From the bay windows of the Victorian building that housed the research offices, one could enjoy a partial view of the side of Mont-Royal, and an implied view, in one’s mind, of the iron cross that overlooked the city, whose steel base resembled that of the Tour Eiffel. I occasionally looked up from the outdated computer station at the Centre de Recherche, trying to find a perfect line of sight between the two gaps of my past and beyond the obfuscations of other intersecting lines—that period of lost time in my family’s history from 1950 to 1953 and the gap in the historical record, between 1866 and 1886, when the Jikji might have first entered French possession. A few years after American state representatives consulted back issues of the National Geographic to draw the 38th parallel, dividing my family history into two clearly demarcated regions of the future, the printed characters of the Jikji would have, I thought, passed under the gloved hands of the librarians at the Bibliothèque Nationale as they catalogued the Henri Véver estate. If the division of my extended family attests to the transformative powers of representational drawing—the straight line at the 38th parallel becoming analogous to other such lines that appear in Soviet and American painting in the mid-twentieth century—then the printed characters of the Jikji, I believed, also possessed the ability to decode the incomprehensible chronology of my life. Victor Collin de Plancy had sold the Jikji to Henri Véver, the collector, in 1911 in exchange of 180 francs; the Bibliothèque Nationale had received it from the Véver estate in 1950, as part of his testament. Perhaps as a rehearsal of those problems of time and space, I attempted to reconstruct the twenty years from the French punitive campaign to Collin de Plancy’s instatement as the French minister to the Republic of K. During those years, the Jikji remained in the climate-controlled archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the city that so many of my colleagues yearned to visit. To hear it from them, the universal heritage of humanity lies not only in the document held in the Manuscrits Orientaux division, but is ensconced in every aspect of the city, from its architecture to the passing gestures of its denizens, the smallest details of the kind of life that is possible only there. I have heard argued that the leisurely attitude of the French regarding the relationship between life and work has an inescapable Frenchness (the extended lunch hours of Parisian bureaucrats described in novels that I began reading but could not finish) and that the liberated attitude toward politics one perceives there also has a specific Frenchness, particularly when compared to North America and those places that are neither North American nor European; I have heard similar theories about the inescapable Europeanness of other European places, as when someone who has recently returned from Sweden commends the Nordic attitude toward child-rearing (they single-handedly invented the Babybjörn, for God’s sake), the physical beauty of Nordic people and their beautiful socialism, their wide adoption of cycling culture revealing a sense of stewardship and care of the environment, conjuring up the smoke, dust, and pollution that waft over the Oriental continent, held off by the invisible borders of a unified Europe.
The French diplomat had arrived on the Peninsula in his capacity as a foreign minister in 1884, envisioning a railway between Seoul and Uiju using French railway technology from Fives-Lille. Of course, no French railway has ever connected the cities of Seoul and Uiju; yet, the idea of the application of French technology through French diplomacy existed somewhere in the Jikji’s history, as an alternative vision of the past that included my grandparents’ hometowns in the French empire, a hypothetical example of the European interconnectedness that is so venerated by the tourists who travel the continent. On their return from Europe, these tourists often express astonishment about the ease with which one passes through the borders between countries (Germany, France, Switzerland), a fluidity made possible by the technology of the Fives-Lille corporation, which, in this alternative Peninsula of Victor Collin de Plancy’s colonial vision, would have connected those place-names that were now lost on one side of my family to the European continent. Although I felt a certain disgust at these celebrations of interconnectedness, I could not help but wish to be a part of it. A tourist who rides a train through this version of the French countryside might, if she were to fall asleep or consciously attenuate her indifference to that part of the world, wake up to find the train arriving in the town in which my grandparents had met, before the division of the Peninsula. Because of their unknown status, the towns that were never connected by the French rail technology enjoyed in my mind the simple geometry of farm landscapes that are made familiar to us by certain canonical paintings, although logic and history suggest that people lived and continue to live there. These lines intersected across acres of a land I could not imagine, an abstract shape constructed of shaded regions and one-way mirrors that contained, inside of its impervious structure, the hundreds of thousands of people who continued in their ordinary lives since my grandparents might have last seen them in the 1950s, their daily habits conducted not in their capacity as relatives to me, or, as implied by the questions my colleagues asked, people living under a particular political regime, but in a dailiness that existed merely as a form of dailiness, their invisible faces that looked like mine as it might in a half-reflected window of the train.