The New Logic of Disruptive Climate Activism (Analogy)

Imagine you are a part of an important social movement. What’s at stake is nothing less than the future of our species, and the planet at large. You believe that the authority of scientific discovery is behind you – it is our best predictions of what’s to come that drives your anxiety, your fear, and your resolve.

The problem is large, impossibly so; it is also time sensitive. So piecemeal tinkering on the edges of policy is just not going to do it. A revolutionary change is needed, and it’s needed now!

The good news is that people seem to agree with you. Though they might differ on some of the details, by-and-large they too think there is a problem that needs solving; they too are unsatisfied with the way things are.

With so much agreement in the air, you put forward your case and wait expectantly for everyone – or almost everyone – to fall into line behind you. After all, the fate of humanity depends on it!

Yet no one does! No one does… anything!

At first you are rightly dumbfounded by this – how can people be so blasé about their own survival? You are also outraged, and rightly so, because you need these people. You can’t make the required policy changes by yourself.

But then it settles over you: they must not have really understood the problem. As frustrating as it is, you realise that you will have to spend the time to convince these people of the end-of-world-threat they face before you can get around to actually fixing it.

Time is against you, so you begin collecting more data, conducting more research, building better explanations and better arguments.

Everyone listens, they nod, they smile in apparent agreement, and then they continue to do absolutely nothing about the problem. You try again, and again. Each time doing more to convince your fellow citizens of the obvious truth before them, appealing to their rationality, their compassion, and even their self-interest.

No matter what you try, they all continue-on as if catastrophe is not coming their way. They are sleepwalking towards their own deaths – in one breath not wanting the world to end, and in the next refusing to do anything that might stop it from happening.

You will have to find a way to break through their apathy! For their own good they cannot be allowed to ignore you any longer. So if they cannot be convinced, then they will have to be coerced.

You will need something extreme, something disruptive and eye-catching; something that will force people to begin talking about you, and the problem they face. By doing this, by using this tactic, you understand that many people might find you obnoxious. You will be criticised, you will even be hated for it, but you definitely won’t be ignored, and that’s what matters.

You think on it for a while, and then it hits you: you know what you must do!

You gather up a few loyal supporters, the kind that understand sacrifice. You then march down to the local graveyard, you protest and picket the funerals of dead soldiers, yell abuse at the grieving families, and hold up signs that read: GOD HATES FAGS!

It’s Time to Take Off the Mask

Published in the Korea Times - It's time to take off mask (koreatimes.co.kr)

Under the slight tumble of another COVID wave, this might not be the best moment for a discussion such as this. But then again, when would be?

As things got worse, better, and then much worse, all the talk was rightly of individual safety, protecting the vulnerable, and unburdening the hospital system. Then as things trended more positively, it was all about consolidation, preventing future problems, and continued vigilance.

If there is space in this model for an end-date, a finish line where people will finally take off their masks and get back to normal, then someone should speak-up, loudly, and announce it. If that finish line involves ‘zero-COVID’, then save your breath.

So let us all meet in the uncontroversial middle: wearing masks outside. When the mandates were first launched, many Koreans wore their masks (we were told) as they would obey any other law. As good – though begrudging – citizens.

This mandate – at least its outdoor cousin – has been gone for nearly five months. And you wouldn’t know it to look around!

Walk any street, of any Korean city, at any time of day, in any weather, and the vast majority of faces you see are still covered. This takes some explaining – something that the ‘good citizen’ argument cannot.

People obediently following government regulations, don’t then ignore their government when the regulations change; unless they were never really following at all.

A more likely explanation is, they were scared then, and remain scared now! This at least matches what we are seeing on the ground (masks still being worn outside) – but it also comes with its own set of problems.

If you have an underlying medical condition, or fit into an ‘At Risk’ category in some other way, the fear – or at least caution – is appropriate. Beyond this small fraction of the Korean population, things begin to break down fast.

Most of the people still wearing masks are reasonably healthy, double or triple or quadruple vaccinated, holding antibodies from infection or exposure, and, of course, are outside where we know that the virus does its weakest work.

If genuine fear is an active reason for these people to continue wearing masks, then something very unpleasant has been allowed to take residence in Korean society.

There are plenty of things to be appropriately fearful of… and plenty of things not to be. And any way you twist it, for most people here, any good reason to be scared has long gone.

So, like witnessing an agoraphobic patient irrationally terrified of the world outside his room, we ought to now be worried about the long term damage that all this terror, anxiety, panic, and fear is causing. Even if felt just a little bit by each Korean, then the sheer number of people feeling it (judging by masks still being worn) – and the associated mental health issues – would still be worrying.

This would certainly be bad enough, but something else is also happening.

Things have to get a touch anecdotal here, still, try running an experiment in your head. In front of you is a neat cross-section of Korean life: 100 people, touching all demographics. And, in-line with those same societal trends, 95 are wearing masks, while 5 are not.

Can you picture what those 5 look like? What they sound like? I bet you can!

Chances are, they are either very old men, very old women, young children naïve to the virus, or young-ish men in their late teens/early twenties. (Also foreigners, but this is slightly cheating). What they definitely are not, are young-to-middle-age women.

A society which balances unachievable financial burdens on its men, against unhealthy beauty standards on its women, the Korean obsession with female appearance has always been problematic.

Even before the pandemic hit the peninsula, it was common enough for young women and girls to wear masks – blaming allergies or pollution or fine dust; anything for an excuse to hide away for a day or two, and get some temporary relief from all that pressure.

So no doubt the mask mandates originally came as a happy escape for such people. Still, this is no more of a solution to vanity and judgement, than heroin is to physical pain. And in the case of masks, they cannot even be said to ease that underlying agony.

Hiding away from a problem rarely brings positive results. When soldiers return from war with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), their therapists will re-expose them to loud noises, to sudden movements – forcing them to overcome their trauma, rather than avoiding it.

Australian data from the darkest months of the pandemic – when most people were trapped in their houses – showed a massive increase in online searches for Botox and other cosmetic treatments. Then when the lock-downs eased, plastic surgery clinics were flooded by women seeking procedures for problems that only began to bother them during those pandemic days, alone, and isolated.

Back here in Korea, young women (and plenty of men too, of course) must have – at first – enjoyed the mental holiday that covering their faces allowed them to have. Now, nearly three years later, that mask increasingly looks like an addiction – a comforting vice they can’t quite shake.

Perhaps some of this is just a type of social gravity, with people wearing the mask only to not stand out from the veiled crowd. But the reasons now matter less than the behaviour. However they might have got here, these people deserve our worry, our concern, and our help – as well as a government that reaches out to them through nation-wide, public service campaigns.

God knows what the long term effects of this might be, but it will have an effect of some kind. Something that will be paid, invariably, through the shared mental health decline of a generation, and primarily by one gender.

In the short term, tourism will languish, with foreign travellers not wanting to wear a mask (with all those attached memories) during their holidays. And perhaps – as tends to be the case – Korean society will be better motivated by these economic hiccups, than by questions of well-being and quality of life.

Until then Koreans will continue to be split between the tiny minority confident enough to show their faces, and the rest – inexplicably tentative, nervous to smile, nervous to frown, to speak, to express themselves, to be looked at in any way.

If you think that this is all wrong, that there still remains a good reason to continue wearing the mask outdoors, then the onus is on you. Explain your roadmap, your baseline for when it does end, for when they should be taken off.

If not now, then when? If not soon, then at what cost?

The Ukrainian War is a Story of Error Correction

There has been a lot made of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The theories, and their holders, kick and bubble, searching for brief moments in brief interviews to talk about NATO expansion, buffer countries, the return of Cold War politics, the declining health of leaders, memories of great empires and lost pride, ethno-nationalism, democracy vs. autocracy, that old earned right of self-determination, of freedom, and the hopes of an Open Society (there’s your roundabout premonition).

Yet what is strangely missed in all this loud analysis, is the central and most illustrative story of the whole Ukrainian War (the explanation for how it started, how it’s going, and how it will end): error correction and the scientific method.

In March 2017, Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, penned an article declaring the changes about to sweep the Russian military. Poorly suited to “war in modern conditions” the old Soviet structures, strategies, training and equipment, were to be torn-down, and replaced by an understanding that “victory is always achieved not only by material, but also by the spiritual resources of the people, by their unity and desire to oppose oppression with all their might.”

Now six months into the current conflict, it is worth asking just what happened to that vision; to that theory of modern warfare. What went so horribly wrong?

Science moves forward in uncomfortable and poorly understood ways. Ways which statements, like that of Gerasimov, miss almost entirely. The scientific method always begins with the discovery of a problem – for Gerasimov and the Russian military that problem was a lack of competitiveness. But tilted towards a certain kind of answer, it was the wrong problem to be focussing on, the wrong question altogether. Rather than asking how they were to catch-up, they should have been asking what had caused them to fall so far behind.

Russia is a country of revolutionary and military glory, of battle-storied nationalism, and monuments to fallen heroes. It is not a country that ever needed convincing that its armed forces were an important and valuable institution. Thick with machinery, advanced weapon systems (even if not widely distributed), and manpower, a simple absence of resources and investment does not explain the combat failures we are now seeing. The baseline here is not parity with America, but only a broad effectiveness and reliability.

After correctly diagnosing a problem, our scientist in the laboratory (if diligently following method and procedure) begins to look for a theory. Something that will explain the phenomena (cover the problem) and provide a solution. This is a deeply creative action (as are all the steps involved), but one that doesn’t amount to progress on its own. The trouble with theories is that they are everywhere: easy to dream-up, always just a lazy thought away, and both infinite in number and range. The difficult job happens at the sorting table, at the moment of selection, when it all comes down to choosing from that endless buffet of solutions.

And it is a difficulty now showing-up on the Ukrainian frontlines. Hundreds of billions of dollars of military investment over the past decade culminated in a clumsy circus act, in front of a global audience: violent, bludgeoning, but above all embarrassing. Seized documents from Russian prisoners show that the Kremlin expected to claim Kyiv, and control the Ukrainian government, twelve hours after the invasion; they thought supply lines would not be an issue; they predicted that the Ukrainians would not fight; they believed their own soldiers would follow orders; for combat lessons from Syria to be applicable; for morale to be high and for logistics to function; for tanks to be effective in residential areas; for air supremacy to erase resistance on the ground; for technical and numerical advantages to translate smoothly into a battlefield victory.

The single factor causing all these theories to miss connecting with reality? Error-correction!

In a world where our problems hide from us, and where theories can be read into any situation (feeding off our biases, our desired outcomes, and our ignorance) it is criticism – and only criticism – which makes all the difference. Living inside the world, inside the phenomena that we are trying to explain through the creation of theories, we are always likely to be wrong… in some way or another. Mistakes – big and small – are the natural state of things, and so just like a good scientist we should want to seek them out as quickly as possible, in order to correct them as quickly as possible.

It is here where progress is found, with the discovery of what might be wrong. The alternative is silence and agreement, which might feel a little more pleasant to some people, but which also means stagnation. You can either find errors, correct them, and watch them disappear (letting you move on to different errors); or you can avoid them, let them pile and build upon each other, and wait for them to eventually erupt as catastrophe and crisis.

Before the invasion, Russia was riddled with the symptoms of such error-avoidance. Every new military breakthrough was flashed across TV screens and hailed as game changers, then later walked down Moscow streets in grand parades. Ask who the audience is for these showcases and you will find the image of a country running from its problems.

If they are for the military itself, then this implies a fragile institution in need of a good morale boost and some self-assurance; if they are for the Russian public then implied is a population without confidence in its own defence forces; if they are for a global audience then we are seeing a competitive insecurity – a military that is posturing, and flexing, to show itself as a capable threat and deterrent, rather than just being a capable threat and deterrent.

Even Gerasimov’s announced overhaul for “war in modern conditions” opened a window to a culture of error-avoidance within the military. Effective error-correction means constant small alterations and ongoing, small changes, so that large-scale, revolutionary reform and upheaval is never necessary.

These symptoms have continued onto the battlefield: guns don’t fire, radios don’t work, soldiers aren’t properly briefed or prepared, the air force and navy aren’t properly integrated with combat forces on the ground, tanks are missing basic mechanical parts, new fighter jets are using commercial (American made) GPS units for navigation, frontline commanders are forced to communicate over insecure cell phones on locally bought SIM cards…

Less obvious signs of error-avoidance sickness are there too. The haphazard shelling of civilian populations has been largely reported on as Russian cruelty, Russian indifference to human life and human rights, or as a brutal war strategy designed to terrorise the Ukrainians into submission. It might be all these things, but it is also a sign of pressure! Run to an unacceptable standstill by terrain and Ukrainian defences, the random shelling of non-military targets is likely a way for frontline soldiers to show their commanders that things are still happening – they might not be moving, but they are still attacking.

There are also dead Generals… lots of them. Every time some lucky sniper looks down the barrel of his rifle and sees an elite member of Russia’s military hierarchy slumming-it in the trenches, he has a culture of error-avoidance to thank for his good fortune. Realising that battlefield losses are not being accurately reported, that slight victories are being exaggerated, that basic orders are not being followed, these Generals have taken the only quick solution they have: standing over the shoulders of their troops like impatient helicopter parents. These are problems that mildly effective error-correction mechanisms would have snuffed-out long before the heat, and real-world consequences, of live conflict.

Yet in this, lie the small seeds of a stuttering truth: from error-correction comes knowledge creation, which – just as it allows for better experiments in the laboratory – also makes for better killing machines on the battlefield. And, that Generals are rushing toward the frontlines is a sign that they are finally seeing long-hidden errors, and desperately trying to apply short-term fixes before things get any more out of control. It is less than ideal, and comes with its own set of costs (a shrinking pool of well-trained officers), but it is error-correction of a kind… and it might just work!

So much of the Russian action now is just this, a late and panicked attempt to learn from cumulative mistakes. Redeploying away from Kyiv and into the East, is one of those lessons learnt. As is the firing of high ranking FSB (the Federal Security Service of Russia) officers for supplying poor intelligence. Or the arrest of staff from the Ministry of Defence for the misappropriation of billions of dollars of war funds. But the reason that these reforms still seem so unimpressive on paper, has less to do with timing, or their bluntness, or even the limited creativity behind them. Rather it is because they are top-down, authoritarian solutions to top-down, authoritarian problems.

