The Korean Diaspora
Posted Apr 21, 2017: The Polyglot Adds Another Dimension to the Korean Diaspora, typakmusings.com, now typakmusings.net
Koreans are all over the world. Not too long ago I read a moving story about a dynasty of Koreans in Cuba whose progenitor had been an indentured farm laborer, a slave, that is, sold to a plantation in Cuba at the turn of the 19th century. Oppressed and shackled at home, he had to grab any opportunity to get out and away no matter where. It’s a story pattern replicated everywhere throughout history, like the Jewish exodus from Egypt or diaspora from Judea.
But the Korean exodus to Siberia is unique in its pathos: the Koreans get royally screwed. Though not officially sanctioned, their entry had been condoned, even tacitly encouraged under the Czars and through the Bolshevik revolution, civil war (1917-23), and Sovietization. Korean communities flourished, apparently with Soviet connivance, a typical case of fattening the cow for slaughter in light of the sequel. In 1937 Stalin rounded them all up for scatter in Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands, 4 out of 5, perished from disease, hunger, and exposure, verily a holocaust, though little known as such, all in pursuit of Stalin’s Slavic agenda to ethnically cleanse strategic Far Eastern Siberia.
Against this background enter Peter Bach, the protagonist of The Polyglot. Surviving the holocaust but seeing no future in racist Russia Peter, 25 and master of half a dozen European and ten Asian languages, heads out in 1945 on a Kazakh passport for Korea, his ancestral land, aboard Shanghai Express when the train comes under attack by Chinese bandits. Defeating and capturing them along with their cache of plunder over the years, he also saves the life of Yuri, Stalin’s Commissar, traveling incognito to North Korea. General Ming, Kaishek Chiang’s Chief of Staff and father of Sulan, wife of Peter’s Kazakh benefactor, invests his reward money in the real estate of Taiwan to which Chiang’s government soon moves.
In North Korea Yuri makes Peter the top man supervising Premier Ilsung Kim. Though hating to be Stalin’s puppet, Peter goes along with the planning and execution of the Korean War (1950), seeing it as an expedient to achieve independence and neutrality for united Korea, albeit with Soviet help. Belatedly realizing the fallacy of his reasoning, he defects with some 100,000 militia to the UN/US forces and works for US intelligence as a multilingual. However, his records misplaced in the confusion of the 1953 Armistice, he languishes in South Korean prison.
During the turmoil of the 1960 presidential elections he breaks out and smuggles to Japan, then to Honolulu, where he translates for a US-Soviet aviation treaty. Married to Stella Sullivan, Oscar-winning documentarian and White House Film Historian, he narrates his life story on TV, rising to stardom overnight. A viewer, executor of the late Prime Minister Ming’s estate, informs him of his legacy worth billions of dollars. As White House Language Advisor Peter translates for Eisenhower at the Paris Summit, a fiasco in the aftermath of the U2 incident, which however connects him with Khrushchev, who lets him and Stella come to the USSR to film the Peter Bach story and take his surviving siblings in Uzbekistan to Honolulu to be at the bedside of their father Jongnay Bach, comatose on dialysis and in desperate need of kidney transplant. His successful surgery in Japan leads to discovery of Peter’s true parentage, Japanese father and Korean mother.
Nominated Ambassador to South Korea after barely surviving an assassination attempt by his disinherited Japanese cousins, he calls on the three neighboring states, Japan and the two Koreas, to federate like the US for balance of power in the Far East and reconciles Eisenhower and Khrushchev to resume detente for world peace, getting nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Peter’s US immigration does not fit the Korean American stereotype which, as in the Cuban saga, has someone coming over as a sugarcane or pineapple worker to slave away at the bottom rung of society his whole life. Only in the second or subsequent generations they go to school, become professionals or business owners, and realize the American dream. Peter’s success is instantaneous but is entirely credible given his talents and also fully deserving after a traumatic history of injuries, physical and psychic. But even at the peak of his good fortune he is not quite out of the woods yet and one crisis after another assails him relentlessly. Discovery of his Japanese paternity is one, destroying his sense of identity. Another is his inability to come clean with Stella about his sordid past. Then there is his brush with death by cyanide poisoning which leaves him bereft of speech, turning him into a mute, opposite to a polyglot. But with unwavering patience and determination he slays his demons one by one and expounds multilingual, multiracial global humanism to save the world.
