Faithful Endurance: An Ethnography of Korean Family Dispersal (review)

BOOK REVIEWS213 much more than the application of Neo-Confucian social values. The old local officials (hyangni) who had served as a socially qualified reservoir of recruitment throughout the Koryö period were reduced to an inferior status and effectively eliminated from the new dynasty's elite stratum, and political institutions were reorganized to create a more centralized political system and a more powerful state apparatus. It was through this revitalized central state that Deuchler's Neo-Confucian vanguard sought to reform society. This reliance on the state to reform society is a development that seems closer to the guwen style of the Northern Song than the Chengzhu Neo-Confucianist emphasis on personal self-cultivation and local reform efforts such as the local compact (hyangyak). I personally suspect that the vigorous Korean Confucian discourse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries shared as much with Northern Song traditions as it did with Chengzhu Neo-Confucianism. But then again, it may perhaps be as Deuchler once remarked to me: the peculiarity of the Korean situation was that NeoConfucianism did play such an unusually activist role. In closing, I would like to note that Deuchler has set a very high standard of scholarship for the rest of us in Korean studies. I heartily recommend this book to my fellow Koreanists, and also to our colleagues in Chinese and Japanese studies who are interested in the comparative aspects of thought and society in East Asia. John B. Duncan University of California, Los Angeles Faithful Endurance: An Ethnography ofKorean Family Dispersal, by Choong Soon Kim. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. 145 pp., illustrations. Each year around 25 June, the date the Korean War broke out in 1950, Korean television broadcasters traditionally run a number of special programs related to the war. On the evening of 30 June 1983, the South Korean government-owned television station, KBS, broadcast a live program devoted to describing the pain and suffering of families that have been divided because of the war. The program had originally been scheduled for 90 minutes, but something extraordinary happened. Family members that had fled to South Korea separately and unknown to each other were able to recognize on the television screen faces of relatives lost years before. Several dramatic reunions were arranged. By the time the program was supposed to end, thousands of people had flocked to the KBS studio 214BOOK REVIEWS on Yöido island in Seoul demanding to appear on television so that they too, could have their faces and stories broadcast in the hope that long-lost relatives would recognize them. That evening, KBS canceled its regularly scheduled programs and continued the telethon throughout the night, with people appearing on camera for 15 seconds each, one after another, to tell about their missing relatives and the circumstances of their separation. Nine of the 22 local affiliates of KBS in the provinces participated in the program, with broadcasters cutting from one station to the other to allow people from all over South Korea to participate. The program continued the next day, and the next—for 65 hours over the next eight days. The government and Korean Red Cross finally had to step in to help register the crush of participants and try to match lost relatives by computer. The program became a regular feature, playing every Friday night for months afterward as Koreans from all walks of life were captured by the pathos of the man who came south alone and wondered if other family members might not also have fled south, of the mother whose young child had become separated from her as she and her family fled Seoul in front of the North Korean advance in January 1951. They cried along with the siblings reunited for the first time since 1950, and with the sobbing mother reunited with her long-lost son. Every television in Korea, from the flickering black-and-white sets in remote rural villages to the color sets in urban tearooms, tuned in to the program night after night. Choong Soon Kim, a Korean-American anthropologist from Tennessee , happened to be in Seoul studying families separated by the Korean War at the time of the telethon. Glued...