The Book of Bob

There was a man in the land of Han whose name was Bob; and that man was imperfect, and often wrong, though he feared God, and avoided evil. And there were born unto him six daughters and one son, who each had their own home. And Bob, each day, morning and evening, aware of the evils in the world, offered sacrifice of intercessory prayer, according to the number of them all, for he said, it may be that my children be inclined to conform to the ways of the world, when they might, by Divine Grace, be transformed by the renewing of the mind so as to prove the benefit of conforming rather to the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Thus did Bob continually. (See Job 1:1-5)

SO begins a diary that my grandfather started writing in 1898, shortly after he was sent to Korea as a medical missionary by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, and which he consolidated on onionskin and carbon paper twenty years after his return to Canada in 1936. The work provides a rare glimpse of the seaside village of Sungjin, which is now deeply ensconced in Kim Jung-il’s North and among the least accessible places on Earth. It’s a snapshot of rural medicine reduced to its basic elements: improvisation and skill and luck. It shows a committed man trying to do good in impossible circumstances.

The reference to Job, even the Korean word han (which translates very roughly as a kind of deep national sadness, infused with outrage at injustices done), suggests we are in for a tale of Christian self-sacrifice, with or without a tidy redemptive wrap-up. My grandfather’s reward was, I suppose, posthumous. There are today more than ten million Protestant Christians in South Korea, at least a quarter of the population. Christianity rivals Buddhism as the religion of choice. The Presbyterian mission to Korea – an effort involving, in its second wave, the Canadian, American, and Australian wings of the church – has been called a “miracle of mission history.” If it were a corporation, it would no doubt be looked at by Harvard Business School graduates as a study in how to build a franchise.

Presbyterian evangelists displayed, from very early on, a cunning sense of which notes to sound with the Korean people. They managed to make Christianity seem less like a threatening replacement of traditional Korean beliefs than a natural extension of the brand. They appealed to nationalistic pride, evoked family values, and, most important, promised a paradise – an economic one – to be realized within a single lifetime.

It’s not too big a stretch to say that my grandfather helped build modern-day Korea. The Protestant ethic helped to power the country’s transformation into an emerging titan of consumer capitalism. What was initiated back at the turn of the century would grow into a uniquely Korean expression of Protestantism. The pastor of the world’s largest church – the half-million-strong Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul – summed it up in a phrase: the “theology of prosperity.”

And so those early pioneers have in some circles been canonized. They are the grist of propaganda, of religious scholarship, even of the kind of “personal-development” books that fly off the business shelves. But not, usually, of literature.

This becomes my problem, now. It is considered professionally advantageous for a writer to come from a long line of abusers or psychotics or slaves to some pernicious addiction. When the sun sets on such people (as the novelist Geoffrey Wolff said of his own deadbeat dad), “one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never cleanly decided.” It’s not quite clear what ought to be done with Robert Grierson, M.D. He remains, at least in the family mythology, almost beyond reproach: to eat him would be indecent; to bury him, premature; to worship him, banal. Worse, I have no memory of the man. He died in 1964, when I was two, and the living links to him are closing down fast.

But one way to think of him is as part of a continuum that began with his father and ends, at least for now, with me, as a kind of conversation, with each man responding to his father by creating a life that, to varying extents, agrees with his or rebuts it. This is, I think, how our identities are formed – by a push and a pull.

My grandfather was ninety-five years old when I was born. “Now I can die in peace, thank God!” he told my mother. “The family name will carry on!” It wasn’t just the name he was talking about – it was the spiritual obligation. If he could check back today, forty-one years later, for a progress report, it would not be immediately clear to him whether his prophecy had been borne out. The evangelical impulse did not show up in my father or in me in any obvious way. It seems to have been transformed en route, to have shed a little of its energy – and ultimately to have found expression in things that have nothing to do with institutionalized religion. My grandfather would be miffed. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Because God-fearing Bob seems himself to have struggled to define what it meant to be a Christian.

Anyone looking for a place to spend twenty-five years in exile could do a lot worse than Sungjin. A town of a few thousand, according to my grandfather’s accounts, it lies hammocked between ocean and rock: what was then called the Sea of Japan (now the East Sea) touches its feet, and the Diamond Mountains at its flank shorten the afternoon sunshine.