THE CONTROVERSY in the Dover-Sherborn Regional
School Committee concerning the inclusion of Yoko Kawashima Watkins's
book "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" in the sixth-grade curriculum
underscores the importance of history in the teaching of literature,
especially when the texts deal with a specific historical time and
place.
Watkins's book, based on the author's life,
focuses on the harrowing experiences of an 11-year-old Japanese girl
and her family at the end of World War II in the northern part of
Japanese-occupied colonial Korea. It is a well-written, gripping tale
of terror and survival, and its first-person narration from the
viewpoint of the girl, Yoko, makes it all the more powerful for
sixth-grade readers.
Teaching should encourage students to think
"outside the box" of American ethnocentricity and highlight human
commonalities across cultural and historical divides. Watkins's book
goes a long way toward accomplishing these goals. Through the magic of
her prose and identification with her heroine, students are transported
to a distant and different time and place and can experience Yoko's
ordeal and triumph as their own.
But context and balance are
important. While Yoko's story is compelling as a narrative of survival,
it achieves its powerful effect in part by eliding the historical
context in which Yoko and her family had been living Korea. That
context, simply put, was a 40-year record of harsh colonial rule in
Korea, which reached its apogee during the war years of 1937-45, when
Yoko was growing up. While some Koreans fared better than others, many
were conscripted for forced labor and sexual slavery to serve the
Japanese imperial war machine, while the colonial authorities
simultaneously promoted a program of intensive, coercive cultural
assimilation that sought to erase a separate Korean identity on the
peninsula.
Watkins was a small girl as these events were
unfolding and can hardly be blamed for them, let alone held responsible
for the occupation itself. But the story she tells is unfortunately
incomplete, if not distorted, by the absence of this larger context.
For example, she notes in passing that "the Koreans were part of the
Japanese empire but they hated the Japanese and were not happy about
the war." Since no further context is provided, young readers knowing
little of the larger history of Japanese colonialism or the wartime
atrocities might be tempted to think of the Korean population as
ungrateful or uncooperative toward the Japanese empire of which they
were a part.
The author's depictions of Koreans in the
"Anti-Japanese Communist Army" are similarly problematic. First, there
is some question as to whom she is referring here. There was no
organized "Anti-Japanese Communist Army" of Korean soldiers, except for
Kim Il Sung (later the leader of North Korea) and his guerrilla
partisans in Manchuria, but they did not arrive in Korea until early
September 1945, long after the events described in the book. It is
possible, of course, that she is referring to some scattered local
Korean communist groups, who sought a violent redress of colonial
grievances in the Nanam area where the story takes place. Such violence
cannot be condoned. But simply to portray Korean communists in 1945 as
endemically evil is not only empirically incorrect; it removes Korean
communism from the larger historical context that explains its
anti-Japanese stance and its appeal to many Koreans. Indeed, throughout
Korea in 1945 communists were widely regarded as patriotic nationalists
who had risked their lives against a brutal colonial regime.
Dover-Sherborn
teachers should be applauded for trying to expand the minds of their
students beyond the familiar, and to include works about Asia in their
curriculum. But Watkins's book may not serve that purpose well,
especially if it is taught simply as a heroic personal narrative of
survival, without adequate provision of historical context. This is not
an argument for censorship or banning books. There is no reason why
Watkins's book cannot be used in the schools. Introduced carefully and
wisely, in conjunction, for example, with Richard Kim's classic "Lost
Names," an autobiographical novel about a young Korean boy living at
the end of Japanese colonial rule in the 1940s, it can help students
understand how perspectives vary according to personal and historical
circumstances. But to teach "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" without
providing historicization might be compared to teaching a sympathetic
novel about the escape of a German official's family from the
Netherlands in 1945 without alluding to the nature of the Nazi
occupation or the specter of Anne Frank.
Carter Eckert is a professor of Korean history at Harvard University. 
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
