Portrait of the patriot - Part 3

In Pak’s mind, history and mythology had the same unreal quality. The anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle, the founding of the DPRK, the patriotic war against American aggressors -- these he knew from history books, not from personal experience. He always marveled at the depth of emotion when his parents would tell stories of the war.

He could better relate to the division of Korea, since he had several times been to Panmunjom, interpreting for visiting foreigners. He felt deeply the injustice of division, but standing at the dividing line that crossed the blue barracks, he harboured no personal hostility toward the South Korean soldiers staring at him through binoculars from the other side.

Divided Korea was a matter of fact -- a sad fact, a tragic fact, but nevertheless an incontrovertible fact of life.

Korean reunification on the other hand was a matter of faith -- an eschatological faith, something you live for every day of your life, even though it may not happen in your lifetime. “Korea is one,” so many posters reminded him again and again. To him this wasn’t just a slogan. It was an article of his creed. It never crossed his mind to doubt it.

And then, very suddenly, almost without warning, this faith in reunification was rewarded with a new fact: the inter-Korean summit of the year 2000.

This followed upon another minor disappointment. He had been working for a brief period with an NGO that employed very young, very inexperienced, and very idealistic aid workers. None of these European youths had ever been in Asia, let alone Korea. They knew nothing of Korean history, treated him with great suspicion, and made demands on him that he was unable to meet, no matter how hard he tried.

This group of foreign youths eventually decided that they could not continue to work in the DPRK without losing their integrity, and blamed their failure on “insufficient humanitarian space” in his country. Pak was hard pressed to understand what that actually meant. His superiors blamed the whole incident on Pak’s lack of experience, i.e., his inability to keep foreigners under his control.

He expected to be dismissed from his international duties and sent back to his teaching job at the university. What he didn’t know was that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was already preparing for the expected influx of foreign delegations following the summit, which would once again stretch their human resources -- especially their pool of interpreters -- to the limit. They reassigned Pak to the UNDP, which they considered a safer place for him.

With the 2000 Summit and the June 15 Joint Declaration, the universe seemed to have shifted. The future seemed to have come closer. Everyone was electrified by the enormity of this event. Coming home from the airport where he had joined the throngs welcoming South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung, he heard his wife playing the electric keyboard that she had not touched since his daughter’s death. She told him she had watched the event on television and decided she wanted to have another child to experience the reunification of Korea.