Like the history of anything noteworthy, the history of science belongs in the mud – with all the other difficult and irresponsible parts of the human enterprise. But every new scientific success is like a net trolling through that mud, catching truth, and dragging us a little higher, a little cleaner, and a little better off with each pass. The point is that we are all, unavoidably, deep inside an infinite space of bewilderment. And so it all falls to us to weave more – and better – nets; something, anything that might make a difference. Like it or not, we will have to come to our own rescue.

The good news is that we have plenty of help. In a free and Open Society, everyone has an equal role in this, if they want it. We can all discover errors in the world around us, we can all expose those errors to the light, and we can all propose creative solutions. The only thing that is needed is the acceptance of criticism, no matter its target, and no matter the source.

Authoritarian regimes behave differently. They claim to stand outside of the mud which their populations are mired in, and are therefore justified to make decisions on their behalf. Whereas the rest of us are sometimes right, and often wrong, they allege to be always correct (or almost always). So for these regimes criticism, and the discovery of error, is not only unwelcome, but also an existential threat to their hold on power. Recognising this hostility, citizens, government employees, soldiers, etc. simply stop reporting the errors they find. Everything that makes itself to the top of the administration is rose-tinted, over-quoted, and disconnected from reality. Distortions always cause problems. And if ignored they always build, and hit, as climactic emergencies of the type we are now seeing inside the Russian military.

Our Open Societies, with all those public disagreements, bickering, and endless criticism, might look from the outside (the inside too) as unnecessarily shambolic – but only to those people who don’t understand the scientific method, and the importance of discovering our mistakes as fast as possible. This misunderstanding is just another example of how badly astray things tend to go under authoritarian regimes. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that countries which are bad at error-correction, are also bad at noticing the presence – and success – of error-correction in their enemies. You would expect a country like Russia to underestimate how much Ukraine had changed in the eight years since their annexation of Crimea, as well as underestimating the resolve, the willingness, and the ability of the Western alliance.

Nobody is perfect in this game, and we have our own problems here. Error-correction is a system, and no individual country is inherently any better at it than any other. It all comes down to culture! And so it could come unstuck tomorrow if we start trying to silence opinion (or even begin to resent criticism) today.

But the outlook for Russia is much worse. Occupation is a hard business, and there are no doubt people at the top of Western intelligence agencies wishing – perhaps even to the point of manipulating battleground conditions and war strategies – that the fighting continues into a decade’s long bleed of Russian capacity and willpower. Let’s all hope, for the sake of the Ukrainian people, that it ends a lot sooner than that! What is certain though is that the side most likely to triumph, will also be the side who plays the most competitive game of proving themselves wrong; the side which can fall in love with the accumulation of harsh, unfiltered, critical feedback.

A standard for victory which applies to all battlefields, wherever they may be, to all laboratories, to all institutions, to all problems, and to all of life!

Ukraine: The Sudden and Slow Death of the United Nations

For some it was a grand statement. The sight of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres walking solemnly through the bombed-out suburbs of Kyiv: inspecting the rubble, listening to stories of massacre, and shaking his fist at accountability for the “evil” acts.

In the opening days of the conflict in Ukraine the United Nations produced a condemning motion of the General Assembly. They then removed Russia from the Human Rights Council. Just how, and why, Russia managed to be elected (in 2020) to such a body, with such a name – and what this did to embolden the Russian regime – is a story for another day, but the more alarming question is where this leaves the United Nations now.

It is a failure with a slow burn!

Twenty years earlier, then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, was in a difficult and despondent mood. And during his Millennium Report to the General Assembly, he emptied his struggling voice onto the international stage: “If the conscience of humanity… cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and justice.”

He was glancing back on recent horrors, and forward to the downfall of his institution. The 1990’s were supposed to be the comfortable, retirement years of the United Nations – with the children moved-out, the house paid-off, and plenty of time on their hands to soak-in the sun and enjoy a lengthy vacation or two. A time where, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War conflicts, a peace dividend appeared close at hand: a long overdue and hard earned period of fortune and safety.

Instead the world saw a sudden rise in civil war, mass atrocities, and humanitarian crises. With that word humanitarian taking on extra weight, as civilian populations not only bore the brunt of this shifting violence, but – more so than ever before – actually became the primary targets of it in places like Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, Timor, Bosnia, Cambodia, Burundi, the Congo, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, China, Algeria, Angola, North Korea, Syria, Georgia, Yemen, Kurdistan, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, Lebanon, Egypt, Eretria, Mali, Chechnya, Kuwait, Bahrain, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Kenya…….

All that human suffering exposed something about the United Nations, something that the Cold War years had papered over. And with it Annan saw only two possible futures for the institution he was in charge of, if it stayed unreformed: either 1. Mass atrocities would continue to happen while the world simply watched-on, infirm and weak, or 2. Countries would simply stop seeking United Nations approval before intervening in such conflicts.

Though that second option might appear unobjectionable to some ears, it is still frightening enough. For starters it is a violation of one aspect of international law in the hopes of remedying another. But most significantly, it removes the possibility of oversight and universality; opening the space for countries – as Russia has recently just done – to manufacture crises in order to legitimize invasions.

So in some ways, we are already there – living in Annan’s nightmare.

But international hope rarely dies so fast nor so clean. The reforms – the structural changes – that Annan had in mind were ambiguous, but his target was not. The United Nations was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War with an impossible task: to become the arbiter and guarantor of global peace and security.

This was clearly an attractive prospect for small, less secure nations; but not so much for the ‘Great Powers’ for whom it was only a constraint. With the international order looking like an ungoverned frontier town in a lawless corner of the Wild West, these few countries (strong enough to defend themselves and conquer others) were already in an enviable position. So they would need more convincing. The answer to this, and the hook that reeled-in those ‘Great Powers’, was the United Nations Security Council.

The United States, Great Britain, France, Russia (then the USSR) and China (then Taiwan) were gifted permanent seats on the Security Council and a unique authority to veto any resolution upon a single vote. With this, they were allowed to retain all the unequal power and influence that they already held – a tower from which they could always protect their own national self-interest; remaining ‘Great Powers’ forever!

The United Nations had compromised its own functionality in order to get everyone inside the room, and signed-up. The hope was that once everyone was a member, and sitting around the table from each other, all those differences would fade over time; that soon enough reformed minds would reform the institution, or at least behave in a way that would make any such reform unnecessary. Then the Cold War ended, and everyone was positively giddy with expectation – lining-up to cash-in those peace dividends.

That was well over thirty years ago. Minds did reform, somewhat. But the institution never followed – the dividends, and the golden years of retirement, never arrived.

Whenever some distant horror catches our attention and outrage, and then instead of intervening (helping in some way to stop the violence) we sit back and watch it happen, there is always a question of ‘political will’ which needs answering. As the name suggests the United Nations is a collection of domestic governments, and for any given intervention those governments will need to find the troops, the equipment, and the funding.

Which steps us back again to the horrors of the 1990’s. In Rwanda, as the Hutu majority were hacking the Tutsi minority to death at the rate of ten thousand a day, the Security Council passed an authorizing resolution for a peace keeping force. Commander of the mission, Canadian Major-General Romeo Dallaire, assessed the situation and reported that he could halt the genocide with as little as 5000 properly equipped troops. In response, the Security Council met again and passed a second resolution… reducing troop numbers from 2558 to 270. The genocide rolled on, day after day, ten thousand dead after ten thousand dead…

For every failure or success of political will, there remains this lingering bottleneck to action. The Security Council is the final judge of international force – the only means by which an intervention can be authorized and considered legal. All the will and commitment of all the nations on earth doesn’t matter a damn if just one of five countries is not quite convinced.

If after his speech to the Millennium Report of the General Assembly, Kofi Annan had been pressed to jot-down what his ideal reforms would actually look like, there is a good chance they would have resembled The Doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

First cooked-up in 2001 as a significant turning of international norms, R2P made the sovereignty of states conditional upon the protection of civilian populations within those states. It required the international community to help domestic governments achieve this, and importantly it obligated intervention wherever this standard was not being met (ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave or systemic war crimes).

A streamlining of institutional gridlock, R2P hit the global scene to significant fanfare and hope. It was quickly being referenced in presidential statements, in United Nations declarations, and as the justification for noteworthy interventions such as that in Libya. Then-British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, announced confidently that “if this new responsibility had been in place a decade ago, thousands in Srebrenica and Rwanda would have been saved”, while the lead author of The Doctrine, Gareth Evans, touched upon the bubbling of expectation within the humanitarian movement:

“Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to say ‘never again’ in the future without having to periodically look back, as has so often been the case in the past, asking ourselves, with a mixture of anger, incomprehension and shame, how did it happen again.”

It was at the 2005 United Nations World Summit where R2P was formally adopted into international law. And a consensus was needed… a consensus of the Permanent Five Members. As the quiet diplomacy rumbled-on behind the summit curtains, R2P was stripped-back in language and content, and then stripped-back again.

Of all the unpleasant changes to the new Doctrine, it was the Security Council reforms that did all the damage. In its original proposal, R2P came with a ‘code of conduct’ for the Permanent Five Members, limiting their ability to veto resolutions which dealt with serious humanitarian disasters. There was also a range of alternative pathways to intervention which bypassed Security Council authorization altogether. These were all removed! In their place a reassertion of absolute discretion for the Security Council, over all interventions. And with that, R2P died in embryo!

With nothing to replace R2P in the two decades since, the invasion of Ukraine cannot be seen as some aberration of international law, but rather as a deliberate and explicit aspect of it. Russia checked the soft winds of moral outrage and the hard costs of sanctions, then pushed on to conquest and war crimes knowing that nothing else would come its way. Vladimir Putin badly misjudged Ukrainian resistance, as well as the strength of his own army, but he was sure of one thing: the United Nations would do nothing!

What the United Nations actually did, was complain and gesture. Because that is all it had in its arsenal! The issue was naturally whipped into a resolution and brought before the Security Council. And one after the other, member-states either abstained or voted in favour, until Russia of course, who vetoed the legislation and put an end to the whole pantomime.

Just like that, the only body of the United Nations that had the power to change things was silenced by the same lawless government they were hoping to stop.

International law is a tricky thing. It is a body of legislation without a police force to back it up. To get things done in this environment, and to maintain the rule of law, it is left to the discretion of militias; coalitions of countries holding others to account. And it is questionable as to whether any such coalition would have found the courage to do more for Ukraine’s defence than is already being done now, even if Russia hadn’t blocked their efforts.

But there was less sadness in the air, and much more impotence, when Secretary-General António Guterres walked out of that failed vote stressing “we must never give up”, and then quickly pivoting his language from Russian troop withdrawals to that of humanitarian corridors and access for aid organizations.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, held a firm line when she said: “You can veto this resolution, but you cannot veto our voices; You cannot veto the truth; You cannot veto our principles; You cannot veto the Ukrainian people; cannot veto the UN Charter…and you will not veto accountability.” It’s a nice sentiment, but Putin had the only veto he needed: a veto on military intervention.

Since then, we have had credible evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, the sight of village-wide massacres in places like Bucha, and ever-twisting justifications from the Kremlin for the invasion. All the while, the Security Council has remained frozen by a single belligerent member. It is the spectacle of prosecutors and police wanting desperately to arrest and bring a criminal to justice, but only if they first get the criminal’s permission to do so.

So with the Russian army slowly sharking its way across Ukraine, what can be done?

Well that R2P ‘code of conduct’ would have been a reasonable start. Not only did it limit the reach of the veto powers to less serious humanitarian situations, but also removed the veto power for any resolution which otherwise would have majority approval within the Security Council. The original R2P report also recommended an expanded role for the General Assembly, to review and umpire Security Council vetoes.

Before R2P – in fact tracing all the way back to the League of Nations – there has been a continuing push for a United Nations constitution, in the hope that such a document would bring a better shared-understanding, as well as more clearly codifying the rules, tools and structures of international cooperation.

Then Thomas Franck proposed the ‘Jurying Process’ under the assumption that grand institutional reforms (such as those just mentioned) would be just too difficult to achieve. Instead, he suggested working around the existing architecture by simply adding an extra layer of force and persuasion. Similar to an American grand jury, this new organ would offer a means around the strict constraints of the United Nations’ governing bodies, and become a separate way to produce moral and legal judgements. It would, therefore, also hold the Security Council to account by sitting in judgement upon its application and interpretation of international law.

Next Thomas Pogge proposed the International Court to run on similar lines. Rather than being made up of delegations from member states, this court would be comprised of a panel of legal experts (judges) with a proven history in international law and the United Nations. Just like with the ‘Jurying Process’, this would be relatively cheap to set-up, would supplement the existing architecture and so not require any large scale reform, and yet would be able to move quickly to make judgements on questions of international law (independent of state influence). If operational today, it would have ruled Russia’s invasion illegal in real time, and then also ruled any remedying intervention legal. Just like that, the application of international law would be divorced from politics.

Other reforms have been the long-proposed United Nations Standing Army, an extension of United Nations membership, expanding the number of vetoes needed to block resolutions, an empowerment of the General Assembly and a democratization of the whole organization, the abolishment of the veto altogether, introducing a weighted voting system, tying veto powers to budget contributions, strict limitations on the power of the veto, creating veto protected categories for resolutions, streamlining broader operational effectiveness of the Security Council,…

Of course no proposal, no matter how mild or limited in its reach, has ever managed to achieve even the most minimal levels of traction within the organization.

And the short term behaviour of Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, says a lot. He turned up at the United Nations, put his case to the world, pleaded for more assistance, and then as the watching members were running for TV cameras to say proudly “today, we are all Ukrainians”, as Luxembourg’s representative did, Zelenskyy had already moved-on to the important business; to the only thing that might save his nation.

