{"id":5164,"date":"2020-11-08T21:13:31","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T05:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5164"},"modified":"2020-11-08T21:15:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-09T05:15:29","slug":"korea-blog-revisiting-the-late-kevin-orourkes-my-korea-a-curious-memoir-of-a-land-that-gets-in-the-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5164","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Revisiting the Late Kevin O\u2019Rourke\u2019s “My Korea,” a Curious Memoir of a Land that Gets in the Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Western expatriates in Asia often see themselves as having missed out on their adopted homeland\u2019s golden age. I arrived recently, just under five years ago, and have since heard much about how I really should\u2019ve been here at the time of the World Cup, if not in the 1990s. Some time ago I met an American here in Seoul who\u2019d first come to Korea in the 1970s as a Mormon missionary. He confirmed what I\u2019d suspected: even back then, the Westerners who\u2019d preceded him were telling him he really should\u2019ve been there in the sixties. Many who came from the West in those decades came for missionary reasons, religious or otherwise. Some, like Kevin O\u2019Rourke, stayed for the long haul, diversifying their activities all the while but never, of course, forgetting the prelapsarian age in which they\u2019d arrived.<\/p>

\u201cYou really had to see Korea in the sixties to know what it was like,\u201d writes O\u2019Rourke in the opening of\u00a0My Korea: 40 Years Without a Horsehair Hat<\/em>. \u201cKorea time was the conceptual axis on which the culture turned. Modernization and the need for quick decisions has done away with this lovely, lazy, exasperating way of life.\u201d Back then, \u201cwhen you didn\u2019t know any other way home, it was normal to ask the traffic policeman to reverse the traffic on a one-way street, and invariably he obliged.\u201d This seems to have been a favorite memory: O\u2019Rourke repeated it in the media interviews entailed by his status as a famous foreigner, and the\u00a0Korea Times<\/em>included it last month in his obituary<\/a>. Having made the initial trip form his native Ireland in 1964, he had by the end of his life spent 56 of his 81 years here in Korea.<\/p>

Readers of Korean literature in translation may well know O\u2019Rourke\u2019s name, bring as he did more than 2,000 Korean poems, stories, and novels into the English language. These include \u201cWings\u201d (\ub0a0\uac1c), Yi Sang\u2019s bizarre modernist tale of colonial humiliation (O\u2019Rourke\u2019s rendition of which I studied just a few years ago at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea), and\u00a0The Square<\/em>, Choi In-hun\u2019s sweeping novelistic critique of Korea both North and South (the partial inspiration for\u00a0last year\u2019s sprawling exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art<\/a>). He also taught English literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul for nearly four decades, but he was at the core a man of the cloth, a priest brought to Korea by the Irish Catholic Missionary Society of St. Columban.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western expatriates in Asia often see themselves as having missed out on their adopted homeland\u2019s golden age. I arrived recently, just under five years ago, and have since heard much about how I really should\u2019ve been here at the time of the World Cup, if not in the 1990s. Some time ago I met an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5164"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5172,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164\/revisions\/5172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}