A Brief History of Han with Prof. Michael D. Shin

Thank you for coming to the Korea Society. It's six o'clock, and we're delighted to welcome you here on such a sunny day, and we appreciate your participation. And I'm very delighted to welcome back Michael Shin. And Professor Shin from Cambridge has really been an asset here for our education initiatives this spring. This is the third of three lectures that he's offering. The first was on the 100th anniversary of the March 1st Liberation Movement, and was quite memorable. The second, which was memorable because it was so smart in its presentation, but entertaining, was on the history of Soju and kimchi. Both of these, by the way, you can listen to on podcasts for free at koreasociety.org or by going to iTunes or your iOS equivalents and try to download but please have a listen to the podcast. And tonight, he's going to speak on the issue of Han, which as a political scientist in my Columbia courses, we generally describe as grievance, but he will describe that as not an all-encompassing term. And it's an important part of sentiment here. And here at the Korea Society, we talk a lot in areas of policy and business and arts and culture and other aspects of education. And of course, we have a very active language program. But he's really going to cut, I think, in interesting ways that are historical, cultural, sociological for us, and knowing Michael in ways that will really illuminate us. So thank you for taking the time to be with us here again for this third of three lectures. I'd also like to thank the Huang Family Foundation, which inspired the series. And I look forward to the next time we can get Professor Shin back. He was first with us about five years ago for a presentation on history of Korean maps, which was most memorable as well. So thanks for all of your continued support for the Korea Society. Thank all of you. And we're delighted. I know we have a number of new people here in the audience, and to the writers especially, thanks for coming. And we're looking forward to your active participation. For those streaming online, thanks for joining us. And for membership and more, please see koreasociety.org. And now, from Cambridge, Professor Michael Shin. First, I'd like to thank Professor Stephen Norber for giving me a forum to meet a broader audience than I usually do. I'd also like to thank Jonathan Corrado and Peter Stumke for doing all the design behind the scenes with us to make this run so smoothly. Now, today I want to talk about Han. It's one of those key words that captures something about Korea that appears to be essential to understanding it. I mean, most cultures have certain key words or phrases like this. Any foreigner who begins learning the Korean language will come upon this. And once they learn about it, Han seems to be everywhere. Yet, what's frustrating about it is that then Koreans will tell these foreigners that it's difficult, if not impossible, to translate and that you can't understand it anyway. So what do you do in such a situation? It's the ultimate kind of tease. They're saying, you need to understand this but you'll never understand it. So what do you do? One thing you can do is tell stories. I don't know if you've read Vilan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And there's a whole story based on the fact that there's a word in Czech language that he couldn't translate into French. So he says that to explain it, I have to tell the story. Because even if Koreans can't explain it in another language, they can point it out when they see it. So in today's talk, I'll first give a brief overview of how the term Han has been used. Very brief, very insufficient. Then I'll present to you some stories taken from my historical research about Han. Then I hope to do more than show that Han can be understood by non-Koreans. I will try to show that what appears to be a difficulty of translation is actually a difficulty of definition. That the way it's been defined has caused problems in translating and getting others to understand. So I hope that this talk can at least bring up some points that will help you to, I guess, or help all of us reach a more sturdy definition of what Han is. As many of you know, Han is most commonly associated with separated families. Now these are the families that have members both in North and South Korea who were separated during the Korean War. So the emotions that they feel when they have the all-too-rare reunions is the prototypical example of Han. You can see it here. They don't even have words to say. They can do sort of cry, and they can't even talk properly. Now, so this reflects the general definition of the term. Han is often defined by the intense emotions that it evokes. So for instance, in a major Korean encyclopedia of Korean culture, it is defined as the most Korean sentiment of sadness. And many other definitions focus on emotions or emotional states. I took this from Anthony Bourdain. He went to Korea for a show, Parts Unknown, and he said this. Han is his favorite Korean word. How come the Korean guys are so tormented? Well, that's quite an explanation of it. But I think this already shows that, I mean, he's pretty close. He has a sense of it as a foreigner. But I hope here you can already see one of the problems with the definition of Han. One of the reasons that people can't think, that thinks that it can't be