Like a guest-host on an established TV show, he began appearing in different houses of different parliaments, on different prime time channels, in different languages, reaching-out directly to any country that would have him, and give him five minutes of attention and compassion. Collective action requires a consensus and an overcoming of the Security Council veto. Individual action requires only the individual country in question.

This is how Ukraine has been defending itself to date: with a few weapons from country A, a few planes from country B, armoured vehicles from C, equipment from D, drones from E, food and supplies from F,… And make no mistake about it, this is Kofi Annan’s nightmare scenario, repeating itself.

As the genocide in Rwanda spiralled towards nearly a million deaths in less than three months of violence, and as the peace keeping force was boarding planes instead of protecting civilians, there was another farce unfolding within the walls of the United Nations: The Genocide Convention was already in effect, and carried with it hard obligations upon member states.

Conscious of this, the language danced and skipped around the fringes of things, with near-comical avoidance of the term genocide so as to not trigger any legal responsibilities upon member states. Instead the ‘great’ deliberative body of international peace and security spoke only of isolated “acts of violence” and “sporadic violence” as the fastest moving genocide in history killed seventy percent of the Tutsi population, saw as many as half a million women raped, displaced the majority of the Rwandan population, sparked regional wars with 150,000 people soon being killed in neighbouring Burundi, and rolling violence across the Congo which would kill 3.8 million people in the next decade.

Then, as now, the United Nations watched and did nothing! Instead the genocide in Rwanda ended in July 1994, not because members states felt the obligations of international law, not because international outrage grew too loud to ignore, and certainly not because the United Nations lived-up to its own self-proclaimed standards. But only when a Ugandan-backed Tutsi force of rebel troops, under the leadership of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, fought their way into the Capital Kigali, and removed the Hutu government by force.

Bypassing Security Council authorisation, ad hoc interventions of this kind are violations of international law. Yet due to the design of the Security Council and its tendency towards paralysis, they are also the closest thing to the embodiment of international law, and international obligations, that we are ever likely to see.

With the United Nations resisting the kinds of reform that might save the organisation from itself, Kofi Annan’s question should bite back at us all: “If the conscience of humanity… cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and justice”.

If you still doubt that the United Nations is on its death bed, and still believe that it remains the best conduit for global justice, then imagine yourself desperate and in the shoes of a Ukrainian citizen today. It has been six months since your government took its pleas to the United Nations, and your home is now destroyed, your family dead. The Russian army are still undeterred and edging towards you. Where, if anywhere, are you now looking for “peace and justice”; where are you now looking for “the conscience of humanity”?

Karl Popper’s Epistemological Swamp

Groggy and bruised, you wake up somewhere in the depths of a dark swamp. You have no memory, no sense of who you are or how you got there, and no indication or clues for how to get out. To make matters worse, as you are pulling yourself together you discover that you are also, now, blind.

Through the darkness and the fear, you wait, scared to move and hoping for some elegant form of rescue. And as you wait, things begin to get worse. The horrible smell catches your nose, mud slides further and further up your shins, leeches start to burrow into your skin, the waist deep water feels sharp and cold, and you begin to sense the close movement of large predators.

Everything that you touch is painful and life threatening. Standing up as tall as you can, you are sure of only one thing: you want to improve your situation, you want to get out. And so you must do something, no matter what it is. To stay where you are is to suffer and soon die.

Not knowing where to go is one thing, but you also don’t know where you are, where it is that you are starting from. There are no landmarks, no map, no compass bearing, no possible foundation that could work as a guide or a starting point. You could be anywhere in this swamp – close to an edge, in the absolute middle, or somewhere in-between.

Scared of what you don’t know, you take a tentative step forward, and stop. You try to feel around for changes in the consistency of the mud, the objects under foot, the temperature of the water, the amount of unsettling animal activity – anything by which you might judge whether that step was an improvement or a mistake; anything to judge whether you are going in the right direction.

You take another step. And another.

You never know whether you are taking the correct path to freedom, but you always know when you aren’t (you tread on something sharp, the mud feels thicker, something blocks your way, an animal bites you…).

In such moments your first instinct is to turn around and retrace your steps. But soon you learn to apply a little more nuance. Where you started from was also uncomfortable, also unsafe, so going back doesn’t get you any closer to escaping from, nor surviving, this wetland. Increasingly you respond to obstacles and dangers by changing direction altogether and plotting new courses.

It is painstaking, frustrating and slow. But with each new mistake and misstep you learn a little more about your environment. A map of where you have been begins to build in your mind, but more importantly you begin to develop a feel for your new home, new ways to judge the things you encounter, new ways to understand the swamp and its challenges.

Every time you solve a problem you seem to discover a new one. But with this bank of knowledge behind you, each new problem also feels a little better than the last: how you treated your last illness helps you treat the next one, insights from difficult landscapes helps you to traverse future terrain, and encounters with old predators helps you to understand and avoid new ones.

Soon you are thriving, crisscrossing your way through the swamp with evermore speed and evermore comfort. With so many mistakes behind you and so many problems solved, everything you are now doing feels like progress, like you are finally going in the right direction.

The ground under your feet is more solid, the mud less and less thick, the mosquitoes less aggressive, and large animals see you more and more as a threat and not as a food source. You are sure of it, you are winning. You are walking your way up an incline and out of the marsh once and for all, saying to yourself in dumb amazement, “of course this is the way, it is obvious. How could I have ever thought otherwise?”

Then with your next step the ground disappears under your feet, and you plunge below the water. That steady incline that you thought was the way out, was in fact just a sandbar in an otherwise deeper and more inhospitable part of the swamp. And you have just gone over its edge.

Up to your neck, cold, struggling to breathe, and swimming just to stay above the sludge, you desperately start feeling around in the darkness for something, anything that might be an improvement. Again, as before, and as always, to stay where you are is to suffer and soon die…

But you are lucky! You have made another mistake! And so despite how bad things might feel right now, you are better off than you were before you made it. Because you now also know more than you did before.

“Frat-boy brother shit” – Review of Min Jin Lee’s ‘Pachinko’

It is loud, confusing, and everywhere. Ball bearings rattle and ricochet across bumpers, barriers and neon lights; bells, music, alarms and sirens explode with significance; the lever pressure-fires, the metal pellets launch into the maze, everything moves and everything is alive in noisy and unpredictable ways.

Each pull of the lever is a different bet and each ball a monetary value. Manage to run one across certain hoops, lights or buttons and you win bonus options; steer one into the impossibly hard to reach central pocket and you win a jackpot: more ball bearings. You can then exchange those for carnival prizes, or in semi-official back-alley trades for cash (Japan has peculiar and yet easily circumvented gambling laws).

What pinball must look like during a messy acid trip, the vertical games are forced into long lines, with sad and eager addicts pulling the levers to a well-practiced rhythm. A technicolour Las Vegas, the noise smashes into itself setting off spikes of anxiety, misery and migraines. These parlours are incubators of mental illness.

Those not scared away are of a certain kind. Dressed in grease, tattoos and violence, they are always drinking, always smoking, and when within reach they are groping some poor hostess (paid just enough to keep a smile and not complain). It is a world of low class gangsters and lower class labourers. Pachinko is a Korean thing... or it was!

In the most charitable light, Min Jin Lee is trying to set-off an explosion within the Korean literary scene. You don’t, or you cannot, write a book like this without understanding what people will say about it – the tones, the words, and the fawning audience that will lap it up. It is all in the details…

It begins in Yeondo, an island just outside of Busan, South Korea. Life is painful, limited and plenty humiliating. There is a shortage of marriageable men, and somehow also a shortage of marriageable women; everyone struggles to eat each night, and the slightest “fever” or “diarrhoea” is a death sentence. Cough-up some blood in the middle of the night (tuberculosis), and your family will start digging the grave right away.

Every free moment is a chance for sex and love and heartbreak and shame. And so Pachinko starts with a teenage pregnancy, a dead father, and a smooth talking, smooth dressing, member of the Yakuza.

Getting fatter by the day, sixteen year old Sunja has a problem that 1930’s Korea will not understand. Her baby’s thirty year old father, Hansu, the man she expected to become her husband, already has a wife and three children across the ocean. But the real problem is one of labels and ownership. This is not Korea anymore, it is part of the expanding Japanese empire, and tragically Hansu’s “marriage is already registered in Japan”.

In a huff, and with a threat to “kill myself”, Sunja sums it up like this: “If he did not marry her, she was a common slut who would be disgraced forever”. From here the novel trundles forward across four generations of pain, loss and a constant war beat of forgetful petulance.

The names hit with a hard missionary tone – sounding plausibly Korean while phonetically Christian: Isak, Samoel, Yoseb, Mozasu, Noa, Solomon… It is Isak that saves the day and marries the “common slut”, allowing the unborn child to take his name, those prying eyes to believe that he is the father, and for himself to play the role of saviour like the “Prophet Hosea” who too had married a “harlot”.

The newlyweds are then on a slow boat to Osaka where Isak’s brother and sister in-law are waiting with slightly better jobs and prospects. But not before the young, pregnant Sunja is imparted with two gems of wisdom. The pastor that reluctantly performs the hasty vows can’t swallow his judgement far enough down to not threaten her with the wrath of god: “You must swear that you’ll be faithful to this man”. Then her mother waving goodbye from the port: “Take good care of your husband. Otherwise, another woman will.”

Imperial Japan is not too keen on its new subjects, and so Isak, Sunja and the newly born Noa arrive as unwelcome and untrusted immigrants, not as fellow citizens of Hirohito’s Asia. Life is racist, fearful and small – and so much better than it was back in Busan. Five people sleeping on the floor of a delicate shack in an ethnic ghetto, at least here there is possibility. Here, maybe, all that struggle and suffering might actually achieve something beyond mere survival.

Warned by his brother, “don’t get mixed up in the politics”, Isak quickly gets mixed up and imprisoned. Then the war turns, the bombs begin to fall closer to home, and Japan is on its knees. And yet with each new difficulty and threat comes a swift, born-again moment of rapture, relief and unnatural good luck. Sometimes, clearly, it is useful to have a high ranking member of the Yakuza in the family.

Doting father, yearning lover, always underappreciated and resented for his help, it is hard to see what keeps Hansu peering-in from the shadows. A biological son is one thing, but Noa believes that another man is his dad, and has been consciously raised with a religious disgust toward the type of criminality, dishonour and strength that Hansu lives with each day. Somehow the reader is forced to believe it has much more to do with Sunja, who we are told at every turn is “stocky”, “round”, “plain”, “unremarkable in her manner”, “not ugly, but not attractive”, with a “flat face” and “thin eyes”.

Grandmothers arrive, uncles survive, distant relatives are murdered off-screen, wives are killed in traffic, and sons decide that suicide has its charms. Linking it all together is the quick-burn of childish emotion, righteous, angry, and selfish; everyone except for the actual villain that is, Hansu, who takes everything in his stride, returns smiling and gracious, and understands when not to force himself into peoples’ lives.

North and South Korea are divided and occupied by Americans and Russians, the two halves then go to war, Japan slowly rebuilds and Korea follows in pace, the northern peninsula becomes a sinkhole of information and of people returning to their homeland. Slowly, and then not so slowly, America descends as a cloud across the Southern Republic and the Japanese isles, hoovering up talent, time and culture.

As if Min Jin Lee is checking items off a shopping list, it is all there – every twist in history, every national emotion, humiliation and flash of pride. And none of it hits the way that it should!

Chains of people are introduced, family trees extend and then break with fast indifference, characters are announced in deliberate tones and then forgotten about, sentences and sentiments repeat over and over (“a woman’s lot is to suffer”, “For a Korean man, the choices were always shit”), while meaning arrives on the page clumsy and contrived through adolescent prose: “If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ”, “she crammed her mind the way she might have overfilled a pig intestine with blood sausage stuffing”.

The words are shovelled onto the page with a thirsty impatience. Lee is trying very hard to build something grand here – she is trying to write the kind of novel that makes people call it an ‘epic’ or perhaps even ‘The Great Korean Novel’. Everything of imaginable importance gets a mention. With each date, name drop, and broken slab of history, the reader is increasingly shaken-awake to the writing process.

Wet and heavy with the author’s ambition, Pachinko is soon so thoroughly pock-marked that it is even possible to see the stuttering pace of when, and how, Lee put pen to paper – when the words flowed and the dialogue came naturally, and when she struggled, stepped away, and came back a week, or month, later with a different voice and an incomplete memory.

Lee’s literary influences are no better disguised here. All the way down to the names of her characters, Pachinko rings like someone trying a little too hard to replicate the work and style of Hwang Sok-yong. Even the overborne concept that Lee forces her story to embrace is uncomfortably close in form to Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations.

But there is something strikingly original here: the author’s own split identity and difficult nationalism. America gets more play than makes creative sense, and near-swallows up the Korean and Japanese elements towards the end. And it is hard not to read the fraught emotions, restrictions, and limitations of birth, as belonging to Lee more so than her characters.

Japanese born, Japanese educated, and knowing only Japanese culture, our suffering heroes are always still Korean, unable to travel domestically, own a passport, rent an apartment without sponsorship, or work without special visas. But more than this, it is in the mind that things become truly difficult, self-isolating, self-imprisoning: “One bad Korean ruins it for thousands of others”, “one industrious Korean can inspire ten thousand to reject their lazy nature”.

It is a lived passion that Lee writes instinctively. But she’s not trying to produce an entertaining story here. Everything, at all times, angles for something more significant. So instead of letting the characters tell their stories and explain their nationalism, the reader is instead beaten-down with a near-full length and unnecessary quote from Benedict Anderson and his now clichéd thoughts on ‘Imagined Communities’.

Soon, through all the seriousness, we are being asked to picture flamboyant gay orgies in the public parks of conservative Japan (“there were too many lovers to count”...“naked bodies humped beneath large trees”), stereotypical Westerners lamenting the “Frat-boy brother shit” of each other, and a compulsive focus on the way female skin ages through hard work: “Her skin deeply grooved from the years of sun”.

