Seite 135 [135]
LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF ETHNIC CHURCHES IN THE KOREAN DIASPORA IN CANADA
Josh left for a summer retreat with his church friends. He’d be gone for a month.
‘He’s not even Christian,’ I yelled at the TV before turning it off. Now I was
stuck doing his share of work” (A. Y. K. Choi 97).
Christina Park’s The Homes We Build on Ashes (2015) has references both
to Christianity in Korea and in the Korean diaspora in Canada. To start with
the first context, the novel mentions that during the Japanese occupation
missionary schools served as an ideological refuge from the Japanese attempts
at forcing their own culture and religion on the colonized (administration,
Shintoism). “Christianity gave Koreans comfort and hope that traditional
religions like Buddhism and Confucianism failed to provide and hence spread
rapidly especially among alienated classes and women. Many Korean elites
were also educated in private Christian schools” (I. J. Yoon, “Korean Diaspora”
211). When Nara, a nobleman’s daughter, calls what is being taught a lie, she
gets whipped by the Japanese who operate the public school she attends: “Nara
was being hit on her legs. Then, a few strokes later, the sound shifted. [...] Nara
was being whipped on her back now. She was ordered not to let out a sound
on threat of a harsher beating” (C. Park, 29). After the incident, Nara’s father
sends her to a missionary school operated by Canadian missionaries. The school
offers temporary protection from similar abuse, and ina case the missionaries
notify the Canadian Embassy when teenage girls are held captive at the police
station as potential traitors: “As the Reverend made note of the students the
soldiers were singling out, his face turned a ghostly grey. [...] A day later, the
Reverend went to see the students at the police station. [...] I have told them
at the station that I had contacted the embassy and notified our ambassador
of their arrests. [...] it makes things more official” (C. Park 41).
During the Korean war and after the Pusan fire of 1953, the church serves
as temporary shelter for those who had to flee and also to those who lost their
homes. At Nara’s church in Pusan, church members hold extra church meet¬
ings in a member’s house with a meal: “[t]he meetings were held to go over the
administration of the church as well as to socialize outside the rigid religious
setting” (C. Park 9). When Nara’s house burns down in the fire while she is out
helping others, church members help Nara rebuild her home. The reader also
learns that the church Nara attends was “founded by Irish and American
missionaries who had probably been Presbyterian. But it was, in part completed
by American GIs who had instead most likely been Catholic [...] evidenced by
the way they crossed themselves at the sight of death. And there was a lot of
death so there was a lot of crossing” (C. Park 9).
When Nara immigrates to Canada, for these positive experiences, she feels
at home in church unlike her older daughter, Sun-hi: “[e]ven though she had
grown up in a church and survived by the good graces of God-fearing people,
she deliberately pushed herself away from that belief system, which she per¬
ceived as either false, hard to believe, or close-minded. It was unclear if it was
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