It starts, as it should, with a fight between my parents and me when discussing Park Chung-hee, South Korea's longest-ruling autocrat. Korean politics run along strict generational lines, much more so than American politics, and feelings about Park, it would seem, follow that rule closely.
I was interviewing University of California, Berkeley, professor Elaine Kim, one of the grand dames of Asian American academia, and proudly left-wing when it comes to Korean politics. She once got a vanity license plate that read JUCHE, a “wonderful idea,” she said, of the eponymous philosophy of radical Korean self-reliance, introduced by North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in 1967, and later adopted by some far-left liberal South Koreans disenchanted with American meddling in local affairs. So perhaps it should come as little surprise when she said, “When I was a graduate student at Columbia [during the '70s], there were people in the higher up that Park Chung-hee paid to watch what kinds of publications students were reading. They would report that [back to Park],” she said.
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