Bashing away in the background like an out of control drum – constant sources of shame and wealth – are those noisy pachinko machines and those seedy parlours. They appear and reappear throughout the eight decades of this novel, finding their place and meaning in the only manner that Min Jin Lee feels comfortable with – with her favourite literary device: repetition, repetition, repetition…

The Needs of Strangers and the Will to Act – Peter Singer, John Rawls, Thomas Pogge

It’s late in the evening, and you are outside enjoying an early autumn walk. Suddenly you hear a sharp scream from the small lake beside you. In the shallow, waist-high water of Singer Pond you see a young child slowly drowning. You can easily wade-in to rescue the boy, but the water is thick with a horrible dark mud. Your new shoes will be ruined – there is no time to undo the laces and take them off. And so you have a choice to make: save the drowning child, or pretend that you don’t see him, keep walking, and save a little money...

Feeling slightly guilty for not saving the young boy, the next evening you decide to take another walk to clear your head. Your shoes fit so well, and are so comfortable that you quickly forget what was sacrificed for them yesterday. To avoid Singer Pond, and perhaps a return of conscience, you take a different route this time. Soon you are walking beside another small lake, Rawls Pond. Then you hear it again, another scream, and you see another person drowning in the water. Their head and flailing arms barely visible through a low fog, you can’t tell if it is a boy or girl, child or adult. There is nothing to go on. Like yesterday it might be a stranger, but it might just as easily be your son, your daughter, your wife, mother, father, brother, or sister. You won’t know until you have actually saved them. Either way, it is going to cost you those shoes...

Having let two people die in the past two days, you decide the next evening to skip your stroll and instead take a calming nap. After an hour or so, you are startled awake from an eventful sleepwalk. You are kneeling down beside yet another small lake, Pogge Pond, this time with no shoes in sight. Elbow deep in the water, you realise that you are holding something under the surface. As you look closer you begin to make out the wet form of another young child, kicking, scratching and clawing to escape your grip on the back of his head. You can either let go and allow him to breathe, or continue with what you have started…

You will have to think about it…

The 2020 Mind

Soft, oblivious and selfish is how I remember him. Each week I would bump into him in the same bar, within the same group of friends. No one particularly disliked him – he was all too hopeless, too clueless, for such strong emotions. Unable to properly take an interest in other people or their lives, he pushed conversations toward himself, and when that failed he searched for people that could be separated from the crowd, people whose kindness made them easy prey. Soon he would have them bottled up in some dark corner, nodding dumbly, while he talked about himself and his thoughts into a social paralysis.

Everything about him seemed, at first, forgivable, even his Dutch habit of always having a drink in his hand while never actually buying one with his own money. He made a skill of casually following people to the bar when they were about to order. Standing there with a meek smile, he would talk-and-talk-and-talk. Invariably the person with their wallet out would feel obliged to make a half-hearted, heavily guilted, offer. He never refused and never returned the kindness.

In hindsight now, he had an obvious tick about him. Something that was quick to surface and which indicated deeper, more submerged, character flaws. After a brief hello, and whether you were meeting for the first time or for the hundredth, he would begin with the same piece of housekeeping (with only the numbers changing): ‘I have been in this city for 231 days, I have 134 days before I leave’.

It seemed innocuous at first, but hearing it again-and-again without prompting, as a kind of public service announcement, had an odd, and growing, psychological effect on those of us around him. We were talking with someone who was running a constant stock keep of his time with us. Before long people began to feel responsible for the experience that he was having, as he counted down each day and moment instead of just living each one, good or bad; parceling everything, all joy and desolation, all beauty and terror, into times and dates.

He once told me that he “loved” poetry. When I pressed a little, he seemed shocked by my questions, telling me without embarrassment that he really didn’t like reading other peoples’ writing. It was only his poetry that he loved. And though he wouldn’t say this second part out loud, all that talk about days and numbers had nothing to do with the time we were spending together. A charitable interpretation would have been a kind of lament, a sadness at the few days we had left in each other's company. But this nonsense started from the first day he arrived – ‘I have been in this city for 1 day, I have 364 days before I leave’ – and from his first conversation with strangers.

Like a doddering grandfather telling a story, he was not speaking for an audience, but regardless of one. Everything was mind to mouth, without any thought that other people may not be fascinated by him, may not be immediately enraptured by the inner workings of his mind. A mind always aware, and always keen to remind anyone listening, that they were on his time, taking up his precious minutes. When it wasn’t them, it was his job or this city. Everything, always, an imposition.

Eventually his days did, finally, run out and he left – still counting and bundling his life into numbers; still insufferable, but elsewhere, with a new audience. And I have often thought about him since. Broken-down from its original context into a metaphor these days, when we call someone ‘narcissistic’ we are often confusing the term with something closer to ‘conceited’ or ‘vain’; someone who thinks that they are great and that everyone else should think so too.

The Narcissus comparison catches a different tone – from the original Greek, a laconic hunter who fell so deeply in love with his own beauty that he spent all his days admiring his reflection and hearing only his own voice repeated back to him through Echo, a besotted and enabling nymph. Narcissus wasn’t interested in what other people thought of him, because he didn’t think about them, at all.

It is rare to find someone so caught up in themselves that this label applies – or at least I thought so!

Then a string of unpleasant and unsettling things happened. A new virus became a fast moving global pandemic, our best-dreamt-up policies of mitigation often had people wishing instead for the illness, the leader of the free world failed again to lead while flirting out loud with authoritarianism, smelling blood in the water actual authoritarian countries seemed emboldened, and our streets became increasingly marked by protest and counter-protest.

The list goes on in different ways for different people. But it’s in the language of it all that things have become alarming. And it didn’t take long to happen. Unavoidable and everywhere, it was in the mouths of friends, strangers, news presenters… begin any sort of conversation, in any sort of representative circle of people, and quickly someone will start talking like this: “2020 has been a tough year”, “2020 has been hard”, “what a terrible year”, “I can’t wait for 2020 to be over and done with”…

There is an unmissable shallowness in this type of language. It comes from luxury. From gifts, birthday parties, Christmas mornings, and unending comfort. It is the innocence of childhood in the mouths of adults. An expectation that each year will be an improvement on the last, and a deep, learnt, conviction that other people are responsible for your happiness, that they should provide for you, that everyone else has responsibilities… and that you have none.

It is odd to think this way past a certain age, and uncomfortable to see it mass produced. When your overweight Auntie does this on New Year’s Day (packages-up her life into a number), you cringe because you instantly recognize what she is doing. From the way that she has framed it, you know that she isn’t a serious person. If she really wanted to start a diet and an exercise program she would have done so the day before, or the day before that.

Yet somehow, in this moment, that fat Auntie of yours has taken over the conversation, everyone nodding along, smiling, agreeing, and even thinking her to be somewhat profound, as she laments that her New Year’s resolution has been stolen from her. When someone experiences new types of loss, suffering and anxiety, and then speaks about it in terms of how it affects their calendar, it quickly takes on the ring of a tantrum. A righteous anger that the world hasn’t been suitably padded, or child-proofed, for their requirements.   

This all comes from a mind that knows intellectually that bad things happen, but never really expects any of those things to come its way. A mind that has never properly considered that the world is difficult at times, and always unpredictable. A mind that thought pain belonged only to other people. A mind that is now pouting out loud, and looking desperately for a parent to complain to – someone to blame for ruined plans and lost time. A mind that is now furious that something has dared to step into its life; and that we should all be sorry and sympathetic for the intrusion… without reciprocation.

It’s true that the universe doesn’t like us, but it doesn’t have a grudge against us either. It certainly doesn’t owe us anything. If we want to improve things, then we will have to work at it, all of us. As we did in the past, we might achieve just enough salutary progress that life again feels comfortable and safe… until the next unforeseen problem hits, and we have to start over. The work of saving civilization is a project of constant maintenance – not for a few months, or even a year, but for as long as we want to survive. This has, and always will be, the case.

Either way, we are currently having an unsubtle encounter with a Greek tragedy.

Angry at Narcissus’ behaviour, the goddess of revenge and retribution, Nemesis, dragged him out into the forest, and dropped him before a small pond. He looked down into the water and saw his own reflection once again. Through the clarity of this new mirror, Narcissus finally realized what he had been doing. There was no doubt that he was in love, but that love could also never grow, never change, never materialize in any way. He died in despair.

2021 might be better… it might be worse! There might be no vaccine!

“Nonorientable” Nonsense – Review of Kim Sang-yil’s ‘Hanism: Korean Concept of Ultimacy’ and ‘Hanism as Korean Mind’

By unlucky chance I was living in Seoul when that fat old man started dancing. Soon anyone still young enough to enjoy such a thing was in on it. Street corners, train stations and shopping centres fast became improvised dance studios – drop a head of broccoli in your shopping cart and groove your way down the aisle toward the next thing on your list. Everybody was trying it and no one seemed much ashamed… nor proud. Gangnam Style was just another catchy song, with low-hanging choreography; and Psy just another middle-of-the-road singer.

Then suddenly the energy began to shift. Old men would want to talk about it between lazy sets at the gym, sensible business women would angle and force it into conversations at cafes, and politicians fell over themselves for a microphone and for ways to show that they cared all along, as if each night – when the tie came off and the kids were finished with their homework – your average parliamentarian would line up his family and hop around the living room to a highly sexualised song about an older man chasing younger girls.

What changed? What made those once unimpressed Koreans fall in love? The realisation that other people were also in love. Gangnam Style was rushing up the American music charts, then the British, the Australian…

Looking outside of themselves for themselves is something that Koreans have become oddly comfortable with (Koreans today still derive much of their national identity from anti-Japanese sentiment, dating back to the days of colonialization). Whether it is music or film or literature or food or dance or fashion, the barometer for Korean domestic success – the thing that pushes someone or something to stardom – is always the adoration of foreign audiences; a unique, and unembarrassed, revelry in the exportation of culture.

So what should we make of the fact that there is something as “deeply rooted in the Korean mind as is Yahweh for the Jewish mind”, something that everyone talks about, that all manner of behaviour and attitude and temperament is explained away by, a reference that is always easy to find, always close to hand, so automatic that it is never questioned and always applicable, and yet search as you may there is a strange absence of English language books on the subject.

How can something be so important, such a “unique” and defining characteristic of Korean life and identity, and yet there be no one writing about it – at least not in the hopes of finding a new, foreign audience? Well Kim Sang-yil has tried... and what a disaster it is! But he has made the effort, so perhaps we ought to as well.

He makes a bold start: everything that has ever been said about Han previously, by anyone, no matter how unconnected, dissimilar or even contradictory, is all true!

At the same time, Han is an emotion, an illness, a personality trait; something inherited, something genetic, spiritual, learnt, felt; something physical, metaphysical, psychological, subconscious; it is a resentment, a sadness, a grief, a pain, an unease, a nausea; historical, sociological, cultural, individual; isolated, transferable, fluid, permanent…

Yes, take a breath, this is going to be exhausting!

Once his intentions are clear enough, Kim quickly transitions to a history lesson, and things get messy right away. He wants us to believe that Koreans – as a contiguous people – were trundling around the Palaeolithic peninsula 30,690 years ago, forging tools and sculpting pottery. The precision of that date ought to be concerning enough, but Kim isn’t really trying to be accurate here, rather he is hoping that you don’t notice, nor understand, the game he is playing.

This “original Korean ethnic group” are what we now call the “Dong-i”, or as Kim translates it: “Eastern people”. This isn’t correct! Dong-i was a Chinese term that was used to refer to non-Chinese people, and so as you might expect – considering the era – it translates not to “Eastern people” but to “Eastern barbarian”.

This may not seem significant, but small errors of scholarship begin to add up here. Without any supporting evidence Kim then tells us despite the obvious mixing of cultures and ethnicities at play (Dong-i referred to a much larger ethnic and geographical group beyond the Korean peninsula, including Manchuria and the Japanese isles), neither the Chinese nor the surrounding populations had any “effect on the formation of ethnic culture there.”

The swamp that Kim dives into here has such a pained methodology to it, and such a history of complete failure, that it is more often than not referred to today in the same tones that are otherwise saved for the moon landing, flat Earth, or Bigfoot conspiracy theorists. The ‘scholarship’ that Kim is buttressing his argument on here – of a Korean Dong-i lineage – is more easily recognisable in academic circles as the ‘Dong-i conflation’ or the ‘Dong-i fallacy’.

He gets it all horribly wrong, but why is Kim talking about history at all?

It begins to make sense when he starts dropping in unprepared and unexplained statements to brick-in the fragile ends of that pseudo-history:  “scholars all agree that the uniqueness of the Korean mind and mentality”…“expressed in Han philosophy”…“they are called by others as Han philosophers”. These come out of blue sky – without lead-in, argument, structure, or explanation. And watching it happen, in all its shameless intent, quickly becomes a deeply uncomfortable experience, as Kim seems to believe that to make something true it only needs to be said out loud.

Like a proud mother impatiently waiting to see her unborn child, Kim loses patience and signals early to his reader why he is behaving this way, and what he is trying to build toward: “Therefore, the nonorientable Dong-i culture…”. All that historical strain, and embarrassing ‘scholarship’, was just so that he could find a way to introduce – and backdate – the term ‘nonorientable’.

But first there is another tenuous swamp that Kim Sang-yil wants us to join him in: philology. It starts and finishes like this: 8000 years ago ethnic Koreans were using the word “gadanagan” which is “believed to be the parent-word for Han”. Questions naturally come fast for the average reader. How are we sure that this is the parent-word? But if so, then how are we sure that the meaning has remained the same? How do we know that “gadanagan” was used 8000 years ago considering that no such written evidence exists? And just who is it that ‘believes’ “gadanagan” to be Han’s parent-word?

Well if our author knows any of these answers, he doesn’t feel it important to tell his audience.

It gets messier still. 6000 years after inception, it is, we are told, during the Iron Age that Han is first used in its now refined and modern look. Without any records of this, how do we know it to be true? Again, we are not told! Hyperventilating now, Kim introduces the Samguk Yusa. Translating to “Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms”, there might be some faint hope in the reader at this point that we could finally get an explanation for that Iron Age dating.

But no!