translated is because it refers to several different emotions at the same time. So as a result, Han can be applied to a variety of situations. Almost any negative emotion can be called Han. So we can see this in examples like here. This is just a few examples I found from the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper. You can see it commonly written here. It says, you're talking about, again, the separated families have Han. Let's quickly relieve their Han. You can understand, yes, separated families have Han. Then it says about the military sex slaves. Kim Hak-sun was the first one to come out publicly. No one will debate that she has Han. So it says here, this is published upon her passing, which is that her life filled with Han has finished. And we can understand that. It's about when, after the democracy movement succeeded, a new president comes in, and you're talking about, again, let's overcome the Han and have a new politics. You can understand that as well. But then it can get a little ridiculous. It says here, our schools don't have enough classrooms, so we have Han. All right? It says, temporary lecturers at colleges have Han. They're not paid properly. Yeah, yes, they stand there. This one, this one I like. Farmers can't find wives, so they have Han. If I put it in this, like, one after another, it does seem a little ridiculous that I can cover such a wide range of situations and emotions. You see this even in Western discussions of it. Some people call it K-rage. This K thing has gone too far. It's K-rage, right? Koreans will soon be called K-humans in the near future because of this. Now, some of these are clearly not cases of Han, and I think that it's insufficient to define Han in terms of emotions. It's not wrong, but just that it's not enough. It doesn't explain enough about what it is. Now, these emotions, intense though they are, are actually, they're surface phenomena. They're manifestations of something deeper that we need to understand. So we need to have a definition of Han that hopes to explain what evokes such strong emotions. Now, and there are many common aspects of Han that Koreans talk about that can't be explained by emotions. Now, I can think of three things. First, Han often feels like, there's sort of a weirdly ghostly spiritual element to it. Almost as if you're haunted. A person who has Han feels haunted. Referring to emotions doesn't explain why people would feel that way. Secondly, it seems that all Koreans are capable of feeling it though it's not constantly present. Third, and this is probably the weirdest thing, and you saw it in the clip from the Anthony Bourdain thing, it appears to be inherited and can be moved from generation to generation. And that's really odd. How can an emotional state move from generation to generation? Now, the person claimed that Koreans are born with Han. I know. When a newborn baby is crying, the baby does not have Han. It should be logically ridiculous. But what we have to figure out is, what is it about Han that makes it appear as if it can be genetic? It can be inherited by future generations. And what I'm gonna try to do today is to sort of use history as sort of to provide a new perspective on Han. Now, let's first clear up a few things. Sometimes Koreans talk about Han as if it's the essence of being Korean. It goes back to time immoral, back to the ancient period. And first of all, it's not a pure Korean word. It has a Chinese character, as you can see. And this Chinese character, yes, does appear in ancient texts. But that doesn't mean that Han, as we know today, existed in the ancient period. In fact, scholars of classical Korean literature say that Han appears rarely in these literary texts. In actuality, classical Korean literature is full of joy and satire and humor, stuff that you don't associate with Han. Han is a very small and minor part of classical Korean literature. If you look at the first Korean-English dictionaries, Han doesn't appear. In the first dictionaries from the late 19th century, Han is just one, it means one. And it has a number. You don't see it here. So this suggests that Han is not something ancient. In fact, it's modern. It's a term that captures something of the modern experience of Koreans. So now let's turn to a few historical examples of Han from the period I specialize in, which is the early 20th century. And so I'm gonna restrict myself to cases where it seems to be expressed on a mass level. It's not just an individual expression. It's a collective expression of Han. And hopefully this can show us how Han as we know it today took shape. Now, the first comes from 1907, okay? I'm pointing to Han because again, this is before Japanese rule began. Now, this was the year of what's called the Great Revival Movement. And this was one of the early turning points in the history of Korean Christianity. And it was mainly restricted to the northern regions of the country. There were also revivals in Seoul. And what we'll see is that these revivals were the occasion for an outpouring of Han, right? As missionaries at the time observed, even though they had no idea what they were watching. And we can see this in sort of recollections from that time. William Blair, a missionary, wrote, the revival was a meeting the like of which I had never seen before, nor wish to see again, unless in God's sight it is absolutely necessary, right? What was so