Korean+War+Interview+Project+Joorhee+Kwon+C+Block

=Korean War Interview Project= by Joorhee Kwon

Interview Questions

1.How was life before the war? 2.How did you feel when the war started? 3.How was your transition from North to South Korea? 4.How were communists treated? 5.How were non-communists treated? 6.How were the conditions in North and South Korea? Please contrast. 7.How did the U.S. and UN army treat the civilians? 8.How hard was it to get goods? 9.How did you feel about people of the same nation killing each other? 10.Overall, which side do you think had more loss? 11.Did you ever experience a bomb? If so, how was it? 12. After the war, how were the conditions in Busan? 13.What do you think is the lasting effect of Korean War? 14.Do you think that North and South Korea will ever unite?

Interview Summary

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Interview

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1)How does your interviewee's testimony fit in with what you have learned about the experience of civilians?

My interviewee was my grandmother, who was a young schoolgirl during the Korean War. All memories of the horrible War seemed to be still fresh in her mind despite her usually-short memory. Her testimony fit in quite similarly with what I learned in Asian Studies - only this time, the Korean War seemed to be an even more dire period of time in the Korean history because it came directly from a person related to me. I could almost picture what it was like during the war, though it would be nothing compared to what my grandmother had gone through.

2)Using your background knowledge try to contextualize their testimony. How do you think major events of the war affected their life at the time?

Before proceeding with my interview, I learned the most about Korean War by reading chapters from 'Still Life with Rice'. From the readings, I learned much how violent and wasteful the war was. Innocent civilians were tricked, tortured (physically and mentally) and killed; families were separated from each other; Koreans, both North and South, had to kill their own people. Food and resources were scarce, and families with ten people had to all sleep in a tiny room. Male and female, young and old, had to help clean out all the corpses. This was the most most shocking for me. My grandmother had to endure the labor of cleaning out corpses from the streets from when she was in elementary school. She watched people getting randomly shot, and cleaned out their maimed corpses because she was forced to.

3)Hypothesize or explain how your interviewee was able to stay out of danger.

My grandmother could stay out of trouble and harm during the Korean War because she was very cautious and careful. Especially when she was moving to South Korea from the North, she had to be particularly careful as a little child. She told me in some cases, babies and infants had to be tossed out from ships in case they cried.

Essay

Analyze the historical significance of your interview, how has the interview added to your understanding of the war, and how you think it will help us better understand the Korean War.

Korean War was one of the most tragic events of the Korean history. I did learn about Korean War in Asian Studies, but didn't necessarily understand how it was really like – how would it have been as one of the victims. Reading packets and articles certainly did increase my knowledge of Korean War, but it didn't come to me a devastating catastrophe. Little did I know of how much people suffered during the war – worse, still suffering.

Korean War was an interesting topic for me because it was a phenomena which some acquaintances of mine actually went through at some point in their lives. Adding on to what I had learned in my previous classes of Asian Studies, I have learned new and interesting facts about the Korean War while working on my interview, and more about my own country. Through my grandmother, an elementary student who worked as a corpse cleaner during the war, I got a chance to hear about what the war was really like, instead of by reading texts and articles on how awful the war was. I also gained an insight on how my distant relatives survived through extreme poverty and unfavorable conditions.

Many people in Korea support unity between South and North Korea, and I was one of them. I believed that unity would happen soon and by doing so, that Korea could develop even more as 'one'. However, the interview convinced me to change my views. As my grandmother told me, unity will not come for a long time because of the drastically different political views and economy. Another factor was that should Korea unite, South Korea would have to spend even more money on North Korea, making South Korean economy decline rapidly. Will this be beneficial for the 'united Korea' overall? I didn't think so. With this, I realized how careless I had been about the many negative consequences that would come after unity, when both sides of the country were still unable to cleanse away the pains of war. It was surprising to see how much details related to the war my grandmother remembered despite her declining memory.

Though Korean War caused much damage to Korea itself, a significant morale I learned from this interview was that a war like this should never happen again anywhere, and also that a country should not be split once united.

All in all, this interview taught me many new things I wasn't formerly aware of - the value of unity, poverty, and the cost of labor. Though reading through packets did contribute in building my knowledge of the Korean War, I would say that I learned more knowledge on the background and legacy of the war by doing an interview. The most important thing I learned about the Korean War is that this is a catastrophe which should never happen again in the history of Korea; too much pain and loss can never be compensated for.