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| Moon Myŏng-ja with Kim Il Sung in 1992 |
Female Journalist (녀기자) is a novel by Cho Sŭng Chan first published in 2014 that covers the life of Korean-American journalist Moon Myŏng-ja. I was eager to obtain a copy because the title kept popping up in my research, and I had been told by several sources that this is one of the more popular domestic novels in North Korea - partly because they are fascinated by the scenes set in America. Somewhat unusually for a non-Imperishable Series novel, it had a second printing just two years after the first.
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| Moon Myŏng-ja's memoir: Park Chung-hee and Kim Dae-jung as I Saw Them (1999) |
Moon herself wrote a memoir that was published (in Korean) in 1999. It is long out of print, although some excerpts can be found online, and the Japanese version is still available from good old Amazon. Although Female Journalist makes her out to seem pretty fanatically pro-communist, Moon's published memoir offers no hint that she particularly admired North Korea's leaders or ideology – indeed, they are hardly mentioned. But she was certainly very opposed to the murderous regime that ruled South Korea until 1986.
Here's what is definitely true: Moon Myŏng-ja (a.k.a. Moon Myŏng-ju, a.k.a. Julie Moon) was born in North Kyŏngsang Province in 1930, went to Japan during the war to study at Meiji University and then Waseda University's Graduate School of Law, and served for five years as Tokyo Bureau Chief for the Korean women's magazine Yŏwŏn before getting hired as Washington correspondent for Chosun Ilbo. She joined the White House Press Corps in April 1961, just two months after Helen Thomas, and for decades they were in a close two-woman race for longest-serving White House correspondent. The pivotal moment in her life came in 1973 when she reported on the abduction of exiled dissident leader and future president Kim Dae-jung from Japan by KCIA thugs. Soon after, she was warned by friends that the authorities were waiting to arrest her if she returned to South Korea, so she had no choice but to apply for political asylum in the US. She later became a naturalized US citizen. Officially, she is the first American journalist to have done standalone interviews with two sitting DPRK leaders: Kim Il Sung in 1994 and Kim Jong Il in 2000. And yet, I asked several American journalists with deep knowledge of North Korea and found that none of them had ever heard of her. Even in South Korea, I could find no in-depth media profiles of her, in either Korean or English.
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| Christmas 1998 photo from Moon's memoir |
There is so much meat to analyze in this novel. Normally when I read a foreign-setting story like this, I am left endlessly puzzling over the provenance of odd details and mistakes. In this case, I can confidently assume that they used Moon's own memoir as a baseline – she would have given them a copy when she visited in 2000 if they didn't already have one. They wouldn't have even had to have it translated. One need only look at how Moon described things in her memoir to see exactly what the North Korean author had to work with and pinpoint where he let his imagination take over.
Crimes of Fashion
For instance, there is this scene, which takes place during Park Chung-hee's first visit to DC after seizing power in the 5.16 coup:
When the day of Park Chung-hee’s arrival in Washington came at last, Moon Myŏng-ju went out to the airport with her colleagues. The airport was crowded with officials from the US government who had come to greet him, officials from the South Korean embassy, their families, and reporters from various countries.When the plane finally arrived and the door opened, a short, skinny, unkempt man wearing sunglasses slowly descended the stairs. It was Park Chung-hee. Upon closer inspection, he was dressed in a shabby outfit with his pants not even creased, and he looked awkward meeting and greeting the American politicians, just like a country bumpkin who’d come to Seoul.How can this be the representative of my country?She felt indignant at the thought of her country’s democracy being trampled because of this brat. She wanted to go right up and tell him to straighten up his act. But she couldn’t act rashly at such a venue, so she just kept stewing to herself.She was unable to meet Park Chung-hee that day. After getting off the plane and greeting the American officials, he quickly got into a waiting car and left. The next day, Park held a banquet at the South Korean Embassy to which Moon was invited. It was a golden opportunity to meet him. She waited in the banquet hall until Park entered, once more wearing tinted lenses. As he approached, Moon stepped forward.“Chairman Park, it’s nice to meet you,” she greeted him politely. Park Chung-hee halted. The ambassador following alongside him blanched, fearing whatever poisonous words Moon might utter. Undaunted, Moon said everything that was on her mind.“It’s rude to meet a foreign head of state while wearing sunglasses. Is it because you lack confidence that you do this?”The ambassador was taken aback and tried to interrupt, but it was no use. Park struggled to maintain his composure, saying “You said you are Reporter Moon?”“Yes, Mr. Chairman!”“I forget, is that considered rude here?”“Maybe not in Seoul, but here it is. Please don’t wear them tomorrow!”