horrific? It scared the living daylights out of foreigners who saw this initially, right? What was it? Luckily, we have another memoir that provides a longer description of what went on. It's by a British, Lord William Cecil. It's a very long quote. I had to spread it over a couple of slides, but I think it's worth going over in detail. He wrote, the missionary only reached the word my father when a rush of power from without seemed to take hold of the meeting. The Europeans described its manifestations as terrifying. Nearly everybody present was seized with the most poignant sense of mental anguish. Before each one, his own sins seemed to be rising in combination of his life. Some were springing to their feet, pleading for an opportunity to relieve their consciences by making their abasement known. Others were silent, but rent with agony, clenching their fists and striking their heads against the ground in the struggle to resist the power that forced them to confess their misdeeds. From eight in the evening until five in the morning, did the same go on. And then the missionaries, horror struck at some of the sins confessed, frightened by the presence of a power which would work such wonders, reduced to tears by the sympathy with the mental agony of the Korean disciples whom they loved so dearly. Some in prayer, others in terrible spiritual conflict. This goes on. Next day, the missionaries hoped that the storm was over and that the comforting teaching of the holy word would wind up the wounds of yesternight. But again, the same anguish, the same confession of sin, and so it went on for several days. This is pretty obviously what we would say is Han. It has all the earmarks of Han, right? Intense emotions, Korean and tremendous, as you said, anguish, spiritual conflict and confused foreigners. And we have it all, we have it all here, right? But first final point, this is a very raw form of Han. I get the sense that not only the Westerners who were observing this, but the people themselves had no idea what was going on. It seems to be spontaneous and sort of spun out of control. And the purpose of the meeting was not for this. In fact, if you look at the materials, the missionaries wanted this to sort of tamper down Korean emotions. They felt that the Christians were becoming too political. So they said that in order to sort of reduce the politicization of the church, they need to sort of have these revival movements. And in a clear case of unintended consequences, the emotions got ramped up quite a bit. So I think we can also take away two more points. First is that this awkward and terrifying way that Han is being expressed suggests that there was, at that time, no culture of Han. We have that now, we have a real culture of Han. There's literature, TV shows, movies, of the whole vocabulary exists to give expression to this Han. But at this time, it appears that this did not exist. So again, this has seemed to me further evidence that Han is a very modern phenomenon. It didn't exist earlier. Second, it seems to be no accident that it was a religious event that released Han. Again, it seems that Han always had some sort of spiritual element. To an outsider, they said it looked like a possession. This power took hold of this meeting, the person said. It looks like possession. At this point, we're not sure why, but again, that's how it looks. And that's a characteristic of Han. So it seems that maybe this can help us explain why Koreans took to Christianity more than other Asians. It seems that there's something about the emotional structure of Christianity that really sort of enabled a release of their own emotional world. This interesting correspondence occurred. I want to get to a lot of points, so I'm going to go through each episode fairly quickly. So the next episode is from 10 years later, from 1917. And it's the year that what is considered to be the first modern novel in Korean literary history was published. It was called Mujeong, or The Heartless, by Lee Kwang-soo. Now, this was also the first bestseller in Korean literary history. So again, this is a novel that was a mass phenomenon. Before it was published in a book form, it was serialized in a newspaper originally. So there were stories where one person in a village would get the newspaper, then would have to read it out loud to all the other people who were illiterate in the village. Story that moved a lot of people. I remember reading a memoir of someone saying that when he was in junior high school, novels like this were forbidden, but someone would have a secret copy and then they would all fight each other to be the first to read this novel. That's how much it grabbed readers at the time. Now, so its publication was significant for a number of reasons, but the most relevant point for today is that it's one of the first novels where Han was a central theme. You'll be utterly stunned to learn that the novel focuses on a love triangle. Imagine that, a Korean drama focusing on a love triangle. It's a one-man, Lee Heung-sik, who's a young, poor schoolteacher in Seoul who can't decide between two women. One is Kim Sun-young, who is the daughter of a wealthy church elder who's in a modern school, so she represents modernity, and this other woman, Young-chae, who is a young gisaeng, but she represents tradition as she lives completely according to Confucian values. Now, the character that the