2019.03.18 05:24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllSgtRf-8E
(Interview with Michael Breen)
The auther of "The New Koreans" is British journalist who covered North and South Korea
for many years. I think he is a visionary for contemporary Koreans and propects of reunification
of Korea. I just began to read it, but I found it very interesting so far.
2019.03.18 10:55
2019.03.19 05:46
“ They(Koreans) have been county’s only resource. You don’t have to play up
their siffering or hard work or abuse or how they are pushed down the social ladder
to find there is something magnificent about them. These are the people who won.”
= from the book
"The achievements of the Korean generation born between 1920 and 1955 is a truely remarkable tale.
Leadership was of course a key factor in the country's development but national growth was something
the entire generation embraced and contributed to. Their children and grandchildren now look at them
as oldfashioned-in the way the men still let the women do all the work at home, in their preference for
sentimental music, in how they maintain silences and imagine conspiracies, in how the ghosts from
childhoods in what is now North Korea and war haunt them, in their poor fashion sense, their deference
to former bosses, their lack of education, their unwillingness to be challenged and in their willingness
to always, it seems, get drunk. But the young owe their elders. They owe them for what they been
through: the war when families were torn apart, the dictatorships when there was no way to avoid abuse,
and the poverty when there is no trips to the beach to punctuate the years of hard work. They are, it may
be said, the greatest generation in Korean history. They deserve statues for they are heroic. But no one
has told them this and they do not conceive of themselves as such."
- from the book