Encounter: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Korea (review)

BOOK REVIEWS189 economic development, urbanization, industrialization, and globalization that affect the prospects for reunification. Koreans lived as a divided nation for so long that the division has become part of its national identity. Of course, more recent events, including the election of Kim Youngsam , the death of Kim Il Sung, and ongoing negotiations between North Korea, the U.S., and the international community regarding the proliferation of nuclear weapons may cast a different light on the prospects for rapprochement . New events and the subsequent analysis and interpretation of them will undoubtedly add more layers of complexity to the already difficult topic of reunification. One of the inherent difficulties associated with a compilation of previously published essays dealing with even such a broad theme as "democratization " is that readers are often left with the lingering feeling that the shoe does not quite fit—that while the essays each have an internal consistency and meaning, they do not have a clear, convincing central argument and conclusion when forced together in a book like this. While the final section, a compendium of important speeches and documents, does help the reader fill in some gaps, more systematic analysis is needed of the Roh Tae-woo era. Was Roh Tae-woo a reformer or merely a figure trapped by larger forces and circumstances beyond his control? While the majority of essays are quite good on their own, one is still left with an unsettled feeling—notjust about how history will regard the role of Roh Tae-woo, but also about what the future holds for South Korea and the region at large. Karl E. Kim University of Hawai'i at Mänoa Encounter: A Novel ofNineteenth-Century Korea, by Hahn Moosook , translated by Ok Young Kim Chang, with a foreword by Don Baker. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. xxiii + 325 pp. $45.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Encounter (Korean title Mannam) is a novel about the "encounter" between Catholic Christianity and Confucian Korea in the early 1800s, many decades before Korea was "opened" to the West. The Catholic faith was forbidden under the laws of the Chosön monarchy and the infant Korean church was subject to wave upon wave of persecution, ostensibly because Catholics eschewed Confucian ancestor reverence, or "worship"; or in the popular argot, because they were "baser than animals who served no king, were filial to no 190KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 19 parents, and who severed the ethical bonds of human relations, and shared both wealth and women" (p. 305). But perhaps the real reason for their persecution related to long-standing factional battles at the royal court. Many of Korea's first Catholics were members of the educated but relatively powerless chungin class, specialists who ranked below the ruling yangban . Others were commoners and people of lowly occupation such as onggi potters, the makers of earthen food jars, a cut below true craftsmen. Korean Christians like to point out that the Catholic religion took root in Korea without missionary help. Catholic books and ideas were imported via Peking by members of returning tribute missions about 1784, and certain disaffected intellectuals took up the doctrines as the basis for a reform ideology. At the time, the rigid Neo-Confucianism that preoccupied the Korean ruling class was under challenge by out-faction elements. A major school of reform was already growing, called Shirhak, or "practical learning." Catholics likewise associated themselves with the "true doctrines" advanced in China many years earlier by Matteo Ricci, together with the vaguely understood science that was somehow a part of it. They formed study groups to clarify the meaning of Ricci's true doctrines, conspiring, in other words, to subvert Korea's reigning Neo-Confucianism. This ideological challenge put them outside the pale, and thousands of Christians—perhaps as many as ten thousand—lost their lives in the four great purges of 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866. Of the reform thinkers associated with early Korean Christianity, none was more prominent than Chöng Yag-yong (1762-1839), or Chöng Tasan, as he is better known. Though he ultimately renounced the faith, Chöng Tasan and his family were at the center of the conspiracy...