The Polyglot

By Ty Pak

Surviving Stalin's 1937 resettlement of Siberian Koreans in Central Asia but seeing no future in racist Russia Peter Bach, 25 and master of half a dozen European and ten Asian languages, heads out in 1945 on a Kazakh passport for Korea, his ancestral land, aboard Shanghai Express when the train comes under attack by Chinese bandits. Defeating and capturing them along with their cache of plunder over the years, he also saves the life of Yuri, Stalin's Commissar, traveling incognito to North Korea. General Ming, Kaishek Chiang's Chief of Staff and father of Sulan, wife of Peter's Kazakh benefactor, invests his reward money in the real estate of Taiwan to which Chiang's government soon moves. In North Korea Yuri makes Peter the top man supervising Premier Ilsung Kim. Though hating to be Stalin's puppet, Peter goes along with the planning and execution of the Korean War (1950), seeing it as an expedient to achieve independence and neutrality for united Korea, albeit with Soviet help. Belatedly realizing the fallacy of his reasoning, he defects with some 100,000 militia to the UN/US forces and works for US intelligence as a multilingual. However, his records misplaced in the confusion of the 1953 Armistice, he languishes in South Korean prison. During the turmoil of the 1960 presidential elections he breaks out and smuggles to Japan, then to Honolulu, where he translates for a US-Soviet aviation treaty. Married to Stella Sullivan, Oscar-winning documentarian and White House Film Historian, he narrates his life story on TV, rising to stardom overnight. A viewer, executor of the late Prime Minister Ming's estate, informs him of his legacy worth billions of dollars. As White House Language Advisor Peter translates for Eisenhower at the Paris Summit, a fiasco in the aftermath of the U2 incident, which however connects him with Khrushchev, who lets him and Stella come to the USSR to film the Peter Bach story and take his surviving siblings in Uzbekistan to Honolulu to be at the bedside of their father Jongnay Bach, comatose on dialysis and in desperate need of kidney transplant. His successful surgery in Japan leads to discovery of Peter's true parentage, Japanese father and Korean mother. Nominated Ambassador to South Korea after barely surviving an assassination attempt by his disinherited Japanese cousins, he calls on the three neighboring states, Japan and the two Koreas, to federate like the US for balance of power in the Far East and reconciles Eisenhower and Khrushchev to resume detente for world peace, getting nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1521400822
• ISBN13: 9781521400821
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 2.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.6" x 6.0"