea, and a children's hospital ward at
Pyongyang Medical School Hospital.
<Slides: North Korean Famine and Okedongmu Children>
Okedongmu in the Troubled Wonderland, North Korea
I visited North Korea, the forbidden country, as a delegate for Okedongmu for the first time in March 2000. North Korea was going through the final stage of the famine which they called, "The Arduous March". Even in the prestigious capitol city, Pyongyang, children’s faces showed signs of malnutrition and their hands were cold as ice. But, they sang, "We are happy", and called the general "Our Father". There, I saw another face of North Korea.
<Video: We are happy!>
As an anthropologist, I felt a need to understand the symbolic politics of this troubled wonderland. With Professor Heonik Kwon at Cambridge
University, I analyzed the process of life-long political socialization aimed at voluntary conformity of the people, and discussed how that led to the exceptional inheritance of the charismatic power in North Korea as compared to other socialist countries. The results are published in a book titled "North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics", later translated into
Korean as "The Theatre State: North Korea".
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North Korean Refugee Children
As an activist, I set out on an investigation of the damage of famine on
North Korean children, a reality which the Regime would not recognize. On the Chinese-Korean border, I met North Korean refugee children and their mothers. Chased by the Chinese police as illegal migrants, they were hiding in mountains, in corn-fields, under bridges, or in secret shelters trembling in fear, sometimes for several years. It was agonizing to leave them behind in that miserable condition, and come back home by myself. By simply showing my South Korean passport and flying only two hours, I was back in
Seoul, but the peaceful daily life in this glittering city somehow seemed unreal. The two different realities of the same people on both sides of the border were hard to accept or to forget.
Around the year 2000, some North Korean refugees in China began coming to South Korea crossing the borders of many countries. The children and adolescents, who grew up during the famine, were noticeably smaller than their South Korean peers, as we had worried about since the beginning of Okedongmu. In addition to some serious developmental problems, many of the refugee children were suffering from the trauma of losing the family, imprisonment, violence, and human trafficking. The affluent South Korean society came as a tremendous culture shock, and the conspicuous consumption and competitive school system soon led to adaptation problems, including depression and suicides.
The South Korean government's program for arriving refugees was focused on political reeducation of adults and did not have a separate educational program for children and adolescents. The director of the adjustment center, who became aware of the problem, asked me to start a cultural education program as soon as possible, with whatever resources and funds I could personally mobilize. The Ministry of Unification program was called the “One (hana) Institute,” and focused on rapidly assimilating North
Koreans into the South Korean society. We, however, named our school the
"One-Two ( hanadul ) School" to emphasize the multi-cultural nature of the refugee experience. We encouraged the students to value their past experience in other cultures including North Korean and be free from the pressure for rapid assimilation to the host culture. They learned how to function in South Korean culture, but also learned that it is ok to be different,
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and that one country can have many cultures.
<Slides: North Korean Refugee Children and Multiculturalism>
From this ideal, other programs like the “Rainbow Center for Migrant
Youth” and “Global Bridge Programs for Migrant Children” were developed for the diverse multi-ethnic migrant groups that are becoming an increasingly important part of South Korean society. The lessons we learned through these efforts were later published in an edited volume titled “Multicultural
Spaces in Korea.”
From Night-Schools to Childcare Movement
All things taken, my social activities started with and developed around the
Cooperative Childcare Movement in South Korea, since the late 1970s. With the rapid urbanization, large scale slums grew up with miserable living conditions. Children with poor working parents were left all day long in locked rooms, and sometimes tragic fires took their lives. The authoritarian military regime at the time considered the education or welfare activities for the poor to be socialistic and dangerous. Something had to be done.
Who can take care of these children? My colleagues and I thought that care and education for the poor children of the slums should be an immediate answer to an urgent problem and also a fundamental task for democracy. The history of Cooperative Childcare Movement is a record of how the civil social movement in Korea has creatively responded to the need for care and education of poor children, which the government had not yet cared for.
Inspired by the ideas of Head Start movement in America, my friends and
I established a two year night school to train teachers to provide daycare to children in the slum areas in Seoul. Applying Brazilian educator Paulo
Freire’s theory of the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” and mindful of South
Korean social realities, we thought that with special training in early childhood education, young female factory laborers could become ideal teachers for the children in their own neighborhoods. This night school was highly illegal. We established our first daycare center in a big tent in a slum
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area in Seoul.
