A-ri-rang, Are We One?

The month of August is when Pyongyang opens its immigration gates to visitors from the West including the eagle-embossed blue-passport-bearing ones. Or at least that was what I was told two years ago when I visited Dandong on the China side of the Yalu Jiang separating Zhongguo from what the Western press likes to derisively designate as the “Hermit Kingdom” of the young “dictator” Kim Jong Un.

Dandong is only a few short miles from the site of the third rocket test that sent the West into a frenzy of calibrated fear in spite of the fact that this third primitive one could not hit a huge air balloon hovering the skies of the old Cotton Ball football stadium in Dallas.

The old civilization initiated by the Han Lao Shi Kung Fu Zi (teacher Confucius to John and Mary) evolved into an observance of form over function, and the occasional parade of rockets and armaments, common in China and North Korea (also true in the old Japan before it lowered its sights on military displays, and South Korea under the heavy hand of restraint by its Pentagon mentors), is more an exercise on ceremonial spectacle for the national pride than anything else.

When we first visited Seoul in ‘72, Walker Hill was Uncle Sam’s filthy rich military base while farmers drove their peach stalks to the ground and the ladies soured their cabbages into kim chee for the winter. The hills around the city were military installations and foreign visitors were told in no uncertain terms that they were to keep their fingers off the shutters of their cameras!

I asked a colleague why the fuzz and he answered that half of the country was under American occupation. Not unlike the teachers and missionaries that followed the flannel-shirted veterans of the Indian Wars into Roosevelt’s Philippines, the U.S. Infantry forces that saw action during the early ’50s turmoil in the Korean Peninsula were swiftly followed by the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Catholics with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in tow, converting the terrain into an extension of the Midwest. 

Almost 60 years later after the Armistice, South Korea has virtually become the 51st State of the Union, with Uncle Sam lifting the visa requirements of SoKor citizens to U.S. sovereign land, and a third of the population lit up with evangelical seal as they establish Korean congregations around the world.  I know of a couple of very active ones on Saipan who have made the old category “missionary” unusually high in number in the CNMI.

The old Korean Arirang was co-opted as a marching music in the U.S. Infantry. We know of it in our youth when it became popular after 1953 when Filipino soldiers returned from the Korean conflict. When I ran into my old colleague on my first visit to Seoul 20 years later and asked him how the old country was faring, he said with a straight face: it is still under American occupation.

Ideology has been used to keep the Panmunjom 38th parallel line in being but one song sang on both sides is about the old imaginary mountain pass toward a longed-after hill titled Arirang. We deign invite the wrath of Hanggul Saram friends for giving their beloved tune new words.  Here goes our paean from Yanbian (Korea in China):

Kim Rhim Park Kwak
Kwan Han Rhee Yi Goh Soh
Kang Wang Choi Roi
Won Son and Doh Roh
 
Are we one, are ye one, or are ye two-o-o?
Are ye one, are ye two, old Kogoryo?
 
Amnok-gang Nakbong-gang
Duman-gang Han-gang
Baekdu-san Taebaek-san, we are one.

Are we one, are ye one, are we still two-o-o?
Are we one, are we two, Hanggul duo?

We do live in Nampo to Jeju do,
North in Musan, south in Busan, also.

We are one, sing as one, a-ra-ri-yo
To create the earth, we will all start anew.

There’s a newness ar-i-sing in the East
Bind the earth around A-ri-rang feast.
 
We are one, we are one, we can all be, too.
A-ri-rang, Hangguk of the Hanggul duo.[/I]  
There are folks determined to keep people apart by ideology, ethnicity, nationality, and/or economic class. There are equally many who see the virtue of a round table and the processes that sustain it, rather than be strait-jacketed in the neatly divided square table of debates and squabbles. This choice is a matter of faith, fundamental to one’s view and, therefore to one’s behavior.  Uncle Sam dines on a square table.

A new earth calls. What does your faith do?

I’d better make sure the old blue book is current in case we get the chance to cross the Yalu this August.