Director's Letter
David R. McCann,
Director of the Korea Institute;
Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature
On August 12-13, I traveled
with some thirty poets
from some twenty-five
countries, forty poets from
(South) Korea, and others
to the Kûmgangsan, Diamond
Mountain Hotel, in North Korea. Our
journey was part of the annual Manhae
Festival. We had traveled from Seoul
to Manhae Village on the morning of
the 12th, and attended the award
ceremony, where Wole Soyinka
received the Manhae Prize in Literature
and a representative received the
Manhae Peace Prize on behalf of the
Dalai Lama.
The event planners had expressed the
hope that poets from the DPRK would
join the evening celebration and
reading of poems written on the subject
Peace for Humanity, but none
appeared. The foreign poets were
especially disappointed at this news,
and heard various explanations
advanced for the absence. On the
fifteenth, a DPRK delegation was going
to attend the Liberation Day
observances in Seoul. Perhaps the
DPRK poets couldn’t do both?
Someone else suggested possible DPRK
concerns about PRC reactions to a
sponsor that had honored the Dalai
Lama with the Manhae Peace Prize,
given China’s policies regarding Tibet.
A third theory proposed that
participation by North Korean poets at
an event in that particular area,
Kûmgangsan, which had been
devastated by American incendiary
bomb attacks during the Korean War,
would have been highly unlikely.
On the plane returning from Korea on
Tuesday, I read a brief news story about
a similar gathering at the Hotel on the
fifteenth, Liberation Day, and again, the
general disappointment when the
hoped-for DPRK participants failed to
appear.
My own theory is more direct. In
1997, on my first trip to North Korea, I
had traveled with seven other visitors
in a group led by Stephen Linton, of the
Eugene Bell Foundation, delivering
medical supplies and equipment in
P’yŏngyang, Wŏnsan, and Hamhûng.
Though Wŏnsan and Hamhûng are
major cities on the east coast, the trip
took hours and hours over a mix of
good and bad roads. But how could I
not have noticed? There are no roads
from P’yŏngyang to the Diamond
Mountain Hotel. The mountains
intervene, some of the tallest and
certainly most precipitous in Korea; and
even surrounded as we were at the
hotel by forest and mountain
wilderness, when a few of us had
started on a walk out of the parking lot
on a road leading into the trees, we were
turned back in abrupt fashion by
uniformed guards posted at the
entrances.
There was no way that DPRK poets
could ever have joined our event,
though for South Korean travelers and
others involved in efforts to improve
relations between the two Koreas, the
hope must always linger. But as Ian
Buruma aptly notes in the August 22
issue of The New Yorker, the hotel that
the Hyundai corporation was allowed
to build is "a fortified holiday resort just
across the border for South Korean
tourists, who are prevented from
meeting any locals."
I wish I had seen Buruma’s article
before starting on that twenty-hour
round trip from Seoul. And yet I cannot
help but hope that the futility of our
journey somehow counts less, in the
peculiar calculus of North-South
relations, than the fact of the journey
itself. Following one of Manhae’s
poems, I even came to think of our
buses as Ferry Buses, Narut’ bbŏsû, in
place of Manhae’s ferry boat, narut’bae,
and of the participants in the Manhae
Festival as haengin, travelers on a
spiritual path. Might it be a path
toward peace in the world? On the
peninsula? In our own lives? I can hope
so.
Would I go again? In a minute!
