The genesis of KOREAN MESSIAH began more than a decade ago, when I was getting set to move to Seoul to take up a posting in The Wall Street Journal’s Korea bureau. In my preparatory reading on North Korea, I was perplexed by references to Kim Il Sung’s Presbyterian upbringing and eager to read more about how his Christian background may have helped shape the state he presided over for half a century. I soon learned that such a book simply didn’t exist.
It was around this time that I met Tony Namkung, a Korean American whose grandfather, roughly a century earlier, had been the first Korean to teach as a full professor at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pyongyang. Tony became a scholar himself before pursuing a second act as a de facto consultant to the U.S. government in its decades-long, stop-and-start attempts to engage North Korea. Through this work, he traveled dozens of times to Pyongyang, helping bring Bill Clinton, then-Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and others to the North Korean capital.
It was in this capacity as “North Korea fixer” that I first met Tony. Within minutes, it became clear that, while the challenges of dealing with North Korea in the here and now were interesting, we both much preferred to talk about the past. Tony and I, though separated in age by nearly four decades, had much in common. Like me, Tony was raised in the church but drifted away somewhat to a more complex posture; nonetheless, there was no question that the faith had never really left either of us and continued to echo through our lives. Over the next six years, Tony traveled regularly from his home in New Jersey to Seoul, where we would share a meal at the Grand Hyatt before he flew on to Beijing and then Pyongyang; we would meet again on the return leg, where I could expect a debrief on the latest in Pyongyang before turning to the topic that truly animated us: Pyongyang’s Christian past, and the way that the faith might have shaped Kim Il Sung and the state he founded.
Between conversations, I read everything I could, if not on the topic itself then on some adjacent topic; each time we met, Tony encouraged me, with increasing firmness, to turn what I was learning into something ambitious. If the book I was looking to read didn’t exist, he said, I should write it. I protested. I was slammed on my day job. Besides, I’m not Korean, I said, and my facility with the language, while adequate, was far from native. Tony’s response was simple: A topic like this, he said, benefited from the eye of an outsider, without all that comes with having family origins in this or that part of the country, or being attached to or estranged from the church. Only then could someone approach such a fraught topic with the nuance it demanded.
Now, twelve years after that first conversation with Tony, I’ve told that missing story in KOREAN MESSIAH. We’ll speak at an event on April 16 at Columbia University. If you’re in town, we’d love to see you there.
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