As my devoted followers may recall, I covered the Korean cultural taboo against sunglasses in a previous post. The above excerpt puts an interesting new twist on it, seemingly implying that this is not a Korean taboo at all but a standard Western rule of etiquette that only uncouth country bumpkins might not be aware of. I had thought this scene was a purely North Korean invention, but then I found a nearly identical scene in Moon's memoir. According to her own recollection, she did scold PCH for wearing sunglasses when he arrived in Washington in 1961.
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| PCH meeting the Kennedys in Nov. 1961, wearing the forbidden lenses. I will concede that it is odd to wear them indoors, but that distinction was not made in the novel |
Reading this, I cannot help but wonder once again what today's North Koreans make of their current leader's penchant for shades. And a very small part of me wonders if the author was trying to say something, writing such a thing at a time when KJU's tastes in this regard were already established.
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| Kim Jong Un in April 2014 (src: The Atlantic) |
Because the above excerpt so closely mirrors Moon's memoir, it's a good opportunity to compare how various expressions by Daegu-native Moon were revised by the North Korean author:
Moon’s memoir: | NK novel: |
서울 온 촌놈 | 서울에 온 촌닭 한가지 |
깡마르고 까무잡잡한 | 강마르고 가무잡잡한 |
선글라스, 색안경 | 색안경 |
바지선도 세우지 않은 후줄근한 차림 | 바지주름도 잡지 않은 후줄근한 차림 |
Loose Lips Sink the State Department's Media Surveillance Program
Another section that closely follows Moon's memoir, but mysteriously deviates on a few key details, is the following:
One day, just as Moon Myŏng-ju leaving the Library of Congress after checking some information, she encountered Thomas Hubbard. A stocky man of average height, he greeted her with a grin. He had a friendly and easygoing personality, and Moon had known him for a long time. He was friendly, but his words were often vague and lacked substance."Reporter Moon, I heard you're breaking news constantly these days?""Hmm!" She ignored the question as Thomas fell in step beside her."You think I don't know? Another anti-Park article, I hear. Saying that he embezzled a ton of money by stealing US military supplies?""What?" Moon Myŏng-ju stopped dead in her tracks. That article wouldn’t be published for another few days. "Where did you hear that?"Thomas's eyes widened in confusion at Moon's question. "What's wrong?""Out with it. Where did you hear that?" To her fiery, pressing questions, Thomas reluctantly replied that he'd seen it at the State Department.At the State Department?!Something clicked in her mind. This was an alarming revelation. Did the State Department review every article written by foreign correspondents?That evening, she went home and said to her husband, who had just returned from work, "Honey, it seems that Telex sends all articles by foreign correspondents over to the State Department. I just heard from Thomas..."Before she could even finish, her husband gave her a dumbfounded look. "Didn't you know that already?""But what about American democracy, which claims to guarantee freedom of the press? Is it all a lie?""Huh, you've wasted your time as a correspondent. You're so clueless about the US, you're just bumbling around, that's the problem!"That was true. Moon had been oblivious about the US. At that moment, she could not think. But the fact that the State Department was reviewing every article by foreign correspondents felt like a big deal, and she could feel the illusions and expectations she had long harbored about America being shattered.
I need to wake up and look at the world. How many slick and flowery words are running rampant in this world, distorting the truth?
With hangulized foreign names I always have to use my judgement, and 하바드 could be either "Hubbard" or "Harvard". If the former, though, this could refer to real-life person Thomas Hubbard, a long-serving State Department officer who played a leading role in several complicated negotiations with North Korea in the 1990s and then was US Ambassador to South Korea from 2001-2004. Hubbard is mentioned briefly in the North Korean novel Gun Barrel [총대] as "presidential special envoy Hubbard" [대통령특사 하바드] spelled the same way.
