My Role Model

My Role Model

 

 

Whether due to the lack of gift or training or a combination of both, not everybody can write well.  It is doubly difficult to write well in a foreign language.  From this perspective, I admire Richard Kim (Korean name: Kim Eun-guk), a Korean-born novelist who wrote in English. 

 

There are young Koreans in the United States who write novels in English these days.  They either moved to the United States at an early age or were born there.  Their act of writing in English per se is of little significance because English is their first language. What sets Kim apart from them is the fact that English was an acquired foreign language to him.

    

Kim went to the United States to study in his early twenties. And he made his debut as a novelist there. In point of fact, the first-ever Korean who published an English novel in the United States was Younghill Kang (Korean name: Kang Yong-heul). His autobiographical novel titled “The Grass Roof” was published in New York in 1931.

 

Kim’s first novel, “The Martyred,” became a bestseller when it was published in the United States in 1964. Against the backdrop of the Korean War, the novel is built around an investigation on twelve murdered ministers, while addressing larger questions about the suffering of innocent people caught up in a war and the individual aspects of faith.  The novel left a lasting impression on me. What impressed me all the more was Kim’s exceptionally good command of English.  It was hard to believe that the novel was actually authored by a Korean who only began to write in English as an adult.

    

With the publication of his second and third novels, “The Innocent” and “Lost Names,” Kim grew in stature as a novelist.  “The Innocent” is about a fictional military coup which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Korean coup d’etat of 1961.  So suspenseful is the novel that one cannot put it down once one starts to read it.  “Lost Names” is a moving drama based on what Kim experienced – rather, suffered – as a youngster growing up under Japanese colonial rule.

    

Kim said in an interview that he had had no intention of becoming a novelist until he attended, by chance, a lecture on Joseph Conrad.  Although Conrad wrote his novels in English, it was not his native tongue.  Discovery of this fact convinced Kim that he, too, would be able to write in his second language, English.

   

Born a Pole, Conrad became a sailor in his youth.  After having spent about 20 years in high seas, he settled in England and began to write novels, with themes drawn from his rich experience in high seas as well as faraway, exotic places he visited as a sailor.  He mastered English all by himself – by reading countless books in his cabin.  Although English was his third language after Polish and French, his written English was flawless.  He eventually became an important figure in English literature.  Among the masterpieces he left behind are “Lord Jim,” “The Nigger of Narcissus” and “Nostromo.”

    

Undoubtedly Kim is regarded as a first-rate novelist of an international stature.  However, the reason why I have an affinity for him is not so much because he wrote critically acclaimed novels as because he unequivocally demonstrated that foreigners could learn to write English as well as do the native speakers. I have been looking up to Kim as my role model in my struggle to master English – in the same way as Kim was inspired by Conrad in writing novels. 

 

The Korea Times

October 2013