[The President's Barber + Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul]

The film The President’s barber (2004) directed Lim Chan-Sang, introduces a story about the life of a barber, Sung Han-Mo, in Hyoja-dong (the administrative district where the Korean presidential residence is situated), also it is interesting to note that the narrative is the barber’s son, Nak-An. Although it is clearly stated at the beginning of the film that “The characters and events featured in this story are fictitious”, it is worth noting that the big political events mentioned in the film did occur in real life as well – for instance, the April Revolution, the rigged election during Rhee Seung-Man’s Regime, the military unit taking over the government, the Assassination of the president (Park Chung-hee) etc. Even though the stories are not purely factual, the plot allows the audience to get a brief overview of the political change in South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the flashback of Nak-An, the audience can easily figure out that Han-Mo is not a highly educated man in the upper class, but rather an everyday man belonging to the working class. Han-Mo does not have specific reasons for supporting the government (he simply believes the government is right, and so is his neighbor, Mr.Choi). Han-Mo gets involved in the process of illegal electioneering without acknowledging what he is actually doing – later when Nak-An gets arrested and get tortured for being suspected to have contacted the communists, Han-Mo mentions the word “democracy”; however based on his previous actions (fraudulent election), he does not seem to know what it actually means. By portraying Han-Mo, the viewers are able to get a sense of how ordinary/ working class people lack in awareness of political issues. While Han-Mo’s description as a man ignorance in politics is constantly shown, and his complete obedience towards the higher ranking officials, Han-Mo is the one to criticize president Park’s long years of dictatorship (although he did not mean it) – this also seemed satirical of the movie.

By reading the assigned article for this week, memory was another part to consider in the film – in particular the childhood memories of Nak-An (since the film’s narrator is the young Nak-An). Coming across the phrase “These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted” (149), it made me wonder why the director intended on using young Nak-An as the narrator instead of the grown-up Nak-An, or Han-Mo himself. Did Lim want to emphasize complete ignorance of what was happening? Furthermore, another question was regarding Nak-An’s aftereffect of torture – I don’t recall hearing the voice of the older Nak-An; did he also suffer from speech impediment? If he had suffered other aftereffects from the torture, perhaps his memory is not completely trustworthy as well.

             Last Friday, professor Ju Hui Han from University of Toronto visited McGill in order to give a talk about Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul. Since I have spent many years in Korea, I am aware of how visible and present Christians are, so the topic immediately grabbed my attention. When prof.Han showed visual aids that illustrated the approximate number of Churches in Seoul, and other parts of South Korea, it was indeed jaw-dropping. The concept of Mega churches were not new to me, but seeing the figures of congregation, the amount of financial asset the Chunghyeon Church, Yoido Full gospel Church, Gwanglim Church etc. had was phenomenal. As I am a Catholic, I’ve visited big/famous South Korean cathedrals like Myeong-dong Catholic Cathedral, but once I saw the pictures of the Mega Churches, Myeong-dong Cathedral seemed quite small in size. On the other hand, prof.Han also mentioned that some churches are splitting in order to keep a small number of congregation – the polarizing pattern of churches (either the Mega Church, or small-scale church) at the same period is definitely an intriguing fact. It was also interesting to note that only 18.3% were Protestants (2005) in South Korea. The Protestant population of Daejeon is not as high compared to Seoul, but they seemed to be present wherever I went. Plus, it is more common to see Protestant evangelists than those of Catholic or Buddhist. In fact, there are many evangelists group heading to other countries for mission work. Overall I really enjoyed the talk, and I look forward to attending more guest lectures!