Instead what we get is a shallow and incomplete primer for the Dangun Myth, and the claim that – through this fairy tale about a god marrying a bear on a famous mountain – we can find a new origin of Han “from Sumerian words”. Around this stage the language and the ‘scholarship’ breaks down almost entirely, as paragraph after paragraph, and claim after claim, are linked and justified in these tones: “I believe that…”, “is quite similar to…”, “It seems that…”, “I think that…”, “some consider…”, “others consider…”, “in other words…”, “I also presume…”.

All of this sweat and effort is Kim’s long way of dragging us back to what Han is today, and what, if anything, is its philosophical content. And he starts here, with a list of his own current, and acceptable, definitions of the word: “1. great, 2. east, 3.bright, 4. oneness, 5. unification, 6. people, 7. old, 8. wholeness, 9. beginning, 10. Han people, 11. white, 12. light, 13. high, 14. sameness, 15. manyness, 16. sky or heaven, 17. long, 18. great leader, 19. up, 20. king, 21. perfect, 22. inclusiveness.” It can be suitably used as a “noun, adjective, adverb, suffix and prefix”.

If any of this strikes you as a problem, well you are not Kim’s audience!

Because then, suddenly, as if he has forgotten his own list, Kim starts to talk only about Han as “one and many”, and with an attack on Western philosophers and Western philosophies (without actually listing any): “Western philosophers find it difficult to harmonize the One with the Many and they finally draw the line between them”. Koreans, or rather Korean Buddhism, or rather still a single Korean monk (Seng-lang), has the answer he wants; “harmonizing” the two concepts into an “emptiness”.

Already past his depth – choking on mud and water – Kim decides to paddle-out a little further. He drags up yet another definition of Han, this time meaning “approximately”, and pulls this clumsy magic trick: “approximately is analogous to the Heisenberg’s [sic] Uncertain Principle” and so “the Korean mind has been dominated by the Uncertainty Principle”. It is safe to assume that by this stage that any reasonable person still hanging around would have finally had enough, thrown the book across the room, and walked away.

And a wise choice that would be, because Kim is still only just warming up!

Dangun comes back, as does the Dong-i, and the Samguk Yusa, then it’s on to discussions about ancient fortune telling techniques, Korean dance, Korean clothing, the Korean alphabet, and even the anatomy of animals, as if this would all become a lot clearer to someone who just had the good sense to spend some time “examining the hooves of that cow”.

What Kim is trying to say is that Han is like a “Moebius strip” – a flat band that is created by first twisting the surface and then connecting the ends together. From here it has no obvious front, back, inner edge, or outer edge. It is “nonorientable”. And that’s it, right there – every Korean has their own definition, and everyone seems confused, because Han is, in fact, all things and everything, at the same time!

As Kim settles back in his chair, arms folded behind his head, comfortable and happy with this effort, I imagine many more Koreans are shifting nervously in theirs. This is philosophy – be it “Han philosophy” or “Hanism” – and within philosophy disagreement is not only expected, but also welcomed. And so if Koreans are at odds about what Han is, then this is a problem; but also a problem that can be solved. It shouldn’t need saying, but, however, if Han is everything, then it is also nothing. Start using, for example, the word ‘stressed’ to describe ‘relaxed’ and what happens is not the building of a richer tapestry of meaning, but the hollowing-out of both terms.

Scratch any cultural surface in Korea and you will find someone throwing the word Han at you, with a well-practiced automatism. What is more likely than nonorientablity as an answer to this, is a simple and very human hope to be special. In terms of computation and fungibility, language is universal. So when something defies translation, it can only be a failure of the translator.

The raw truth of Han is probably much less glamourous still. It is untranslatable because, and only because, Koreans don’t actually want it translated. Because Koreans don’t want to admit that – whatever it is – it isn’t unique to them. Just as they, as people, aren’t unique either; just as scuffed, shallow and unimportant as the rest of us.

At the end of the Japanese colonial period, Koreans were left with two unpleasant, and retroactive humiliations to reckon with. Not only had they failed near-completely to defend themselves or put-up any real resistance, but there was also the huge number of documented collaborators and everyday Koreans who meekly assimilated (choosing to speak Japanese in their homes, seeking to be educated within Japanese Universities for Japanese jobs, or freely joining the Japanese police and military). To tackle this stigma, post-colonial Koreans have made a desperate national sport out of distinguishing themselves as culturally, historically, and racially unique.

If you have your doubts about this, or of the place of Han within it, then let Kim Sang-yil convince you otherwise with “the concrete example of the male Korean trousers”. Whereas Western trousers have seams and folds and are designed with a front and a back, Korean traditional trousers – we are told in detail – have none of this luxury, with loose cylindrical legs and an amorphous crotch. So they are reversible. And so clearly, at least for Kim, another illustration of nonorientable Han philosophy at work.

No wonder his book is out of print!

“Your husband, your comrade, and your friend” – Review of Immanuel Kim’s ‘Friend: A Novel from North Korea’

It was a new and changing country. The heroes of old novels and propaganda – toiling with brute force against weather, invasion, and internal enemies – wouldn’t work anymore. The gears of revolution were slowly shifting into a new, more subtle age that valued “technology”, “education” and “brainpower”. This was 1988… in Pyongyang!

And what an ominous moment to be alive in that corner of the world. In the right light, at the right angle, and with the wrong eyes, it was still possible to get the sense that the North was winning.

Below the Imjin River, down the banks of the Han, South Korea’s economic miracle was being carved firmly into the landscape. But this was a different age, information travelled a little slower, and geographic borders had a little more resilience to them. Kim Il-sung still had time to turn things around – to bring about the food and the comfort that he had always promised.

Money was borrowed from the Soviet big brother, new chemical fertilizers were handed-out to farmers, terraces were built into the fields, and electric pumps replaced traditional irrigation systems. The once notoriously difficult space of North Korean agriculture was completely transformed, and farmed to impossible new yields.

Everything was looking up, and yet the signs were already there – a famine so agonising and wide-reaching that it earnt its own moniker – the ‘Arduous March’ – was slowly edging its way upon the country.

In a book of the most extraordinary context, it is this look into the near future that is the most difficult to shake when reading Friend. After all, we are dealing with “a state-sanctioned novel, written in Korea for North Koreans, by an author [Paek Nam-nyong] in good standing with the regime”; so much so that our translator, Immanuel Kim, was allowed a private meeting with Paek in Pyongyang.

It starts meek, mild and sad, with a family on the edge of divorce, a husband and wife caught in permanent resentment, and a child lost in the middle. The tenses and time frames bounce back and forth, but it is always Jeong Jin Wu, a provincial court judge that guides the narrative, and balances the emotions.

But ‘moral compass’ is too strong of a term here – the Judge is just as confused and torn as everyone else; he just does a better job with the struggle of it all. Or more accurately, he keeps on struggling where others don’t, his heart still “pained” and his nights still sleepless from a similar family break-up that he adjudicated six years ago.

This time around it’s Sun Hee – a minor celebrity singing at concert halls across the country – and her husband Seok Chun – a lathe operator in a local factory – that have his attention. The couple are both agreed that their marriage should end, their complaints and anger sounding similar from each trench: “…despises me and doesn’t even treat me like a human being.”

The Judge is having none of it! Instead Jeong Jin Wu (his name always written in full, contrasted with the other characters who never get their family names mentioned) promises, with the air of a grizzled homicide detective, that “the court will carefully assess the divorce case”. By this he means, making late night – unannounced – house calls, dropping in casually to interrogate the couple at their work places (along with their bosses), and befriending their young son (Ho Nam) – probing him for information about his parents.

The romance, played back into the history of three different couples, is very 1950s – grand, sudden, and overbearing. After a couple of furtive glances, and disconnected eye-contact, a younger Seok Chun has waited long enough:

“Comrade Sun Hee, do you love me?”

“Huh? Tell me please.”

The intervals between Seok Chun’s breaths became shorter.

“Please don’t do this,” Sun Hee whispered apprehensively.

“You love me, right?” he asked loudly.

“Shh! Someone might hear you!”

“Please, tell me,” begged Seok Chun.

For all that he is to the reader, our Judge was once just as fawning, just as love-struck and pathetic – chasing around his wife to be, forcing himself into her life. The only passion that really steps beyond the North Korean context and resonates to foreign ears is that of “The schoolteacher”. Orphaned by an American bombing raid, she marries an obviously flawed man, tries to change him, squeezes him with guilt, worries herself sick, fails, smiles, laughs and loves him all over again.

Everyone that is designed not to be an obvious villain, is hardworking to a fault. Love always begins by first noticing the passion, the duty, and the effort: “drops of sweat rolling down her forehead, around her lustrous eyes, and down her white cheeks as she arduously worked the press.” From there, it also bleeds into every well placed instinct.

Hoping to reconnect our divorcing husband and wife, the Judge leaves his chambers – and presumably his case load – to dig for sand in a freezing river bed. Dishevelled, he then drags the material back to Seok Chun’s factory, all in the hope that it might help Seok Chun finish his invention sooner, and then have the spare time – once again – for his wife and child. Against this archetype are those “leeches” who “impeded the nation’s progress”: fat, unwrinkled, and “meticulously combed”.

If it all feels a little childish, then that’s the idea! Ever since the Japanese colonial period, Koreans – North and South – have always had an odd image of themselves. Built through layers of propaganda, it was a way to deal with their humiliation and their failure – a coping mechanism for an entire nation. It runs like this:

1. Koreans are a unique and pure race, and morally superior to other races due to this purity.

2. They are all born inherently virtuous, and so their instincts are always correct.

3. But this also makes them vulnerable to foreign invasions: people who take advantage of Korean innocence and good nature.

In a world like this, there is nothing to learn because everything true is already given at birth. People are raised to adulthood always reminded that they should listen to, and embrace, their childish impulses. It is a fairy tale that has lost some of its lungs here in South Korea – in the North however, it is what keeps the regime alive and the people still dreaming of reunification.

Unlike most dictators, the Kim Trinity are deliberately described in motherly terms, worrying about their people, encouraging them through love and concern, never by example. Already perfect by their Korean blood, North Koreans just need a little nurture and encouragement in their lives.

And here in Friend, the ideological line holds firm: everyone is emotional, passionate to the point of naiveté, and anger always burns righteous, hot and sudden; it’s all very Italian! In a refreshingly subtle and compositionally understated novel, this focus on children breaks the script. Late one evening, Sun Hee returns from her studio to find that the Judge has taken her son to his apartment. Tired, and a little imposed upon, she tries to take Ho Nam back home:

“As soon as Sun Hee grabbed Ho Nam and pulled him into her arms, Judge Jeong Jin Wu reprimanded her in the same way he had at his office.

“Comrade Sun Hee, let the child go. Take him home after he has eaten.”

She realized that the law supported her son’s welfare more than hers, and she cowered before the judge’s sharp words”

The message is clear. There are only mothers here, and so if you ever forget the importance of children, expect others to notice, quickly and without sympathy. But the real error that Sun Hee makes, is trying to direct her son rather than to encourage him to embrace his inner, impetuous, Korean self.

Ho Nam goes with the Judge to his house, and even bathes with him, because on this first meeting the boy “considered Jeong Jin Wu a trustworthy man”. And when one of those “leeches” is trying to convince his mother to finalise her divorce, Ho Nam explodes in adult moral outrage:

“Go home! Take your bread with you,” shouted Ho Nam.

“Have you no respect for family?”

“If you’re family, then why are you telling my mom to leave my dad?”

When the Leech spits back at him, “What an insolent child”, the North Korean audience is supposed to read this as an unknowing compliment.

For all the ideology, there is a lot of the author in this story. Paek’s father was killed during the Korean War, and here the schoolteacher suffers the same fate. He also worked at a steel factory just like our fictional husband, and he was eventually promoted away and into the arts just like our fictional wife. His own wife died young, leaving him to take on the traditionally womanly duties around the house, and Friend is a constant portrayal of the strain and suffering that happens when wives are absent from the household. Paek also came to work at the Jagang Province Writers’ Union, directly above the municipal divorce court, where every day he watched families in the final stages of collapse.

You can hear about the sophistication of the North Korean propaganda machine to nausea, but somehow your expectations still betray you, imagining a crude, blunt force of repetitive prose; every sentence ending with “according to the Great Leader Kim Il-sung”. Not a soft, morally ambiguous narrative, full of parochial dirty laundry.

What runs through it all is change, change, change. Paek was writing at a time when the old literary tradition of Socialist Realism was being swept away – if it ever really existed (See Brian Myers’s Han Sorya and North Korean Literature). Gone were the formulaic and monotonous stories, of “flat” characters and “gung-ho heroes”. In its place an understanding that “proper political indoctrinations cannot make individuals change overnight”.

But this is still North Korea, and writers still work to a script, and a quota. And at times it shows! With Friend the compositional plan breaks down early and fast, with the side-stories around the schoolteacher and her husband –and particularly the old divorce case that the Judge regretfully signed-off on – often undercooked and hollow.

And for all the delicate interplay, there is also a hasty, unpolished element to the prose (to be expected considering that North Korean writers work by assignment), with awkward clichés turning-up and disfiguring the ends of paragraphs:

“The duck would never be the swan’s mate, as their different lives would lead to different destinies.”

“The boy slept, while Sun Hee lay awake in fear that the rain would wash her precious and beautiful childhood memories down the muddied gutters.”

“It was this kind of person who maintained the moral principles of society and washed corrupt individuals out to sea.”

When Immanuel Kim met Paek Nam-nyong in Pyongyang, Friend was already 27 years old – and Paek was “humble, generous, and kind”. Yet it must have felt like something was missing, because in those middle years the world had collapsed, beyond all belief and fear.

First, Kim Il-sung died! Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and without the usual discounts those high-end chemical fertilizers were suddenly too expensive to import. Soon after, an energy crisis put a sudden end to the electric irrigation systems. For the first time in memory, North Korean farmers were abandoned by the state, trying to quickly relearn old techniques for the difficult conditions.

