Story by Charles Culbertson
Photos by Diane Elliott ('00)
Design by Nikki Nargi

 

In fear for his life when the North Koreans attacked the South over the 38th parallel in 1950, a teenaged Chong-Kun Yoon was a refugee in his own country until he forged a new life for himself in America. Now the JMU history professor keeps a wary eye as tensions build again

HE DARTS THROUGH THE BULLET-RIDDEN STREETS OF SEOUL like a beast of prey, his eyes bulging and lungs bursting as he fights to extend the distance between himself and his pursuers. But when the wall of a dead-end alley looms up to meet him, he realizes, horrified, that escape is impossible. With skin the color of whey, the man turns to plead for his life.

Two breathless, perspiring North Korean soldiers approach him, their faces twisted with hatred, their rifles ready. One of them screams, "Notorious Seoul police torturer who torments and maims fellow communist comrades!" and slams the butt of his Japanese-made rifle into the man's head, knocking him to the pavement. The other soldier steps forward, lowers his weapon, and quickly pumps two bullets into the man's brain. "The enemy of the people is thus punished!" the soldier cries in a shrill voice.

Hoping a lack of speed will make him invisible, a teenage Chong-Kun Yoon melts away from the murder scene and inches back into a group of spectators that has gathered to watch the South Korean policeman's execution. Then, with a burst of energy, Yoon breaks out of the crowd and races home as fast as his young legs can carry him.

"The horror of that scene lingered in my mind, and I was unable to sleep for many nights," Yoon says today. "I wondered just how many others had been executed summarily in that fashion elsewhere in the city. It was then that I fully realized that a bloody reign of terror had really descended upon South Korea."

Yoon - who has taught history at JMU for the last 33 years - was right. As he chronicles for his students in Asian history, the United Nations has estimated that 26,000 South Koreans were murdered by their northern "comrades" in the first few months of the Korean War, mostly on the grounds that they had opposed North Korea politically. Yoon, who lived in the capital city when the North Korean People's Army swarmed over the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, witnessed the communist brutality and bloodlust.

"And it can happen again," he says. "North Korea has threatened many times to turn Seoul into a sea of fire. But the real problem is that my generation - the generation that saw what the communists are capable of - is dying out. Post-Korean War generations do not know the danger they are in and, worse yet, do not believe the threat is there."

This from a man who knew what danger was all about long before the NKPA's invasion of the south. When Yoon was born in Seoul, his country had already suffered under the iron glove of the Japanese Empire since 1910; and although he was only a boy when Japan was forced to relinquish its claim on the peninsula in 1945, he clearly remembers occupation and life as a colonial subject. While it was a difficult experience for him personally, Yoon says he feels it is important to share the human impact of that occupation with his students.

Japan - despite years of obstreperous sermonizing about a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and an "Asia for Asians" - freely used murder and imprisonment as tools with which to obliterate Korean culture and identity. Forbidden to use their own language, Koreans were forced to speak Japanese, worship the emperor and pay homage to all citizens of the Land of the Rising Sun, from the puttee-clad soldiers prowling Korean streets to the schoolmasters beating children in Korean classrooms.

"When the Japanese retreated in the last days of World War II, everyone - even small children like me - ran into the streets shouting and singing in Korean," says Yoon, who learned to speak Japanese as a schoolboy during those days of occupation. "Others formed mobs and went looking for former Japanese officials and Korean collaborators. It was both an exhilarating and a dangerous time."

But whatever exhilaration Yoon and his fellow Koreans may have felt over regaining their independence quickly evaporated as Soviet troops swept down the peninsula, driving Japanese forces before them. When it became apparent that Korea would soon trade its Japanese master for a Soviet one, the United States acted quickly to make sure it had a presence in the region and established the 38th parallel as a dividing line between Soviet-held territory in the north and American-held territory in the south.

"When the Russian and American military occupations of Korea ended in 1948, two ideologically irreconcilable governments were created - communists in Pyongyang and fiercely anticommunists in Seoul," Yoon says.

North Korea's invasion of the south resulted in a three-year war that killed 830,000 soldiers and made refugees of Yoon and millions of his countrymen. For three years, he went on the run, evading first the communists and then the front line, which moved with the fortunes of battle. And there was always the fear of American bombardment. "If three of us were walking down a road, the bombers couldn't tell us apart from the communists," Yoon explains. "I was a refugee in my own country. Think of running away from JMU and wandering around Virginia. I walked all over South Korea." The history professor finally found relative safety at the home of a relative in the countryside. It is not surprising that one of Yoon's personal heroes is Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the man whose combat strategy turned the military tables on North Korea, drove it from the south and set the stage for the July 27, 1953, cease-fire.

Yoon left Korea soon after. He came to the United States in 1955, assisted by an older brother who had emigrated earlier, and earned his bachelor's degree in history and political science from the University of Oregon. He did his master's and doctoral work at American University in Washington, D.C., and taught at American before coming to JMU in 1970.

Almost 50 years after leaving his country, Yoon still views North Korea through a lens shaped by its invasion and epic destruction of South Korea. That he has put half the globe between himself and his former homeland, earned three academic degrees and become an American citizen has done nothing to soften his opinion toward the dictatorship north of the 38th parallel. If anything, his vision is even sharper now, clarified by personal experience and deepened by a lifelong study of history and politics.

