To Swim Across the World

Frances and Ginger Park's book To Swim Across the World (Talk Miramax, 2001) might be fictitious, but accounts of Japanese atrocities toward Koreans were real and palpable.

As Aunt Sunja lamented: "They ransack homes; beat the men and rape the women, shoot babies to stop them from crying, then feed their tiny hearts to the vultures. I speak the truth! If you don't believe me, you are no better than a dirty Jap dancing on Korean graves."

Changi too, had this to say: "Everyone listen to me! I do not respond to the Jap name they brand me with - Mifune Okawa!"

After spitting with whole-hearted disgust, he added: "Call me that name and I'd warm your sake with my piss! Because I am afraid of no one. No one tells me how to think or breathe. No Jap tells me who I am."

Detailing how a Korean grandfather was beaten and sliced with a knife, the authors described the knife as one "whose bejeweled jade handle was surely worth more than any Korean life."

As for the name of the novel, it was derived from the name of the novel's protagonist Sei Young (世泳) which literally means "to swim across the world."

As Sei Young noted, not without a tinge of sadness: "We all suffered during the Japanese Occupation. Many of us lost loved ones during the war effort. The pain is greater than the sum of our soul."

Since the book is supposed to be fictitious, the following descriptions of Korea's first president should be taken with a pinch of salt:

"Syngman Rhee would fight to the end; that I believed. It wasn't only the Japanese he had fought in his lifetime. As a young independent revolutionary in turn-of-the-century Korea, his way of thinking - to give more power to the people - jeopardized the Korean royals, who had ordered Rhee captured, imprisoned and tortured. Even when bamboo sticks were driven under his fingernails and lit with matches, he would not relent. Only as his flesh began to singe were the burning sticks extinguished. For the rest of his life, whenever he became infuriated, he would blow on his fingertips as though they were on fire. The habit of a lifelong crusader."

"Our first President had had the immortal task of rebuilding a nation in the midst of war, and I believed he was the best person for the job at that time. However historians would view this era, they were not there at Korea's moment of crisis."