Then the floods came, and with no disaster planning in place, the terraced fields were first submerged, and then swept away entirely. The Arduous March had arrived, with the regime also pushing a new kind of propaganda: “Let’s eat only two meals a day”. Soon it was only one! The whole country was gripped by a biblical famine – even the best attempts of literature to play this down were left referring to it as the “eating problem”.

With shallow graves filling the once-clear hillsides (as a percentage of the population, more Koreans died in the famine than Chinese in the Great Leap Forward), and with stories of Ukrainian-style cannibalism (family members eating young children), a record number of North Koreans risked gunfire to cross the Yalu River into China.

For those who stayed, the starvation ended only when enough people had died – with less mouths to feed there was finally some food to go around. The memory of the famine still lingers in North Korea, it’s not the type of thing that is easily forgotten. And so sentences like this, designed to link motherly concern to the preparation of extravagant meals, would likely make Friend unpublishable today:

“Yeong Il was on the verge of crying and could not control his chopsticks. Next to him was his lunch box, untouched, unopened. His stepmother had packed just rice and boiled spinach. Tears streamed down the schoolteacher’s face.”

“A broad-minded man” – Review of Yoji Gomi’s ‘My Father, Kim Jong Il, and I’

It was early May, 2001, and a paunchy man with a delicate manicure was struggling off a flight at Japan’s Narita Airport. His wife and children – less fleshy, less plump – followed impatiently behind him. All four were travelling under Chinese aliases on forged Dominican Republic passports. Sweating in the early summer heat, and wearing pink-tinted sunglasses, the man sat, exhausted, waiting for his designer luggage to hit the carousel.

None of them made it through immigration, and all were deported back to China after three days of arrest. Pleading for the Japanese authorities to change their minds, the man tried to win them over with honesty, saying that he just “wanted to go to Disneyland”. In those three helpless days, global media attention began to crackle into life – this was no ordinary family vacation.

The next time the world would hear about Kim Jong-nam in such detail – and with such interest – was at another airport, this time in Malaysia. He was collapsed on a stretcher, and choking to death from the nerve agent that had been smeared across his face – assassinated as a public spectacle by his younger brother, and usurper to the North Korean throne, Kim Jong-un.

Sticking to this theme, My Father, Kim Jong Il, and I is the story of yet another airport, and a different luggage carousel – just as ill-fated, just as overweening and tragic. This time it was Beijing International Airport, and the man stalking-up behind Jong-Nam – and who would soon be lecherously drawing his blood – was Japanese journalist, Yoji Gomi.

Recognising Jong-nam from the “plump neck” and “number of moles” on his face, Gomi “followed him… outside of the airport building, and kept asking questions”. When Chinese officials ushered Jong-nam into a waiting taxi, Gomi pushed forward through the car’s open window with “my business card containing my email address”; regretting only that he hadn’t called the next taxi and “followed him from the airport.”

Within a country like North Korea, it is hard to feel sorry for someone who grows up well-fed, comfortable, and dressed in gold jewellery, but in these pages Kim Jong-nam is a man falling apart, lost, isolated, and so lonely that even the offer of exploitation from a complete stranger sounds appealing. If the question ever needed answering, then here it is: Yes! It is possible to be so in need of a human touch that even being strangled has its charms.

The old adage, ‘never trust a journalist’, doesn’t do any justice to what happens in My Father, Kim Jong Il, and I. This is far more abusive, and far more ethically unmoored, than what most people reasonably imagine by that phrase.

As soon as Jong-nam sends a first lonely email to Gomi, a whirlwind of tradecraft kicks into gear, every emotional trigger is pulled, every angle gets tested, and information is slowly drained from Jong-nam despite his best efforts and attempts to define the relationship on his own terms. It plays out like a man being dragged slowly into ever deeper water, and then drowned before indifferent eyes.

The language is always brotherly, familiar, and digging for emotional debt – “heartfelt condolences”, “my deepest sympathy”, “your dear mother”, “take care of your health”. Noticeable (perhaps even to Jong-nam as well), the aim here is to guilt Jong-nam through kindness into revealing and commenting on what he doesn’t want to, or what he is rightly too scared to.

Jong-nam is always yammering away with unconscious delight, and then quickly walking back his words; recognising too late the danger he might be in each time. And knowing where this all eventually ends for him, it becomes a little hard not to read it without anger. Especially when Gomi doesn’t seem to appreciate, or perhaps care, about the risks he is asking his pen pal to take.

Even after being told by Jong-nam that a private threat was delivered to him from Pyongyang – “I received a sort of warning from them” – and that the regime were not only upset about what Gomi had been publishing in his newspaper about their discussions, but that it was also likely that their “email exchanges were being monitored”, this still isn’t enough to let caution win the day.

Email silences are met with fawning concern, and being told that a topic is off-limits simply translates to Gomi’s ears that such inquiries should be delayed, or asked about in roundabout ways, after some sweet talk. Ordinary alarm bells and sensible etiquette never enter the scene here, because as Gomi tells us, “I was growing anxious for a reunion with him”, as if Jong-nam were a long-lost friend.

This is, of course, Gomi’s job. But it doesn’t make the whole process feel any less dirty. Especially when the glee in the journalist’s eye is obvious at every turn, bragging at length about the number of emails they exchanged (“no other journalist has been lucky enough to have exchanged more than 150 emails with him”), the handful of face-to-face meetings, and constantly reminding us that “I might be the journalist who has had the deepest exchanges with him”. This is less of a book than a glorification of a rare and lucky scoop.

And to make it all seem a little more gallant and noble, Gomi elevates Jong-nam inappropriately, with too much self-agency and intelligence – “He is a voracious reader of books”, “He analyses the situation of his mother country very coolly and objectively”, “he is frequently layering his wording with implicit meaning”. Gomi wants you to believe that Jong-nam is “a broad-minded man”, so that his book is seen as less an event of callus manipulation, and more of a complex chess match between geniuses.

Which belies the trivial, postcard-like tone of most of the emails – “Beijing is quite festive right now” – as they circle slowly toward dangerous questions about North Korea. It’s the foreplay and emotional groundwork of a Nigerian email scammer talking his way into your trust and closer to your bank details.

But all the shading in the world can’t disguise the horrible profiteering that is playing out before the reader. As Jong-nam rattles on about his childhood, it becomes apparent that this is, more than anything, an unintended study in loneliness. Jong-nam’s stories quickly repeat and contradict, and when he does offer some criticism of North Korea there is never any substance to it.

The questions bounce off him like an undergraduate trying to bluff their way through an oral exam. He is angry about the economy and wishes it would liberalise, but offers no details or thoughts that he couldn’t have read in a Chinese newspaper. He is angry about the succession of his brother, but focusses on Jong-un’s age and experience a little too much. There is no inside track on the North Korean royal court here, just a shallow and embittered man, jealous at being passed-over.

You can only talk about the same things so many times, before it becomes obvious that you have nothing new to say. And it all makes sense. After decades in exile, it would be surprising if Jong-nam still had some secrets hidden away, or if those secrets still held any relevance to the North Korea of today.

There is nothing here, no scoop, nothing to report, only the image of Jong-nam – a minor celebrity squatting in the casinos of Macau, unmoored from family, home and influence – looking to milk his last claim to fame. And it’s also here, clumsy, buffoonish, and drawn in simple colours, that Kim Jong-nam should now be understood – not through the light that Yoji Gomi wants us to re-imagine him in, and not through the soiled pages of My Father, Kim Jong Il, and I.

In that Japanese airport, as he begged in a “high-pitched voice” to be allowed to visit Disneyland, the immigration officers must have first laughed, and then felt a little sympathy, at the artless, childish nature of the fraud before them: the fake name on Kim Jong-nam’s passport, the name that he had chosen for himself in Chinese characters, was “The Fat Bear”.

“Custer’s Last Stand” – Review of John Bolton’s ‘The Room Where It Happened’

 “…Chairman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as President, can make that vision come true. He will do the right thing because he is far too smart not to, and he does not want to disappoint his friend, President Trump!

That was our North Korea policy.”

It’s easy to hate John Bolton! He just has that type of manner about him, that type of un-connectable personality and reputation… that type of face! And so, many people will only ever open this book for gossipy quotes like the one above, and reaffirmations of the worst things already known about America’s forty fifth President, Donald Trump.

What dominated Bolton’s brief moment as National Security Advisor, through endless flights and meetings, was North Korea. And it doesn’t seem like anyone else in the media, or the world, is willing to say the obvious, so I will: thank god he was there!

That quote from Donald Trump is, of course, no longer shocking for most people. And for anyone who has been paying attention, nor should it be. But what seems to have slipped-by over the years, and what the uncomplicated ego of Trump is now shadowing further away, is that this “policy” – once shaken free from the infantile language – is remarkably similar to that of previous American administrations, and that of every South Korean administration, with the mild exceptions of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye.

Like a grizzled, veteran police officer, Bolton sees the world through single, unflinching eyes. ‘Criminals are everywhere, and always looking for opportunities. The only way to stop them, or reform them, is through strength and punishment’. So he gets almost everything wrong about North Korea – and still none of it matters, because he does a much better, and much less dangerous, job of getting it wrong.

If you didn’t already have your mind inside this level of diplomacy, there is a lot of travel, late nights, and empty planning. Shuttling between leaders and countries, hoping to get just a few sympathetic people speaking in the same voice – only to be quickly disappointed once your smiling, nodding, counterparts leave the room. So you book another flight, have the same meeting, get the same smiles, and then the same disappointment.

There is a certain rhythm of dishonesty to all cross-border relationships. But when the point of discussion is a neighbour with weapons of mass destruction, concentration camps, a history of launching both full-scale and limited warfare, and who threatens more of it each day as they flood the sky with new missile technology, it shouldn’t be this hard. And the fact that it is, says something important, something that Bolton seemed to understand instinctively…

The real problem on the Korean peninsula – the barrier to peace and denuclearisation – is not North Korea, but South Korea!

Watching the Trump-Kim “fandango” playout, and hoping that “the whole thing would collapse”, Bolton became a happy target for the North Korean propaganda machine, accusing him of trying to undermine the ongoing talks – a badge that Bolton wears proudly across the pages of The Room Where It Happened. Just as he does being called “human scum”. There are some regimes that it is an “honour” to be on the bad side of!

But what made Bolton so off-putting for Kim Jong-un, as well as Moon Jae-in in South Korea, was that he refused the hype and heady atmosphere. Every time Trump grew hot and romanced – “I want to go [to meet Kim at the DMZ]. It will be great theatre” – Bolton was the boring, overbearing Victorian mother, nagging away about the importance of remaining a virgin until someone produces an engagement ring… or, at least, a “full, baseline declaration on their nuclear and ballistic-missile programs”.

This is where the “Libya model” begins to matter, and where the morality of ordinary people begins to fail. The model runs something like this: ‘when a rogue state begins to pursue nuclear/chemical weapons, other countries should respond with economic sanctions. If that rogue state then has a change of heart and wants an end to those sanctions, it should first give up its weapons program’. This should leave most people asking, ‘where’s the controversy?’

Well, seven years after Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi gave up his bombs, he threatened and began initiating a genocide of his own people – promising out loud that there would be “rivers of blood” – and was stopped from doing so by international forces following international law. We should all be as shocked as Bolton is that, somehow, the universal lesson here seems to have been ‘never voluntarily disarm’, as opposed to ‘never commit genocide’.

But North Korea is different. They don’t need nuclear weapons, and never have, because they already hold an insurmountable military deterrent: tens of thousands of artillery placements within shelling-range of Seoul and the threat of another all-out ground invasion similar to 1950. Any attack on Pyongyang comes at the non-nuclear cost of millions of South Korean lives, within a matter of hours.

Through his hardened Realist lens, Bolton misses this, because he also misses the subtleties of language and behaviour playing out around him. In a world wholly explainable through power, what naturally becomes irrelevant is ideology, and North Korea’s internal propaganda (how North Koreans think and how they see themselves in the world). Of course, it shouldn’t be!

It is amazing how often people seem to forget that there are two Koreas! Not two independent nation-states that happen to share a border, but two governments, two systems, both claiming and competing (enshrined in both constitutions) for ownership of the whole peninsula. ‘Competing’ is the important word here, because since the late 1970s it was increasingly difficult for the northern regime to deny its economic inferiority. And when the famine of the mid-1990s made it impossible, then-leader Kim Jong-il needed a new source of legitimacy, a reason for why North Koreans should not abandon him in favour of their alternative government south of the 38th parallel.

His answer was Songun, or ‘military first’ policy, and the promise of the “final victory”! Beyond the tuned-in ears of South Korea and Japan, neither of these terms have translated very well. It is a horrible cliché, but context is everything here. Military first is not a response to a fear of invasion, but an excuse for an economic crisis (‘the leader is so busy defending us that he can no longer take care of our daily needs’). And final victory is not a military triumph but actually the reunification of Korea.

This is why North Korea behave the way they do – from the outside erratic, bellicose and militant; from the inside protective, resolute and longing to embrace their southern family.

During his time in the Trump administration, Bolton came close to grasping this – all the information was there, he just couldn’t put it together in the right way. Most of the help here came from Japan, with Shinzo Abe telling him that the North Koreans “have staked their lives on their system… they will go back to their old ways”, and importantly having it explained to him by Japanese officials that the whole diplomatic outreach was coming as much from Seoul as it was from Pyongyang; all a part of their “unification agenda”.

Whereas South Korea obviously don’t share the North’s military first policy, they do however have – deep within their national identity and across the policies of multiple administrations – the same idea of a final victory; just in different language and with a different government. And there was Moon Jae-in, at every step, pushing the Trump-Kim friendship closer together with “schizophrenic” enthusiasm. It takes a while, but Bolton gets there in the end: “I was revising my earlier view, wondering if greater South Korean involvement in denuclearization might not complicate things”.

At one point in this summit season, when the American negotiators are worrying about the legal implications of an “end-of-war declaration”, the North Korean delegation look back at them casually and say that it was just “something Moon wanted” and that “they didn’t care about it”. When Bolton then muses aloud “which of course raised the question of why we were considering it at all”, you can almost feel his head dramatically turning, eyes narrowed in suspicion at the double agent he has just sniffed out.