Moon's memoir is no help solving this mystery. It includes a nearly identical scene, down to the later conversation with her husband and her self-realization that she has been "oblivious" about the US. The only differences are 1) the article in question concerned ROK press intimidation and had nothing to do with military embezzlement, and 2) the person who told her about it was actually the reporter Spencer Davis, who was AP's State Department correspondent at the time.
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| Left: AP reporter Spencer Davis; Right: Former Ambassador Thomas Hubbard |
Why would they swap out Davis for Hubbard? Did they prefer for this revelation to come from a State Department worker rather than a fellow reporter? If this is intended to be that Thomas Hubbard, he would have been a freshly minted junior foreign service officer at the time. Is this an attempt to write an origin story for someone who would go on to be so involved with Korea? If so, why didn't they do more with this character? I have wracked my brain but cannot come up with any satisfactory answers.
As for the monitoring of foreign reporters' cable dispatches, from what I can find online, this was part of Operation Shamrock, a WWII relic that kept operating in peacetime because nobody cared enough to shut it down until it was publicly exposed in 1975. It can be thought of as an early precursor to the NSA surveillance scandal. Once again, one wonders what the North Korean writer may have been subtlely trying to say here, given that government monitoring of communications is standard operating procedure in their Republic, particularly for foreign journalists.
Creative License
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| Moon with Kim Jong Il in 2000 |
To be clear, large portions of the novel do not overlap at all with Moon's memoir, particularly the parts dealing with her personal life and the scenes set in North Korea. There's an interesting scene where she's arguing with her husband over whether to abort her second child for the sake of her career, hinting at North Korean views of wifely duty and the proper balance between career and family. There is also a harrowing early scene where she gets abducted from Tokyo and brutally tortured by agents of Syngman Rhee, which I can find nowhere in her memoir - but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Moon's memoir focused on her work as a journalist and various political events in the US and South Korea that she witnessed. This novel has a different focus, centered around the occasion of her first visit to Pyongyang in 1992 and her emotional encounter with Kim Il Sung. While there, she reunites with a cousin (likely fictional) who went North before the war, and the story unfolds through the mechanism of her telling him the story of her life, interspersed with periodic cut-aways to the present whenever he prompts her with clarifying questions.
As Moon regales her cousin with her life story, she also shares some of her observations about American society and the immigrant experience, including the following:
“The Los Angeles Times published data from the city police department stating that among the 70 or so ethnic groups living in the city, Koreans had the highest crime rate. Reading the article, I was initially ashamed, then enraged. To think that South Korean society itself was so rotten and decaying that even those who emigrated abroad were violently breaking the law and disrupting society, drawing criticism and disgracing the nation."At around that time, The New York Times published an article about a Chinese national charged with child abuse, sparking a huge public uproar. It turns out the child abuse charge stemmed from the parents of the family raising their voices and swearing at their child while bathing him because he was whining. An American neighbor witnessed this and reported it to the police, resulting in a week-long detention and a fine. In the East, swearing at your child while bathing them is not considered a crime, it's a sign of love. But under American law, that's considered a violation of human rights and subject to legal action! Faced with such absurdity, something suddenly occurred to me. I rushed down there and studied the Los Angeles Police Department's report on "Koreans' Crimes" and met with several of the individuals involved. There were some who’d done real crimes such as prostitution, drugs, illegal entry, and shoplifting, but more than half of them received legal punishment for ridiculous things like the Chinese person's 'child abuse crime'."One Korean immigrant, who hadn't been there long and didn't speak English, was sentenced for an outrageous crime, fined hundreds of dollars, and couldn't even protest."This is how Americans view Asians, and especially our people."
This particular anecdote does not appear anywhere in Moon's memoir, but again the memoir focused mainly on political events. Perhaps she wrote about this elsewhere; it certainly sounds like something that might have happened. It's just interesting to wonder what North Korean readers made of this.
Sources and links
Over at Jaju Shibo, the columnist 중국시민 has an in-depth analysis of this novel as part of their regular North Korea literature series, worth a look if you read Korean. 