readers sympathized with most was Young-chae because she had, again, surprise, surprise, she had the saddest backstory. Now, Young-chae, so she's a gisaeng in the present of the novel, she was actually the daughter of Heung-sik's benefactor. He had been a wealthy businessman, but he sold all his business to raise money to build a school. Then he allowed Heung-sik, who was a poor orphan, to attend the school for free. Now, her father and brothers died in jail after they were arrested for a crime that one of them committed. Then after she became orphaned, she was tricked into becoming a gisaeng, but she maintained her chastity because she believed that her father wanted her to marry Heung-sik later. Now, I don't have time to discuss the novel in depth, but let me just emphasize that Young-chae was the most popular character because she was the character most associated with Han, and it's explicit in the novel. She's explicitly connected to Han. Now, there are three points I'd like to make. First, Young-chae's Han took the form of a violent or traumatic loss of identity. Do you know, you all know how to predict the plot of any Korean drama, right? Just predict what's the worst thing that could happen to the character. What's the least, what's the person they don't want to meet with the most? They'll meet them in the next scene, right? So she's preserving her chastity for Heung-sik. Unfortunately, guess what happens to her? She's raped, right? She's a gisaeng, she's raped, and this results in a complete loss of her identity. She says, I've been called a gisaeng. Why shall I never be called by the affectionate hollow names of wife, mother, aunt? A gisaeng, how I hated to hear the word. Then she eventually decides to commit suicide and says that she wants to plunge herself in the Han-filled blue waters of the Daedong River. It's the river that runs by Pyongyang, which is where she was farmed, right? So again, I'd say that Han clearly is associated with a loss of identity in this novel. Second point, this novel marks the beginning of a culture of Han. So a culture of Han emerges simultaneously with the rise of modern literature. So it is no longer expressed in a spontaneous and chaotic manner. Characters like Young-chae literally give a face to Han. And the novel provided readers with a whole set of behaviors and tropes through which to understand their Han. The third point is that, which anyone familiar with Korea knows, is that women become the bearers of Han. I talked about how in the last lecture about soju, making soju is very difficult. So who made it? Women. Bearing Han is a terrible emotional burden. Who bears it? Women. In fact, Lee Kwang-soo, before he wrote this novel, his protagonists were all male. Then when he wrote this novel, he shifted for the first time to having prominent female protagonists. So Han becomes more prominent. Now I think, if you think about Korean popular culture today, the ones that are the most popular in expressing Han feature female protagonists. You think of the movie, Seopyeonje. You can, we'll talk about this in a moment. Number one movie of all time when it came out. The short story is based on, focused on male characters. The movie focused on the female. Daejanggeum, Jewel in the Palace. One of the most popular dramas of all time. Focuses on Han, not surprising. It's almost all set in the female quarters of the royal palace. Women are the bearers of Han. So when Han is expressed in female form, it expresses a collective experience better than the male. A male, it would for a male character. Now the next episode is from 1926. So I'm examining basically a 20 year period here. This was the year that Sunjong, the last Korean emperor died, on April 25th, 1926. Now, as it happened after his father's passing, his father was Gojong, there was a tremendous outpouring of grief. The Donga Ilbo reported that in the days after his death, over 20,000 people gathered in front of the palace to mourn him. And in the evenings, the numbers increased. He said that about 100,000 people gathered on the road between the palace and the nearest intersection, grieving and crying into the night. This is a time when the population of Seoul was about 300,000. So 100,000 people come out, it's just a tremendous number of people. There are stories of mourners who fainted at public gatherings. He said that a Korean man in Osaka who heard the news tried to commit suicide by drinking ammonia after grieving for two hours. And Sunjong, so again, this is where there was grieving. He died in Changdeok Palace, not Gyeongbokgung, which was being destroyed by the Japanese at the time, the Changdeok Palace. So they gathered in this area, right in front, marked here, in front of Donghwamun. Sunjong was directly associated with Han, and I'm not reading anything into the documents here. They said that one article on his funeral noted that his death ended, quote-unquote, and ended in sadness a life of Han. As the Donga Ilbo observed, the anger, bitterness, and sorrow built up inside us have become mixed together, and it could be said the passing of the Junghui Emperor has touched the hearts of the Joseon people and released their pent-up sadness. So here, we see something closer to what we now understand as Han. And let me make a few points. First, it appears that there is now a culture of Han. We have a whole assortment of narratives and tropes ready to turn