His mind made-up, and now thoroughly pissed off, Bolton doesn’t need any confirmation, so he doesn’t go looking. But it is there, and easy to find. Moon Jae-in pledged more than once during his election campaign to achieve a North-South confederation before the end of his term in office - with less than two years remaining, he is fast running out of time.

Much of our understanding here comes from the work of Brian Myers (author of The Cleanest Race). And it’s worthwhile considering just how this type of ideology quickly becomes a trap, and how little can be done to change things considering the ramifications in Pyongyang of dropping the military first bravado:

“The left wing is wrong because you cannot bribe or sweet talk a country into committing political suicide, the right wing is wrong because you can’t bully it into doing that either, the centre is wrong for thinking you can get the Chinese to persuade them to do it.”

But something can be done. North Korea exists and behaves the way they do today, because they are playing for a South Korean audience. An audience that is always willing to forgive and excuse Kim Jong-un – just as they did with his father and grandfather before him – because they also hug reunification as their highest goal; thinking it will happen on their terms and not his. For the administration in Seoul, a belligerent North Korea is better than an indifferent North Korea. And in that, is also the solution…

Seventy five years of North Korean aggression could all be drawn to a swift end tomorrow by the Blue House pushing through a constitutional reform denouncing reunification, under any and all circumstances. As the news of the economic miracle eventually travelled north, so would this. Without a Korean neighbour to unify with, the final victory would suddenly no longer make sense, and so neither would the malnutrition and the suffering… neither would the Kim dynasty.

But some people would rather have a brother in prison with the ambiguous hope that he will one day be released, than have that same brother alive, free and happy, but living in a different home.

John Bolton is an unfortunate character in American political life. Impossibly stubborn and bathed in cold, obnoxious emotions, when he forces quotes from Winston Churchill into the text, it is easy to read this as an overt self-comparison: both misunderstood, both friendless, both to be vindicated with time. If so, then Bolton is still waiting, as well as getting a little impatient, because through the pages of The Room Where It Happened, he is also consciously searching for rehabilitation.

It is a new side to the man, and it doesn’t fit him well. Trying to be funny and lighten his image, paragraphs regularly end with pithy and pubescent turns - “How encouraging”, “Just what we needed.” And it might have worked if it wasn’t surrounded by the stuffy, business-like prose that comes a little more naturally to him, with “Trump said…” or “Trump had…” lazily intruding into every paragraph, as well as favourite words – like “certainly” – echoing without shame, page after page.

When Bolton was first hired, he arrived at the White House and was greeted by Chief of Staff John Kelly, with this: “You can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of here. This is a bad place to work, as you will find out”. During his time in the job Bolton kicked and screamed and fought with the President – as much as was possible – pulling him back from the ledge when no-one else dared.

This didn’t get the world any closer to seeing a denuclearised North Korea, but it did help the world to see the North Korean problem for what it really is, even if Bolton didn’t properly see it himself. The next time Kim Jong-un launches a series of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles over Japanese islands, and the government in Seoul dismisses them as “projectiles”, there might be more people alert to the game they are playing; and the liberties that they are taking with everyone else’s peace and security.

At the time though, riding in the cheap seats of Air Force One, it all “felt like Custer’s Last Stand”, like John Bolton was out gunned, hopelessly out numbered, surrounded on all sides, and yet still charging down a hill to slaughter and certain death, trying and failing to go out on his shield – “the whole thing was a waste of time”.

“Flower Island” – Review of Hwang Sok-yong’s ‘Familiar Things’

“People live here, just like anywhere else” – hearing this spoken aloud, especially from a mother showing her son their new home, does something strangely familiar. With so little written, so much is said! It burns the mind in uncomfortable ways, without knowing why, or what, is happening exactly.

Small, instinctive turns like this fill the prose of Hwang Sok-yong, most of which slip-by unseen and detached from the impact that they are having. Hwang writes almost in the negative spaces of description – the less he lays out on the page, the closer and more emotional the reader feels. Looking back you think, in puzzlement, ‘what just happened? How did that simple novel, with such understated text, do so much to me?’

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s certainly not luck – Hwang has this down to an art now. As Hwang gets older, and his books become thinner (without diminishment), it’s hard to not get the feeling that he could write just about anything, on any topic, no matter how brief, and it would all still feel very meaningful; sitting in the reader’s thoughts for weeks afterwards.

This new home that we are introduced to early, is a place of cardboard and plastic and Styrofoam and linoleum, a place where flies are eaten by the “pint” and everything is a “short trip from bowl to mouth”. An island of “two thousand households” built into “the slopes of the hill”. It’s a slum! On a patch of garbage!

Bugeye – nicknamed as such after a police officer threatened him, “Don’t roll your eyes at me, you bug-eyed little punk! (All of the children are re-christened things like Baldspot or Mole or Toad or Stink Bug or Beetle or Scab) – is moving into one of the shanties with his mother, and into a new job as her assistant. Rubber gloves, pitchfork and collection basket in hand, they filter through the mounds of new trash that arrives each day from the neighbouring city.

“The garbage trucks began to file in”, and the best items are snagged quickly by the crowds of pickers, fighting for the higher-priced recyclables. Bugeye is stationed in the second-line, behind his struggling, yet always capable, mother. He searches for “yogurt bottles, empty cosmetics jars, broken plastic dippers and basins, cans, glass bottles.”

The grandfather of modern Korean fiction has left a lot of himself in this novel, with old, favourite literary devices running into the pages, and coupling the lost characters. Hwang loves a ghost story, and here they are – through shamanistic dreams – linking the development and change of a fast moving Korea to something more aged, more fragile, more wholesome.

It’s a theme that connects to the garbage itself, dragged and discarded from the new world next-door – “Each item carried with it an air of sadness or regret”.

Even those few years, that unique and dangerous time in Korean life, when Hwang was in his pomp – both as a writer and presumably a man – trickles gently before the reader, with subtle references: when Bugeye’s father is arrested and sentenced to a lengthy spell in prison, it’s because “the new general had seized power and declared that he would clean up society”. And instead of an unpleasant cellblock, he marks-off the passing years in an unpleasant “re-education camp”.

Through the maggots, crushed soda cans, the smell and the grime, this is a community of the type that Hwang admires (he was jailed in the 1960s for supporting the labour union movement, and then later sentenced to seven years in prison for travelling to North Korea in 1989). This is ugly and dark, but the garbage also shines wonderful, “iridescent” colours of “black and white and red and blue and yellow…”

There is also a lot of the translator, Sora Kim-Russell, in this novel, with whimsical and oddly British turns of phrase littering the language: “faraway land”, “wasn’t too shabby”. With the only possible exception of Deborah Smith, Kim-Russell is at the apex of her game (Korean-to-English literary translation). Everything flows so well that even small glitches in the elegance of the prose – like using “so big” and “so huge” as pivots in the same sentence – don’t catch the reader like they otherwise might:

“The cap was so big that it slid down until the rim touched his nose, and the combat boots were so huge that he had plenty of space left”

For the people that live in this public squalor, and make it a home, it is Flower Island! And strangely there is money to be made, “three times as much” as Bugeye’s mother previously could working at a market back inside the city limits.

With all the fights and bruises, the late-night drinking and gambling, the long – grinding – days of unfulfilling work, everyone on Flower Island grows up fast and happy. Parents are fluid, people break-up regularly, swap lovers, with new mothers and fathers moving into the vacated bedspace of the small plastic-walled huts; to leave again a month or so later.

There is an adventurous lawlessness to it all – life has to be light and unattached, or it quickly becomes intolerable and vicious. The only real constraining rule on Flower Island is also the most obvious one: “laugh it off” or leave.

With no space or time for tantrums, children are treated as adults. The care and concern is real, but it can never be too involved or smothering – if sons and daughters don’t come home for dinner, or don’t come home at all, it is casually assumed that they are eating and sleeping elsewhere, comfortable enough, and safe.

Until it’s not, in sudden, unexpected, and wonderfully paced shifts of the narrative. When a late rampage of fire grips the slums, with trash and homes burning as one, everything hits an appropriate panic – watching the residents struggle towards the island’s outer limits, away from their lives and their income. The reader fizzes in the heart of this fear and heat, across page-after-page, and then the fire dies and everyone takes a few calming breaths. Only for Hwang to – almost as an afterthought – drop in a single, final, resonating sentence: “Baldspot’s body was discovered two days later”.

Like the blue lights that keep appearing, pulling the characters between shamanistic worlds, past and present and tenderly lost, there is a lesson here – something that every police detective and stalker already knows to an art.

When the Chuseok holiday comes around in early autumn, the food waste begins to multiply and change – “once-frozen rice”, “shucked oysters”, “whole fish”, “heads of cabbage”. Then as the weather gets colder it’s “hello coal”, and so on… It is amazing how much you can learn from someone by going through their trash!

Outcast and hated, Flower Island unavoidably has the pulse of the city next door – watching in the darkness and distance, knowing, devoted, admiring, and living off its appetite. It is only when they reach-out for some affection, step over the gate, befriend the guard dog, and begin testing the locks, that Familiar Things also become dangerous and “unloved”.

“The appearance of a great hero” – Review of Minsoo Kang’s ‘The Story of Hong Gildong’

Everyone already knows this story, in their own way! No matter where it happens, there is a home for it — a comfortable, cosy place, just under the surface of national identity and individual courage. It’s tight within the bones of people — and yet also a story that no one has ever read!

A talented child leaves behind a life of somewhat-luxury for a rugged, semi-nomadic home, alone, in the wilderness. He soon joins, and then leads a gang of outlaws, who begin fighting injustice, and righting the wrongs of society. He is smarter than his enemies, of unwavering morality, always a champion of the people; he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

Of course, this is Robin Hood! But in Australia it’s Ned Kelly, in Japan it’s Nezumi Kozo, in Scotland it’s Rob Roy MacGregor, in Mexico its La Carambada… In Korea, it’s something a little more — it’s The Story of Hong Gildong, “arguably the single most important work of classic (i.e., premodern) prose fiction”, and a name borne so deep into history and culture that it is still used as a generic place-holder on government forms, like John Doe is in other countries.

From this light home, Hong Gildong is also a megalomaniac, a self-righteous egoist, a frivolous and joyriding criminal, as well as a messianic faith-healer. And none of this is understated or possible to miss, every page hits the reader — hard — with an assault on even the most calloused of moral sentiments. Hong Gildong is a shockingly unpleasant literary figure — and yet, somehow, his story and name have stood up to the ravages of time.

This must be expected. A look back in time at the real-life Robin Hood, would almost certainly be an immediate cure to the romance he is held in today — a lunatic stalking the outer forests of Nottingham, preying greedily on common-folk and aristocracy alike, lining his pockets through violence and terror. It wouldn’t be pleasant viewing, there wouldn’t be any merry men.

So we need more than translation here, we need the story torn open, exposed, with silence and detail bleeding thick into the narrative — welcome, Minsoo Kang.

Subtleties of language aside, there is a lot of heavy lifting involved in this new Penguin Classic. Layer-upon-layer of pseudo-history needs to be offset, the work of other writers and academics needs to be reference-checked and often discarded, and a lot of people are going to get their feelings hurt. Kang looks into Hong Gildong like the trained historian that he is, without intention or deference or concern for the centrality that this story holds in Korean folklore and literature.

So it is also a lens onto the Joseon Dynasty, the difficulties of attribution, the wide-open-spaces where documents are lost or events never recorded, the challenges of weeding out vested interests, and a poignant lesson on how cultural memes work — once alive, replicating faithfully across generations, unchecked and unquestioned.

Nagging the reader with Homer-esque prose — ‘this happened…, this happened…, then this happened…, this was thought…, this was then thought…, this was also thought… — in many ways this is a Korean Iliad. And inside the story itself, there is a breathless, hungry intent to build the character of Hong Gildong into a man destined to be more.

Just like those descriptions of the Trojan Wars — which again shockingly few people have actually read — every opportunity to pause, embellish, lie, and remind the reader of the superman before them, is taken. Rather than a lone Greek soldier — with nothing but a sword in hand — deep in lust for revenge, defeating thousands of enemies unaided, with Hong Gildong it is slightly more elusive.

Either way, there is nothing aspirational here, there can’t be! And this seems, at first, an odd literary device: by destiny of the stars, these people are not like you and me. Don’t bother with imitation! None of what you are reading can be repeated, it has to be born.

There are no imperfections in the character of Hong Gildong, no failures or mistakes. He is unstoppable. Or rather he is only ever held back by the unfair limitations of Joseon Korea — one limitation in particular: the status of illegitimate children like himself. With his pathway to greatness and success taken from him, Hong Gildong begins to look in other directions.

And it’s likely this soppy emotion that mostly appeals to Koreans today — and explains why this story is bound so tight from history to modern nationalism. With each new foreign invasion, Koreans have seen themselves held-back from their ‘rightful destiny’; everything swirling into a deep bitterness about lost potential. (Unsurprisingly then, it is during the period of Japanese colonialization that this old tale is reborn, cleaned, polished, and made ‘Korean’).

Whereas the figure of Robin Hood was at war against a parochial tyranny and individual greed, Hong Gildong raises his sword against the Joseon Dynasty as a whole. The grumble that starts all this violence, and alights the whole peninsula in warfare? Hong Gildong — as an illegitimate child — was denied the chance to refer to his “father as Father”. It makes the reader shudder to think what he might have done with some real suffering in his life, or god forbid, if he had more than one grievance to complain about.

It is all very filial and ridiculous. When Hong’s mother was made a concubine by his wealthy, powerful father — having no choice in the matter — we are told “From that day on she never ventured outside the house and showed no interest in other men.” What a shock, the prisoner couldn’t leave her cell!

The Confucianism of the period runs deep here, with Hong Gildong, the boy “born with the appearance of a great hero”, and destined to sniff-out injustice in the world, fawning over his father’s grace in between beatings for daring to acknowledge him as the parent he is — “You have shown me nothing but deep and constant love”, only to be told “If you ever speak of this matter again you’ll be severely punished.”

