By Jimmie
I have never written a fanaccount in my life. And because I’m much more used to writing critiques and reviews, what follows might not be what you expected. However, since I promised a lot of people that if I get a ticket to a showing of Tears of Heaven where Junsu is the main lead I would write a fanaccount, here it is…
Necessary Background Information
Few international fans are aware of the source material that inspired this production, Jo Sungmo’s Ashinayo music video (click here to view) and its rather considerable significance to the Korean social psyche. In 2000, Jo Sungmo released his music video, a 10-minute blockbuster set during the Vietnam War that tells of a tragic love story between a Korean soldier and a Vietnamese woman. The video and the music made quite the impact. Not only did it keep Jo Sungmo on the top of the charts for weeks, it launched the career of Shin Mina.
The content of the video re-opened questions surrounding the role of Korea and Korean soldiers in the Vietnam War. As the music video suggested, a lot more Korean soldiers than had been thought had loved Vietnamese women or fathered children by them. The majority of these Korean fathers subsequently died—the Korean government sent soldiers to Vietnam after the US promised that it would give the Korean government several thousands of dollars (or was it hundreds of thousands? In any case it was a lot of money) for every Korean soldier that died in Vietnam, which the Korean government at the time eagerly grabbed as free development aid—but the few who had survived started telling their stories. NGOs and even the Korean government at some point, paid for these Korean-Vietnamese children to be reunited with their fathers in Korea.
Koreans of previous generations already knew that the Korean government sent Korean soldiers to Vietnam in order to obtain free development aid that rises with the Korean body count; that this gave American and Korean generals every incentive to send Korean soldiers to the battles that only a crazy person would think he could survive; that the American command, trusting the reputation that Koreans are naturally cruel (a reputation popularised by the Japanese colonial government when Korea was a Japanese colony), sent Koreans on all sorts of black ops; that Koreans inflicted horrible torture on the Vietcong and other Vietnamese, such as skinning alive. This is all common knowledge, but until Jo Sungmo’s video, most Koreans were too busy avoiding being impoverished to pay much attention. But in 2000, a new generation was rediscovering this history. It caused quite a stir.
Koreans, who had become used to seeing themselves as the righteous and innocent victims throughout most of their history, had to confront the possibility that they were just as skilled at being the perpetrators; that what Koreans had suffered at the hands of their neighbours and others, they were capable of inflicting too. However, ironically, most of the resulting criticism and anger was directed at the Americans and added to the already-existing anti-American sentiment of that time. The attitude of the American command, using Korean soldiers in black ops and to do the dirty work in Vietnam, reminded Koreans of the policy of the Japanese colonial government: the Japanese, unable to subdue the resistance and independence spirit of Koreans, used Koreans who had been broken as slave labourers in Japan as prison guards, spies and torturers against their fellow Koreans.
Thus, all these themes—family mysteries, being sent to unsurvivable battles, traditional victim turned perpetrator, the colonialist mentality—appear in varying degrees throughout Tears of Heaven. (Interestingly, it is the English lyrics of the songs and not the Korean that emphasise the North-South split that apply to both Korea and Vietnam at the time of the Vietnam War.) In this sense, this is a very Korean production. It has no resemblance to Miss Saigon except in setting.
JYJ3 