Kim applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ties That Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905-1965, with the following results:
When opening to page 99, the reader would learn about Moon Lee who draped a Korean flag on the gate of the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. in March of 1942, a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. Lee was in the city attending the Korean Liberty Conference. Korea had become a colony of Japan in 1910, and an independence movement had been gaining momentum over the decades. Lee’s “hostile takeover” of the Japanese embassy by a Korean was reported in newspapers around the country and exemplified the efforts of Korean nationalists to persuade Americans and U.S. government officials to support Korean independence.Learn more about Ties That Bind at the University of Nebraska Press website.
A reader opening to page 99 in the book would get a good sense of the monograph. The selection shows how Koreans tapped into anti-Japanese sentiments to garner sympathy for Korean independence. Moon Lee was not a famous person and nothing else is known about him. But Koreans like Moon Lee and other supporters rallied behind the cause of Korean independence and worked tirelessly to persuade the general public and people in positions of power to recognize Korean independence. The selection also shows the types of evidence that I used in my book and my focus on cultural history.
My one caveat is that a reader may misinterpret the book as being focused on Korean independence movement and Korean nationalism. While this is an important part of two of the chapters of the book, it is not a focus in the first chapter and does not appear at all in the last two chapters. The book is about how interested parties, including Korean nationalists, American missionaries, political pundits, and others, influenced American perceptions of Korea and Koreans over a larger span of time. This book is firmly in the field of U.S. history and shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a book on Korean history.
I found it interesting that some newspapers carried the same misinformation about Moon Lee being a naturalized citizen of the United States. This would have been nigh impossible in 1942 because Asians were forbidden from becoming naturalized citizens (this would not be overturned until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952). The only way for an Asian to be a citizen was to be born in the United States as was decided by the Supreme Court in the landmark case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. I didn’t realize how newspapers used articles from news services such as UPI and AP. The same article could appear in the Grand Forks Herald or the Pasadena Star News with slight variations or different titles, depending on what the editor wanted to emphasize. I suppose when small local newspapers carried syndicated news, they didn’t have the time or resources to fact check the sources.
--Marshal Zeringue
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