I must say that I am very proud of the fact that I have just finished the thickest book I have ever read: The Singapore Story. It is the biography of the famous former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew. My parents(who had pushed me to read this book for ages) and I expected that the book would show me how to become a successful person like him; but as a toiled through the book's pages, what I found was something different. The book is a biography more of Singapore than Lee; for most of the book, he explains how Singapore had developed to its current state.
The daunting length of the book has made me forget much of what I read in it. However, it did manage to leave some impressions on me. Lee, as a politician, had met innumerable people, and for nearly everyone, he described what that person was like, with very fitting adjectives. He impressed me on this, as I consider myself very bad when it comes to judging people's characters. Unfortunately, I forgot how he acquired this skill. Also, he struck me as being less politically correct compared to western authours, which showed when he supported corporal punishment and Deng Xiaoping; the book showed me how different the world could be viewed by different people, and that a virtue supported by one culture didn't necessarily have the support of other cultures.
I've learnt a lot from Lee's description of his neighbouring countries. Although I had a vague knowledge about their history, Lee proved that I knew hardly anything. I learnt that the communist threat in Asia, which came to me as distant and unimportant to me during school history lessons, was very much real back then; Singapore could have easily ended up as being a communist country. Also, I've learnt about the tenuous China-Taiwan-US relationship. I had thought that Taiwan was an independent country; in fact, China becomes very sensitive when other countries regard Taiwan as an independent nation. All in all, I feel enlightened about the modern history of Asia.
Of course, there's plenty more to write about this monstrously thick book, but at the moment, I want my mind to be free from Singapore for some time.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
이진희 - 해협: 한 재일 사학자의 반세기
Most of the books in the Korean Church bookshelf are in poor condition. While I was looking for a book that was in a better condition, I came across an autobiography of a Korean historian who had lived most of his life in Japan. For some time, I've felt the need to approach Korean history as I do to English history in my A-level courses, so this book looked like a good start.
He was born in Gimhae but moved to Japan during WW2. In Japan, while he taught in Korean schools, he studied Korean archaelogy, and went to become a professor in various universities in Japan. His main motivation in his life were to preserve a national identity for the Koreans living in Japan and use archaeology to correct any wrong historical theory between Korea and Japan.
The book gave me an insight to the life of an intellectual. It isn't an attractive life to pursue; it doesn't make you into a millionaire or a celebrity. The life of an intellectual only makes sense if you have a strong sense of duty and responsibility to achieve something, and studying and researching is the way of achieving that. At first, I was skeptical about how interesting a life of an historian/archaeologist could be, but as I read on, I saw how he used his profession to try correct the flawed history regarding Korea in Japanese textbooks, and I came to think that such life was one worth living.
The book also gave me a first hand account of the Cold War. Before, I had thought that socialism/communism was the obvious evil, and that only the poor and the uneducated supported it. However, the author was a committed socialist, as were many of his fellow intellectuals, and they all supported North Korea after WW2 until by the 1970s they realized how Kim Il-Sung had perverted the ideals of socialism. Also, although I was aware of the dictatorship and terror in South Korea before 1980s, I didn't know that the situation was on par with that of North Korea. The two Korean governments were almost equally ruthless, and it was only recently that South Korea became more democratic and safe.
Although this book is hardly famous, it taught me a great deal. This book inspires me to read as much as possible, regardless of the fame of the author; all books teach me something.
He was born in Gimhae but moved to Japan during WW2. In Japan, while he taught in Korean schools, he studied Korean archaelogy, and went to become a professor in various universities in Japan. His main motivation in his life were to preserve a national identity for the Koreans living in Japan and use archaeology to correct any wrong historical theory between Korea and Japan.
The book gave me an insight to the life of an intellectual. It isn't an attractive life to pursue; it doesn't make you into a millionaire or a celebrity. The life of an intellectual only makes sense if you have a strong sense of duty and responsibility to achieve something, and studying and researching is the way of achieving that. At first, I was skeptical about how interesting a life of an historian/archaeologist could be, but as I read on, I saw how he used his profession to try correct the flawed history regarding Korea in Japanese textbooks, and I came to think that such life was one worth living.
The book also gave me a first hand account of the Cold War. Before, I had thought that socialism/communism was the obvious evil, and that only the poor and the uneducated supported it. However, the author was a committed socialist, as were many of his fellow intellectuals, and they all supported North Korea after WW2 until by the 1970s they realized how Kim Il-Sung had perverted the ideals of socialism. Also, although I was aware of the dictatorship and terror in South Korea before 1980s, I didn't know that the situation was on par with that of North Korea. The two Korean governments were almost equally ruthless, and it was only recently that South Korea became more democratic and safe.
Although this book is hardly famous, it taught me a great deal. This book inspires me to read as much as possible, regardless of the fame of the author; all books teach me something.
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