America in Korea: a failed occupation?

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. For three-quarters of a century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two very different regimes that are bitterly opposed to each other. But did it have to be this way? In his book, A Fractured Liberation, which has been shortlisted for the Kundal History Prize, Professor Cornel Chang revisits the US occupation of the South of Korea between 1945 and 1948 to explore whether opportunities were missed for a better future. He shared his findings with Rob Attar,

The story you tell in this book has a personal connection to you. Would you be able to tell us how these events shaped your own family? Yeah, so I grew up as an immigrant kid in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. And, you know, I have this very specific recollections of waking up in the middle of the night. with my parents speaking to my grandmother, and they were speaking in Korean, of course, which was their native tongue at the time.

And they would be speaking at a quiet whisper about events that took place years ago, talking about the war and talking about American troops, good and bad ones. And w what I remember is that I would wake up the next morning and ask my father, you know, what was all of these conversations about that you were talking to grandmother about? And he would say, Nothing important is what he would say to me. And later I would learn that nothing important were things like my maternal grandparents who fled Pyongyang in the spring of 1946 and fled for the South in the spring of 1946 and would never return and never see their family members again.

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