Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood

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.