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Jae-Nam Han |
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BIOGRAPHYRichard E. Kim was born in Hamhung, a city in northern Korea, on March 13, 1932, while the Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. His father, Chun-Do, was a fighter for national independence, and Kim and his family had to live a few years in Manchuria, avoiding the Japanese persecution. These childhood experiences instilled in him strong nationalist sentiments, which he would later recollect in his third novel, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood ( 1970). Kim grew up in the city of Hwangju and attended Second Pyongyang Middle School, located in the capital city of North Korea. After Korea was divided into the North and the South after its liberation in 1945, Kim and his family came to the South, this time fleeing the communist persecution of landowners.
After finishing high school in the southwestern city of Mokpo, he entered Seoul National University as an economics major. In 1950, while he was a freshman at the university, the Korean War broke out. His active involvement in this war would later provide material for his first novel, The Martyred ( 1964). An anticommunist, he volunteered to serve in the South Korean army. He became a reserve officer in the marine corps before he was discharged due to pneumonia. He later volunteered to become a liaison officer between the U.S. and South Korean forces. After serving as an aide-de-camp to General Arthur Trudeau, then commander of the U.S. Seventh Army, he was honorably discharged from the army in December 1954.
Thanks to General Trudeau and Charlotte D. Meinecke of New York University, Kim came to Middlebury College in Vermont in 1955 to finish his college studies, majoring in political science and philosophy of history. Without receiving his bachelor's degree, he earned an M.A. degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in 1960. Then Kim studied in the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, earning an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1962. The next year he earned an M.A. degree in Far Eastern studies at Harvard. In 1960 Kim married Penelope Ann Groll, a Caucasian who was a fellow student at Middlebury, and became a naturalized citizen in 1964. From 1962 till 1977 he taught college English at various institutions, including Long Beach State College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Syracuse University, and San Diego State University. In 1981-1983 he also taught British and American literature as a Fullbright scholar at Seoul National University. Since 1985, Kim has been president of the Trans-Literary Agency in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. Kim is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Foreign Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Kim is probably the best-known novelist among Korean American writers, his fame resting chiefly on three novels, The Martyred, The Innocent ( 1968), and Lost Names. He also published two nonfiction books written in Korean, In Search of Lost Years ( 1985) and In Russia and China: In Search of Lost Koreans ( 1989). Published in Seoul, these books record Kim's encounters with the Koreans living in China and Russia, who are the "lost" souls living on foreign soil, not unlike his own experience. At the time of Lost Names' publication Kim was at work on a new novel; however, he has yet to publish it.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMESKim is a diaspora writer who finds his subject matter in the major historical events of twentieth-century Korea. He once remarked, " Korea is the foundation of my literature, my eternal pursuit of my literary way and all of my literary sources" (qtd. in Choy284). Unlike most of the other Korean American writers who deal with the Korean immigrant life in the United States, Kim limits the physical boundaries of his fiction entirely within Korea: the physical setting is Korea, the characters are all Koreans, and the actions loosely follow the historical events of Korea, such as the Japanese occupation ( Lost Names), the Korean War ( The Martyred), and the May 16, 1961, military coup d'état ( The Innocent). In The Martyred and The Innocent, the author draws on the historical events in Korea to delve into the issues of the individual's place in an apathetic universe, the paradoxical nature of good and evil, the use (or uselessness) of religious faith, human suffering, and the finality of death. Lost Names, a quasi autobiography, contains the author's personal observations of the hard life of Koreans living under Japanese colonial occupation.
Kim made it clear that his first novel, The Martyred, was informed by existentialism: he dedicated his novel to "the memory of Albert Camus,* whose insight into 'a strange form of love' overcame for me the nihilism of the trenches and bunkers of Korea."For further information visit this website for Kathy Masalski's interview with Richard E. Kim.
*"What matters - all that matters, really - is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest - women, art, success - is nothing but excuses."
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Click here for an interview with Richard Kim
Click here for student-generated questions for essays on Lost Names