Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1970

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Scene 2

Scenes 3-4

Scenes 5-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Han and the Trap of Self-Pity

Though it is a word shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the Han is a uniquely Korean concept. According to Kim, Han “contains a range of emotions derived from one’s awareness of one’s doom” and is “the most important element in Korean literature” (10-11). Kim decided to renounce the concept of Han as degrading, blaming it for making the Korean people “pliant before foreign powers and domination […] with a petty, private, and baser instinct for only one’s survival” (11).

Following the erasure of their Korean names, Kim visits the cemetery with his father and grandfather to beg forgiveness from their ancestors. The reactions of the older generations in this scene exhibit Han. Mourning the loss of his name, an old man gives into the self-pitying and abjection of Han. He laments, “How can the world be so cruel to us? We are ruined—all of us! Ruined!” (102). Rather than resisting the “fate” of perpetual Japanese occupation, the old man forfeits his dignity, clinging to Mr. Kim in an unseemly spectacle. Kim remarks that he is “repelled by the pitiful sight of the driveling groveling old man” (103). The old man is not alone in his grief; the cemetery is full of equally distraught figures.

Kim’s reaction to the pathos-laden scene at the cemetery exemplifies his project, as a writer, of overcoming the temptation that Han provides. He sees their “pitifulness, their weakness, their self-lacerating lamentation for their ruin” and is repulsed and infuriated, likening the feeling to what he experiences when he is forced to pray at the Shinto shrine (103). Kim’s distaste for the actions of the older generations is reconciled when he realizes the burden of guilt that his father’s generation experienced. After the fall of Japan, Kim realizes that he will make history alongside the older generations.

The Remembrance of Things Lost

In the preface of Lost Names, Kim defines his cultural project in writing his autobiography as the “Remembrance of Things Lost,” or recovering what was lost by, or taken from, the Koreans under Japanese occupation. This is Kim’s response to the Korean cultural response of Han. To Kim, the remembrance of things lost is an act of rebellion against not only the cruelty and pain of his history, but of the dehumanizing, fatalistic, or even ennobling impulses that suffering can create.

Kim writes that the Koreans lost many things during Japanese occupation:

“we had lost our land to the Japanese; we had lost, because of that foreign domination, our country […] something much more than a mere nation-state,” and “above all, we had lost even our names to the Japanese” (13). He describes the loss of their Korean surnames as an “extraordinary, unprecedented chapter in all histories of colonial experiences” (13). This “symbolic and quite ritualistic effort on the part of the colonizers” sought to debase the Korean identity itself (13).

For Kim, the remembrance of things lost is an affirmation of life, showing that “the proof of life, of the living, will triumph over the withering negation of life, the dead” (13). Rather than continuing to hate the Japanese for their cruelty, or succumb to the temptation of martyrdom, he attempts to afford a greater dignity to the events of his personal history by remembering them for what they were. For this reason, Lost Names is in the present tense. By using the present tense, Kim’s writing keeps the events “alive,” as if they are still happening in the moment of reading. Events that are even more emotionally impactful, such as the reunion with Mr. Kim following the fall of Japan and the liberation of the prison camp, are in the present progressive tense, heightening the immediacy.

Hubris of the Colonizer

The people of Japanese-occupied Korea are forced to do tasks that are essentially useless, but that are designed to reinforce Japanese control and suppress the spirit of the Koreans. Such tasks include forced worship at Shinto shrines, showing excessive reverence toward the Japanese Emperor, collecting rubber balls, preparing for American invasion in useless ways, and creating sharpened bamboo poles and wooden rifles. Each of these tasks Kim undergoes has a symbolic purpose but is useless in practice. Forced labor represents the hubris and excessive pride that belies weakness or foreshadows a fall of the Japanese: the colonial forces underestimate their own power and the will of the Korean people.

Kim and his classmates are made to attend assemblies on Sundays; this means they cannot attend their own Church services. Instead, at the end of the assembly, they are forced to bow to a Shinto shrine. Forcing Koreans in a mostly Christian community to worship at Shinto shrines is an attempt to erase their culture. However, this merely builds resentment toward the Japanese oppressors and their culture, which culminates in the burning of the shrine, which only houses a stick from a tree on the Japanese mainland.

The useless precautions the Koreans must make in case of American invasion are done under the Japanese assumption that the Koreans would not welcome Americans as a liberating force. Everyone in Kim’s community must prepare for air raids by digging air raid shelters and maintaining piles of sand to put fires out. In another instance, the Koreans must “sharpen several dozen bamboo sticks” because they “are expected to charge against the Americans on the beach and bamboo them to death” (109).

Perhaps the greatest example of pointless labor and Japanese hubris is the airstrip that Kim and his schoolmates work on in “‘Is Someone Dying?’”. By this point, it is evident that the Japanese are losing the war: no fighter jets will come from Manchuria to refuel at the base. Kim, his classmates, and even the Japanese teachers and overseers at the base all sacrifice their health to the construction of the base—all for nothing. To his Japanese teacher, Kim leaving the base is symbolic of the futility of the effort. He recognizes that all attempts to dominate the Koreans have been fruitless, and instead, he seeks to curry favor to save his skin in the aftermath of Japanese occupation.