"History is my first educational love," says Yoon, who teaches courses in world civilizations, Asian history, literature and philosophy, and modern Japan and China. "Revolutions and wars have always interested me, as have the people who make history - both the main players and the unsung heroes, as well."

Yoon's research into Asian history takes him back not just decades, but centuries. The history professor, who travels often to Seoul and Kyoto to investigate Japan's 1590 invasion of Korea and the ensuing war with Korea and China, says Korea's plight has not changed much over time. Then, as now, Korea has been squeezed among superpowers. "Korea has always been the little brother in a neighborhood of big brothers," he says. "Korea's monarchs had to learn the delicate art of diplomacy to get along. Like Japan, Russia and the Soviet Union, too, have had designs on Korea for centuries. Traditionally, China has been protective so long as Korea does not challenge it."

Few university professors have the advantage of being able to underscore their scholarly insights and hang history lessons on a framework of personal experience. While Yoon modestly asserts that his experience is "limited" - in addition to Korean, Japanese and English, he also speaks Chinese - he nevertheless brings to his classes at JMU an element of reality that he acknowledges may "enhance the level of credibility on the part of my students." It is one thing to read about something in a book, he notes, and quite another to have someone who has lived through an event tell you about it.

"Imparting what little knowledge I have with young people is a great joy," Yoon says. "I often feel that I play the role of a cultural ambassador from Asia, without the diplomatic 'spinning.' In this way, hopefully, the bridge between East and West can be built on firmer foundations."

And yet, Yoon says, he entertains no illusions as to the nature of the world's only surviving Stalinist regime. He says North Korea operates both internally and internationally through the paranoid mind of Kim Jong Il, a man who has systematically starved his people, impoverished his country and turned it into a hermit state.

"Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pyongyang regime has desperately searched for ways to ensure its continued survival as a socialist dictatorship," says Yoon. "Toward that end, North Korea secretly developed nuclear weapons and long-range, multistage ballistic missiles, and has resorted to high-risk diplomatic brinkmanship by demanding that the U.S. sign a pledge to not launch a military attack."

Yoon says the fact that the United States didn't play along - refusing, essentially, to reward bad behavior - agitated Pyongyang even further, driving it to yet greater acts of brinkmanship. He notes that refusals by the Bush administration to deal unilaterally with North Korea sent the communist dictatorship into foot-stomping rages, prompting it to fire missiles into the Sea of Japan, reactivate the nuclear reactor in Yongbyon and threaten global war on a basis so regular it borders on the Pavlovian.

The option of striking North Korea militarily with the goal of toppling its regime and ridding it of nuclear weapons would work, Yoon notes, but paying a too-heavy price would be the result. He says if the United States attacks North Korea and overturns the regime, North Korea will in the process "turn the entire peninsula into a battlefield, killing millions of people."

"The Bush administration's stance that it will not deal with the blackmailer directly has the potential of making the North Korean nuclear situation a lot more complicated and dangerous," Yoon says. "That's why the United States' greatest hope of dealing with an intransigent North Korea is China - the country that made the Korean War possible in the first place."

Yoon notes that China's efforts to help resolve the problem - China and the United States recently joined forces to negotiate with North Korea - are forthcoming for three reasons. One, North Korea is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to China, which is anxious to play a leading political, economic and philosophical role on the world stage. Two, the United States has a bargaining chip the Chinese may want to eventually see on the bargaining table - Taiwan. And three, North Korea is quickly proving itself to be a militarily unstable neighbor.

"With Beijing lying within easy reach of North Korea's arsenal, the last thing the Chinese want is for this rogue regime to remain a nuclear power," Yoon says. "It is to their advantage to work with us to bring North Korea into line, and the Chinese realize that."

Ironically, the country that may be the most difficult to bring to the United States' side in the current standoff is South Korea. Despite what Yoon calls "America's great sacrifice in liberating South Korea from the yoke of communist tyranny and oppression," young South Koreans consider such events as little more than fodder for the history books. They have, he noted, little affection for American policy and do not see the threat their northern neighbor poses.

Swept by a rising tide of nationalism, many young South Koreans, like other youth around the world, "detest American dominance and demonstrate in the streets shouting, 'Yankee go home!'" Yoon says this view, combined with nonstop political barrages from North Korea about how Koreans are all "brothers," is changing the face of a country America spent 45,000 lives to protect from communist aggression.

"But the irony of the situation is that the classes in Seoul which offer intensive English language preparations are overflowing with these same young people," Yoon says. "In short, what they are saying is, 'Yankee go home! But take me with you!'"

Yoon, who became a U.S. citizen in 1973, says he wants to write a hypothetical scholarly work on just what the world would be like if the Yankees did go home. He says the world would be a vastly different place, and that humanity would be sorely impoverished if Americans simply picked up all their marbles and retreated to their own shores.

"Thanks to America's courage to break out of its isolationism and pursue its ideals beyond its own borders, hundreds of millions of oppressed people all over the world have been liberated from the yoke of tyranny, fascism, militarism and communism," he says.

Yoon - who saw the bullet-riddled bodies of U.S. soldiers in the streets of Seoul and knows firsthand the sacrifices his adopted country made on behalf of an oppressed people - nevertheless approaches what he calls the "American colossus" with typical sagacity.

"Obviously, America continues to exude a magnetic attraction," he says, "but it is imperative for it to cultivate the wisdom to know the finiteness of power and wealth."