Reference
Lost Names by Richard Kim is an account of life in Korea during the Japanese occupation leading up to and including World War II. While the author lived through this period, his first person narrative is a composite sketch of the Korean experience. We jump from one episode to another, building up a childhood experience as a member of an oppressed people. With each episode, we see the characters lose a little more of their identity as their ancient culture is pushed aside in the interest of the perceived superiority of the Japanese. It doesn’t all happen at once. And that is where I found the beauty of the book. In the beginning, the occupying forces do not live up to the American propaganda that I’ve heard in studying the Axis powers. They appear respectful of the Korean people. Each new episode brings a small change to the status quo: no Korean history taught in school, no Korean language in the streets, exchanging Korean family names for Japanese ones (the namesake episode of Lost Names), to finally the more brutal conscription of labor to the increasingly desperate Japanese cause.
Lost Names is written in a style that may not be to the liking of some readers. I struggled a bit with the stilted and simplistic sentence structures used by Kim. It was written in a way I would expect from an English language learner. I can understand this approach since the main character is a child, but I personally felt that it detracted some from the effectiveness of the book and made the narrator feel distant.
That being said, Lost Names is a valuable classroom resource. I used this with a less than academically minded twelfth grade English class. Because of its episodic nature, I was able to pick and choose what would work in my class. I used this text to reinforce students’ skills in identifying various literary elements. The stories themselves demand reflection on the rights we deserve as humans and cause students to ponder the basics of who they are as citizens. There is lots of room for reflective writing and journaling inspired by Lost Names. My students had also previously studied propaganda techniques and in this book, we have a real live example of the dangers of propaganda.
As a study of history, there are parallels to the American treatment of Native Americans and the US government’s attempt to westernize them. This is also a good Eastern example of the process of colonization and can enrich and draw comparisons to what students already know about how the European powers colonized different parts of the world. Many American students know nothing about Korea aside from a cursory overview of the Korean Conflict while studying the Cold War. Through this manageable, episodic work, they can increase that knowledge ten-fold.