Sunjong, who was not an important monarch at all, into a symbol of Han. So again, in addition, the cultural institutions necessary to sort of sustain this culture were also developing. Newspapers made a film of his funeral. You can see it here. And showed it in theaters in cities and towns all over the country. And look, we still have this film today. This narration is not the original narration, of course, because there was no talkies at this time. But this is the actual film. It was so popular that even without sound, extra showings had to be added in many cities, because people just wanted to see this. That's why the resolution is so poor. This is on YouTube, actually. Anyone can see this. Those of you who are old enough from Korea know that, just like today, if you want to see a film today, you have to see all these trailers. In Korea, you would have to see these propaganda films. And this was turned into one of those propaganda films. In the 1950s. And someone thankfully put it up on YouTube. Now, second, the death of Sun Jong ties Han directly to the loss of the country. Now, Han becomes political in nature. Explicitly political. So Sun Jong's death appeared to be the occasion for a delayed mourning for the loss of the country. Newspapers portrayed him not just as the last emperor of the 500 years of the country, but also as connected to the entirety of Korean history. They said that, the Donghae Ilbo newspaper said that the day of the funeral was the end of 5,000 years of Korean history. So Koreans thought that Korea was ending. One observer wrote, when the funeral procession heads toward Geumgok, the past events of Emperor Gojong and Empress Myeongseong will feel as if they happened yesterday, and their long-standing sadness will bring out a new Han. When Sun Jong first meets Emperor Gojong and Empress Myeongseong in the afterlife, it will feel as if we are seeing their deep sorrow. Clearly, again, saying that his death is bringing out our Han. Now, the third point I want to make is what's interesting is, it reveals that there's a difference between mourning and Han. Now, it looks like Sun Jong is dead, and they're conducting mourning rites. They're grieving, apparently. But they're actually doing something different. And this is an important distinction because Han is often defined as lament, as if it is a form of grieving. But as the anthropologist Richard Roy Grinker has argued, Han illustrates the difference between mourning and what Sigmund Freud called melancholia. Sigmund Freud had a famous lecture called Mourning and Melancholia in 1917. And he said that, yes, both are similar because both are reactions to the loss of a loved one. But while mourning is sort of normal, melancholia is pathological. If mourning is a period of grief, and that leads to reconciliation of the self with the world, in melancholia, this process does not occur. And at least it's sort of turned inward, and it leads to a loss of the self. So as Freud put it, in mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty. In melancholia, it is the ego itself. So when you lose a loved one in regular mourning, that loved one is gone from the world. So you lose interest in the world. You don't wanna go out. You don't wanna participate in society. But when you get over it, then you're willing, you can go back out into society. What Freud called melancholia is, what disappears is actually yourself. Your self is gone, and you're sort of mourning that. But you don't know what to do about it. It becomes pathological. So melancholia can be understood as the result of a loss of identity. But one in which the person cannot let go of that sense of loss. As another scholar has mentioned, the person in melancholy is lost to himself or herself. The work of melancholy is to preserve oneself as lost, as not worthy of being found. And we see similar things in the death of Sun Jung. They don't want to let go of Korean history, or Korean identity. They wanna cling to it more. But they can only experience it as a loss. Or as, in other words, as Han. So I think based on these episodes, we can revise commonly accepted definitions of Han. I would say that the central aspect of Han is not emotions, but loss of identity. So Han can be defined as the complex of emotions felt by a people who lack a collective identity. And there was an ironic aspect to Han, because what unites Koreans is the fact that they lack a collective identity. So it's this constant feeling of being less than whole. And this is very hard to express. If you think about it, most of us don't think about our collective identity on a daily basis. But you don't have to. You're not deprived of it. You know you're part of this collective identity. Koreans don't have that comfort. And that feeling of uneasiness, of sadness, that's called Han. And I hope that this can help to explain some of the strange aspects of Han. Why do you feel haunted? Why does Han feel like it's haunted? Because it's this constant sense of loss that you have, that the society has as a whole. Why can all Koreans feel it? Because they're all living in a divided country that's still dealing with the trauma of civil war. Oh, then why does it feel as if it's inheritable, it's genetic? Of course, those who experienced civil war have Han, and my parents' generation, who have conscious memories of the Korean War. It's not just them. Generations born long after the end