[How About This Book?] Facing the Death Penalty, He Asked Them to Spare His Manuscript... Jeong Suil, Who Lived Under Seven Names

Cha Byeongjik's *Seven Names: A Biography of Jeong Suil*
From Muhammad Kansu to a scholar of civilizational exchange... The Cold War's 20th century layered behind seven names

A man facing the death penalty pleaded for his life. But he was not speaking of himself. He was speaking of the manuscript of History of Ancient East-West Exchanges found on the computer seized from him. In court in November 1996, Jeong Suil said he would accept his punishment, but pleaded that his research manuscript not be destroyed. Taken on its own, the scene could make for a moving story about a devoted scholar. But his life was far too complicated for that. He really had been a North Korean agent operating in the South, and he entered South Korea in 1984 under the assumed identity of a Lebanese-Filipino named “Muhammad Kansu.” He continued his espionage activities even after becoming a professor at Dankook University, until his arrest in 1996.

Chung Suil, who was arrested in 1996 after concealing his identity as a North Korean agent and operating under the name "Muhammad Kansu." He was later tried for violating the National Security Act and sentenced to 12 years in prison, a sentence that was upheld. Yonhap News Agency.

When one person has seven names, an index is more useful than a résumé. Haeseong, born in Manchuria; Jeong Suil; Yoshitake Shuichi during Japanese colonial rule; Zheng Shouyi in China; Muhammad Kansu; Kim Seongcheol; and Lee Cheolsu. His nationality changed several times, too. He grew up speaking Korean at home, Japanese at school, and Chinese in the streets, then studied Arabic at Peking University. He went to Morocco as a Chinese diplomat, became a professor in North Korea, and then became an agent, traveling through Lebanon, Tunisia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. He seems like someone who left a name behind every time he crossed a border.

Seven Names by Cha Byeongjik is compelling because it does not dress up this tumultuous life to make it even more dramatic. Cha spent about 20 years in contact with Jeong, but did not simply take his recollections at face value. He compares trial records, writings, contemporary sources, and accounts from people around him, examining even the places where memories diverge. This is a biography written by a lawyer, but what draws the eye is not the defense; it is the fact-checking. Rather than taking Jeong from one side and placing him on the other, Cha leaves his two faces, which do not quite fit together, as they are.

Even after entering prison, one of those two faces never quite faded. He translated The Travels of Ibn Battuta from the Arabic original and wrote manuscripts on Silk Road studies and the history of exchanges among ancient civilizations. On the day of his release, prison authorities would not hand over his research records, so he reportedly insisted that he would not leave without his manuscripts. The prison door opened, but the man did not come out. The papers left inside mattered more to him than the freedom waiting outside.

It was much the same after he got out. Once he regained his passport, he traveled through Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America again. On research trips, he wrote down what he saw during the day, then organized his notes again at his lodgings in the evening. For him, travel was not about consuming scenery; it was about verifying what he saw. Even after turning 90, his desk was never empty. Studies of Civilizational Exchange, published after his death, runs to more than 800 pages. If there was an eighth name that the man with seven names could never relinquish, it was probably “scholar.”

What is striking is that the field he devoted his life to was the study of civilizational exchange. For Jeong, the Silk Road was not simply a pretty line connecting China and Rome. It was a route along which people, religions, languages, and technologies met, mixed, and dispersed. His own life crossed many borders and languages in much the same way. But resemblance does not make for a beautiful parallel. Roads carry more than silk and Buddhist scriptures. They carry ideas, too, as well as the orders of states. Some borders were crossed by a scholar; others, by an agent. In Jeong’s life, those two sets of footprints often fell in the same places.

Cha does not erase those footprints. That is why the scenes that linger in the book have more to do with habits than with verdicts: a man worrying about his manuscript in court, translating in prison, gathering his research notes on the day of his release, and organizing his travel records even in old age. Still, that persistence does not explain away the choices he made before. The book does not force an easy reconciliation, either. It simply shows how long contradictions can coexist within a person.

In his later years, Jeong called himself “a person of his era” rather than “a person on the border.” Once you hear it, the phrase seems quite apt. Behind his seven names lie the shifting borders of the 20th century: Manchuria and colonial Korea, the Chinese Revolution and the Cold War, North and South Korea, and the Arab world. At first, it seemed that one man had changed his name seven times. By the time you close the book, it can feel instead as though the era demanded seven names of one man.

After all those names, something strangely remains: the posture of a person sitting at his desk, reading, recording, and checking again. Jeong spent his life studying roads and actually traveled many of them. His name, nationality, and identity changed again and again. What he probably could not change to the end was the way he read books and wrote sentences.

Seven Names | Written by Cha Byeongjik | Changbi | 496 pages

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.