The Cooperative Childcare Movement
The daycare institutions available to most people in Korea were public and bureaucratic or private and profit-oriented. Through these experiences, I felt a need for a new paradigm of childcare that is spontaneous, cooperative, ecological and applicable to not only the poor but to all parents and children.
I saw daycare as an opportunity for not just housing children while their parents worked, but for building stronger communities.
In 1994, we started a new childcare co-op with some brave parents and teachers. Instead of handing the children over to teachers at the front door, the parents could come into the playroom anytime to talk to the teachers and play with the children. The Cooperative Childcare Movement evolved to be a program for not only the children's socialization but also the younger parents' re-socialization. The parents readjusted their lifestyles to raise their children happily, with traditionally absent fathers participating actively in their children’s day to day activities.
Unlike the bureaucratic daycare centers, which often keep their children inside all day, we want the children to enjoy sunshine, wind, water, soil, trees and animals. We want to give them an open space, and took them for an outing every day visiting small neighborhood parks, playgrounds, markets, bakeries, police stations, and fire-stations. The programs are designed to inculcate a sense of community, integrating children over age, gender and disability. The educational programs are centered around group projects for which children deliberate on what to do, devise creative methods for accomplishing their goals, and work together to make a final product all the children are proud of. .
In Korea’s hyper urban environments, these cooperatives daycare centers became a center of neighborhood networks. When one parent must work late, they find that they have co-op parents with whom their children can spend the evening. Indeed, many families have started to move their homes closer to the center.
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By developing a sense of community, these parents began to solve many other problem s together. They have started after-school care programs as their kids grew out of daycare, and developed co-op produce programs and community kitchens to help share the cooking duties for busy dual career families. They organized campaigns to protect neighborhood parks and playgrounds from environmental destruction and development. They set up a cafe and handcraft workshop for the handicapped children in their communities. Some families have even built multi-unit buildings to live together sharing communal spaces. Some of the parents from the early years of the Cooperative Childcare Movement, who are now approaching retirement age, are even building a dream retirement community together in rural areas.
<Slides: Cooperative Childcare Movement>
With this amazing spontaneity, the Cooperative Childcare Movement now has 73 daycare centers, 17 after-school care programs, 6 children's centers in low-income communities, and a few alternative schools around the nation.
Our early attempts at establishing childcare for the poor in 1978 were unwelcomed by the authoritarian government of the time. This past year, the mayor of Seoul officially adopted the cooperative childcare movement as a model for community building for the future.
Having discovered and realized the potential cooperative childcare offers for community development, we are now launching a cooperative childcare center that connects North Korean refugees with South Korean families, creating a unique model for cultural integration. On the other side of Seoul, we are building a cooperative childcare center through which we hope multi-ethnic migrant children and parents will live and grow with South
Korean families.
Now, let’s go into the conclusion.
In this Age of Globalization, citizens of many advanced countries view border-crossings as casual routine. However, for the majority of people around the world, national borders remain high and, in some countries, are becoming higher. For many, national borders mean limitation, vulnerability, and discrimination. At the same time, borders still elicit curiosity, excitement,
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and enchantment, and offer new opportunities for experimentation and growth.
I have crossed many borders as a migrant, as an anthropologist and as an activist. And, I have witnessed the all too prevalent risks and dangers along many borders. Most of these dangers are caused by on-going politics of prejudice and hatred, while others are caused by the bureaucratic systems of modern nation-states and simple cultural misunderstandings. However, in all these troubled wonderlands, I always found people full of what President
Obama might call "the audacity of hope." And, wherever I went, I have always found young people eager to employ the energy of their youthful optimism.
The organizations that we have established, including East Asian Peace
Workshop, Okedongmu Children for the Relief, the One-Two School for
North Korean Refugee Children, and the South Korean Cooperative Childcare Centers, are all non-governmental organizations driven by people who want nothing more but to make their lives better. Our activities have always been small relative to the vast social problems they seek to address, but are always focused on making a difference in one life at a time. These programs could be called as “an informal politics” of people daring to change the future of not only themselves but of many others. The results we have achieved are modest, but I like to dream that they are planting the seeds for shared living in a someday borderless world. Thank you.
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