of active war in 1953 can also feel it. It's because they grew up in a divided country. So anyone who did would feel it. But they only feel it when they face the reality of the division. Now, to explain this a little, this can be confusing. To explain this a little further, I think we can see it in the movie, Sobhyeonje. Lee Chong-Jun wrote probably one of the most profound meditations on Han in this novella called Namdo Sarang, translated as The Southerners. And it's a series of five novellas, and three of them, parts of three of them were taken to create the movie Sobhyeonje, which when it came out, became the number one film of all time, box office film of all time. Now, in the first short story, one that's actually called Sobhyeonje, which is a style of pansori, a man is looking for someone who is later revealed to be his adoptive sister. So already we see Han, right? Because it's about a separated family. A man is looking for his lost sister. It's that trope of the separated family we see here. Now, he learns from, so both of them, both the man and the sister he's looking for, both of them were adopted by this pansori singer who tried to teach them that art of pansori. I don't know if you know pansori, it's that one-person opera, very distinctive form of singing. He tried to make the daughter a singer and the son a drummer. And that went about as well as forcing any child to do something. But he learns from a woman that his father made his sister blind in order to deepen her Han so that she would be a better singer. Crazy, but it makes sense in terms of Han. Now, in the short story, it's not really in the movie, and he gives the lines to completely different characters in the movie, but the son has a conversation with this woman about his family and Han. And they present two different versions of Han. One is that Han can be implanted in someone by a traumatic event. Like in this story, it says the father intentionally blinding his adoptive daughter. But the second version is that it's not that way. This woman argues that Han is something that accumulates over one's lifetime. He says it's not something that can be implanted in him or her if someone wants to. It gathers like dust over a long, long time over the course of one's life. Just by living, you get Han. So that's what I think Koreans think about when they say you're born with Han. Just by living in Korea, you get Han. This is in Korean, because I can't render it in English nearly as well as it is in Korean. Now, the novel presents these as two different versions of Han. I think they're just two different aspects of the same phenomenon. People who have Han as a result of implanted trauma, that's the first generation who lived through the Korean War. Then all succeeding generations will get Han just by living in a divided country. It's the result of growing up in a society where trauma, that is the division of the country, remains unresolved. Now, I have a little bit, I want to just go over this real quick. The question is, I hope I have shown that, I think if we define Han in this way, non-Koreans can understand it, at least have a path to understanding it. If you define it in terms of emotions, it gets too subjective. All of you have been in fights with your significant other saying that, you don't understand how I feel. Han can be that way. When you get to that type of argument, the argument goes nowhere, and it doesn't build understanding. You can build on it in a different way. This might seem a little bizarre, but I think I can show it by saying that you can see Han in non-Korean cultural production, cultural products. I would like to make the argument, bizarre as it sounds like, that Field of Dreams is the most Korean movie I've ever seen. Bear with me. It's a film about, that's right, it's so American, right? It's about baseball in Iowa farms, right? It's so American. But it's the most Korean film I've ever seen. Why? You know the story, right? This man suddenly hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in a cornfield. He's haunted. He gets this voice here. What does one of the voices tell him to do? Ease his pain. Very much about a trauma, something, a pain that has to be overcome, right? So a ghost, he builds a baseball, a ghost comes, and Shoeless Joe Jacks and his father's hero comes and plays in the baseball field. Not everyone can understand it. Remember, there are characters who don't see the baseball players playing in the field. So people who don't have that same sort of experience can't feel it. It's inaccessible to them, but it does later on. Later at the end, he discovers that the whole point of all the ghosts telling him this was that he had to relieve the Han of his father. He meets his father and sort of reconciles with him. How Korean is this? Family reunion. They reconcile. Eases his pain. That's why if you read Western film critics' critiques of this movie, they say it was corny, it's too sentimental, stuff like that. Isn't that the exact same way foreigners talk about Korean dramas? I think what they're reacting to is something that is very emotionally similar to Han. I think this, to me, shows that, again, it is an emotional, a set of emotion that's accessible to outsiders. Because if it can be expressed in a movie about Iowa and baseball, it definitely can be accessible to anyone. So I hope that provides lots of food for discussion. Thank you very much.