The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.
Korea
As a member of the US National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was struck by the environment on both sides of the border. The north had barren fields, no cars, and windowless homes; the south, gleaming skyscrapers in the global city of Seoul.
It’s 1992 and Seoul’s tallest skyscraper has suddenly collapsed, killing thousands and bringing to light just as many questions as to why it happened and who was responsible. This is the backdrop of Hannah Michell’s latest novel, Excavations, an ambitious thriller that is just as engrossing for the whodunnit as is it for the historical milieu. Besides the physical excavation of the building ruins, the main characters also find themselves digging for the truth behind family secrets.
Jung-Myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind is set in Hanyang, as Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty in the late 18th century, was then known. The protagonists are fictionalized versions of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, both real-life figures who are considered some of, if not the, finest painters of the Joseon Dynasty.
A shift of perspective offers the opportunity for new insights into a familiar topic. Try a different standpoint, turn the map into a different orientation, and new patterns emerge. This is what Sheila Miyoshi Jager aims to do for East Asian history in The Other Great Game, by moving Korea from the margins of the narrative of the 19th century to its center. Jager argues that the question of Korea’s position in the new regional order was one of the most significant questions of the period. Indeed, as the title suggests, she positions it as the counterpart to the original “Great Game”—a roughly contemporaneous rivalry between the United Kingdom and Russia across Central Asia. She goes further to stress that Korea was not just a prize to be fought over, but that Korean politics too was an important part of this story.
Korea was a unified, homogeneous country from the seventh century CE until 1945 when in the wake of the Second World War it was partitioned by the United States and the Soviet Union and formally became two separate states in 1948. Since that time, writes James Madison University history professor Michael J Seth, Korea has been a nation divided into vastly different social systems and “perpetually at war” with itself. Seth’s new book Korea at War attempts to describe and explain this geopolitical transformation.
Greek Lessons by celebrated Korean author and Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is a brief, poetic, and intimate look into the lives of two people, each affected by a disability, both cleaved from society in their own way, yet progressively drawn together by their shared grief and nascent hope. The narration switches between the two, tracing their lives in a series of flashbacks or letters to loved ones that show how each progressively fell away from family and friends, either due to distance or death and divorce.