Hong Gildong’s nose for unfairness starts in his own household, but never actually applies to it; only to the Joseon proto-state. Echoing the hubris of youth today, people who can’t hold onto jobs nor fix their own lives, but still join protest marches and insist loudly that they can change the world instead.

So with a small turn of well-studied witchcraft — a theme that runs throughout, with the reader reminded of “the marvellous power’s Gildong possessed” — Hong Gildong leaves the home that his mother cannot, and becomes an outlaw.

And as an outlaw his thin morality breaks down immediately, as he more often than not cannot “allay his wrath”, and makes a habit of executing people “out of vengeance”.

Robin Hood stumbles upon his gang by accident, and then sticks around, in as much as anything to teach them a new, gentler, code of ethics for their criminality. There is no soft belly to Hong Gildong as he goes out immediately in search of “the lair of the bandits of Taesokbaek Mountain”. And rather than convincing his new friends of his qualities, they see it in his “appearance of a heroic personage”.

Welcomed into the gang, and then promoted to leader, it is worth remembering here that, though “filled with fury”, this is still just a ten year old boy; if you can believe it!

“Magical skills” in hand, Hong Gildong and the Taesokbaek Mountain bandits start terrorising the “eight provinces of Joseon”. It is all very violent, very self-congratulatory, and with the strange — yet unmissable — tone of a social climber, someone consciously building their resume for the next step in their career and an improved circle of friends.

As the story moves forward, morality is left behind. There is less-and-less of the Robin Hood archetype that Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘Noble Robber’, and more of a nasty, hardened criminal, ruthlessly fighting his way to the top. When the King has had enough of this, and agrees to negotiate an end to the insurrection, Hong Gildong asks only for one thing (after which he will leave the kingdom forever): “the position of minister of war”.

And just like that, with only a personal trophy to show for it, he walks away — so much for fighting the injustices of society!

The story casually shifts into its third phase, with Hong Gildong, his bandits, and their families boarding ships, and leaving Joseon for an island called Jae, then another called Yul. And here, finally beyond the reach of those old Confucian prejudices, any hope for an honourable and redeeming twist collapses entirely; along with the narrative itself.

The first two royal decisions of King Hong Gildong? First, decree that this new paradise is built in a mirror-image of Joseon, replicating its political order, aristocracy, and even system of titles and grants that left Hong Gildong isolated and girdled as an illegitimate child. The second? Making two women, named Jeong and Jo, his “concubines” because he simply, “could not resist them”…

Minsoo Kang writes with appropriate derision: “It is as if Hong Gildong the king has completely forgotten his earlier frustrations as a secondary son.” Such an easy exit doesn’t apply here. It’s unmistakable from language what is happening, as our all-conquering hero laments into his old age about those humiliations of his youth, rehashing dead grievances and talking endlessly about being denied by his father and brother.

Hong Gildong cares deeply about injustice — if, and only if, he is on the wrong side of it.

And here it ends, where all good folklore should: with old age, a comfortable retirement, and whimsical musings over the past. But with all that has been, and like a reflexive victim of trauma, when the reader is told that, finally, “The land was at peace with no sign of trouble anywhere”, it is hard not to have the thought, ‘of course it was, because for the first time in recent memory there wasn’t an adolescent terrorist running through the provinces, robbing, killing and pillaging all he could find’.

Then, with his victims still stitching their wounds, and his new kingdom secured under his rule — the world either burning or servile — Hong Gildong turns unemotionally to the camera, and with the unlearning tone of a husband just done beating his wife, says “I tell you that all of this could have been prevented if only I were allowed to address my father as Father and my older brother as Brother.”

Living in the Republic of Fear

It is July 22, 1979, and the cameras are deliberately rolling. The people entering the hall, walking gingerly to pre-assigned seats – and confused as to why they have been summoned – know one clear thing: they are being recorded, in both voice and image.

The emergency meeting of the Ba’athist Party Central Committee begins with Saddam Hussein slouched casually back in his chair. Instead of rising to address his audience, he simply leans forward, searching for the best angle on the microphone:

“The dreams of the conspirators are many.”

“But be assured, I will pick up my gun and fight to the end.”

A beaten and broken man is then walked to the podium, the spectators recognise him as a senior member of the party. Shaking with fear, and blubbering through his words, the man begins his coached confession. He first admits his guilt, then begins listing names… his fellow conspirators.

As he reads, guards move quickly within the room, removing each person from their seats after they have been named. “Get out!” a now animated Saddam shouts from the podium, “get out!” One-by-one, the auditorium slowly empties.

Watching loyal friends and colleagues dragged away in cuffs, it begins to dawn on those people still seated what is happening. Suddenly a fear hits the room – a hard, infectious panic.

A man jumps to his feet – pumping his fists and verging on tears; he shouts:

“Long live the party! Long live Saddam Hussein!”

Soon everyone is on their feet applauding, and oaths of loyalty are echoing throughout the room. Everyone is praising Saddam and the Ba’ath Party, competing to be the loudest, the most grovelling – hoping that this might save their name being spoken.

None of it helps! The roll call goes on!

Saddam leans back in his chair again, and continues leisurely smoking his cigar.

Only when half of the room is empty – and sixty eight people have been arrested – does it end. Those left behind, those who have survived, visibly tremble with a mixture of fear and relief. Saddam congratulates them on their loyalty.

Then he tells them to pick up a gun and join him in the garden.

Outside they see their friends lined up for execution. They don’t need any more encouragement – everyone fires their weapon, and everyone is now implicated in the crime and tied forever to Saddam Hussein remaining in power… no matter what he does from there on out.

It now becomes impossible to be pro-Iraqi without also being pro-Saddam, you could no longer be a proud nationalist without being a proud Ba’athist. The blood on their hands, and fear in their hearts, takes away their options.

All limits, nuance, caution and criticism die in that garden – the only change now is the slow tightening of the line, and the growing list of people that fall outside of it – never realising until too late.

The terror inside these men soon spreads throughout the country – everyone hears the stories, and sees their neighbours being purged in the middle of the night. With each new arrest, the cheers grow louder and mob larger. To be silent is to draw suspicion, and a near-admission of guilt.

A young dissident, lucky enough to escape, describes the atmosphere as living in the Republic of Fear.

“Stubbornly swollen” - Review of Frances Cha’s ‘If I Had Your Face’

I always noticed them… I just didn’t care very much.

For part of my working week I am in an office, and have to make regular visits from my desk to the printing room. Behind the main printer someone has installed a large pane of glass; I am not sure what its purpose is, and have never bothered to ask, but it’s not a mirror...

Every time I walk into the room, one, two, or more, of the younger women in the organisation will be crowding for their reflections. Touching up strands of hair, layers of make-up, and practicing different expressions, from different angles. I squeeze past them, say hello (they all seem to be called things like Joy or Ruby or Sunny) and leave them to it – as if they are playing a sport that I don’t know the rules to, and am not very interested in learning.

Of course I still judge them! Tragic, hopeless, and just a little intimidating, it is one of the few wonderfully acceptable prejudices to still hold. They steal eyes, and dominate space, polished and perfect; humming with vigour, their hard work has its payoffs, if only small.

Then I would leave the printing room, and my mind would move elsewhere, my self-consciousness would fade and I would forget about my face; they wouldn’t! Back in their own offices, in meetings, or talking with clients, they would slowly fizz with a growing anxiety, constantly fingering hair and clothes, and stealing glances into anything that offered a reflection.

I never saw any of them, in their fraught, and excruciatingly long, morning transitions – “fall[ing] apart yet again this week in front of our bathroom mirror, agitated and despairing”.

Unfortunately Frances Cha’s novel, If I Had Your Face, lends itself to cliché. It didn’t need much more than the title (this is Cha’s first literary effort) to make it an instant ‘best seller’; if that term still means anything. Without glancing at a single page, most readers will instantly feel that they understand the whole book. It’s personal to everyone, in some way!

The Korean fascination with feminine beauty, plastic surgery, dumb glamour and K-pop, isn’t really that ‘Korean’ at all. But it is the current high-water mark of this degrading impossibility. So pay no attention to the pre-order numbers, or the second, third, fourth editions already published only a month after its first release. Don’t believe the hype and excitement, this is not the book that you think it is… it’s much better!

And you can see clearly where the change happens – drawn firmly after the second chapter – where Cha puts aside the thick, wieldy, paintbrush for a thinner, much more delicate, option. The concept steps back from the page, and the author takes over. It is subtle, and it makes every bit of difference.

All the heavy, expected, themes are there from the first two chapters. Hair shops, nail rooms, motherhood, SKY (Korean Ivy League) universities, K-pop and celebrity culture, marriage and men, money, the lack of money, the best plastic surgery hospital in Seoul (the ‘Cinderella Clinic’), and the constant longing for a different shape, a different beauty, and all the possibilities it would bring – “I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”

Then, from a novel about “electrically beautiful girls” and “asshole” men, Cha leaves everything behind and writes a pleasingly complex look at morality, universal injustice, and personal agency.

If I Had Your Face bleeds the stories of four women – Kyuri, Ara, Miho and Wonna – all connected through a fifth voice that we never hear directly from, Sujin, who is digging into debt and pain for new eyes and a new jawline; a new life. She wants what Kyuri has!

‘Room salons’ are a Korean bridge between child-like entertainment, stripping, and prostitution. An odd, parochial phenomenon where groups of men book shared rooms equipped with karaoke machines. They also book young women to sit on their laps, flirt with them, and pour drinks. This is the legal side. Soon the men develop relationships with their hosts, and for a new price, everyone is looking the other way as “round 2” starts and the salon becomes a brothel.

“10 percent” salons only hire the “prettiest 10 percent of girls in the industry”, and for someone who hugs their vices tight as their only virtue, it’s either K-pop and the quintessential celebrity lifestyle, or this. These are the swirling, gaseous years of ambition, where junkies brag unashamedly about the size of their addiction, convinced all along that those drugs are also their ticket to stardom and success.

But before anyone gets in the 10 percent, they need surgery, of some kind; there is always something to be fixed or improved upon. Sujin bides her time – post-reconstruction – polishing nails at a different kind of salon, face covered by a mask, eyes down on the job at hand. Waiting impatiently for her “stubbornly swollen” face to find its new bone structure, and hoping that just enough of the sensation returns so that she doesn’t need a mirror “to check if food or drink were dribbling down my chin.”

Either way, “you get used to it”! You battle on with your confusion, and your hopelessness!

Inappropriately, it is Ara’s voice that we hear first, small, delicate, of violently strong will, and mute – even her “laugh is soundless”. In a merry-go-round of futility and desperation, Ara is easily the most sympathy-inducing of the characters. Her mistakes are easier to understand, her fascination with K-pop tickles upon a childlike quality, and her everyday plight – as she struggles to express herself on a notepad – sets off explosions within the reader’s protective instincts

Her face then changes, and brutality verging on cruelty becomes the problem-solver that her voice cannot be, cold, sudden, and familiar. She doesn’t need our help after all. None of the characters do: the soft artist in Miho turns suddenly to revenge, the heavily pregnant Wonna chews-up her husband like the Korean mothers-in-law that she hates so much, and Kyuri shifts from social climber to love struck schoolgirl, and then on to careful diplomat. (The minor characters all get this same treatment, in their own way.)

Through the crisp and careful prose, the well-constructed empty spaces, and delicate pacing, there is always going to be the tendency to over simplify If I Had Your Face. But if it must be pinched-small, then it’s a war novel – full of carnage, absurdity, and constant struggle. Each day fighting and failing, each day dirtied and beaten, no-one leaving the trenches un-scarred or sane.

It is also a refreshingly honest look at victimhood... as a celestial pre-requisite for life. The weak are stronger than we give them credit for, and the social elites are fragile in what should be obvious ways, suffering through their days like the rest of us. There are no lazy pats on the back here or empty categories, just pain, hurt, and the clear truth that to call oneself a ‘victim’ is an unbearable act of indulgence and egoism – “Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else”.

We are all, to some degree, in abusive relationships with our own appearance and the world beyond – but with every punch, bruise, insult, degradation, and injustice, there is also, mostly, happiness! A battle-torn camaraderie, a joy in the blood and the fight. 

This is what I missed about those women, consumed by the mirror in our office. The endless maintenance and dollification is still a losing battle, as we all breakdown slowly toward “imminent expiration date[s].” But there is still laughter and strength; smiles and an uncommon lightness that is hard not to admire.

Just like Frances Cha’s female characters, I also live in a terrible apartment complex in a wonderful neighbourhood. On the same morning that I finished reading If I Had Your Face, I walked into the elevator to leave for work and was chased down by a young lady, racing to catch the closing doors. She jumped into the small space, excited, loud, and in deep conversation with herself.

She then saw her reflection in the glass panel on the back wall, leaned closer to examine her face, and let out a deep breathless moan. The ride down to the ground floor became a panicked lesson in the retouching of make-up, to a rising soundtrack of guttural, disappointed sighs.

When the doors finally opened – announced by a loud bell – she instantly peeled away her sadness, perked upright, smiled at me with an exaggerated wave goodbye, and leaped out of the elevator with the same bounce and glee that she entered with. No hesitation or backward steps – and formidably alive – the world didn’t know what was about to hit it!

I turned, catching a quick peep in the glass, and noticed that I had been unconsciously twisting my fringe through my fingers – something that I am sure I do a lot, without ever realising it. I walk out of the terrible apartment and into the wonderful neighbourhood, a little slower, a little heavier, a little more cautious and weak.

“A fallen meteorite” – Review of Jeong You-Jeong’s ‘The Good Son’

“The smell of blood woke me.” And so Jeong You-jeong starts in the worse possible way, with trodden, nerve-dulling, cliché. It’s enough to stop even the faintest literary ear from reading further, and discard The Good Son after only one sentence. Without any claim to such an ear myself, I kicked on.

And it doesn’t improve much, at least not right away. Clumsy mistakes are one thing, but The Good Son consistently talks down to the reader. Prose is thrown, and then smeared, uncaringly on the pages. The dizzying haste of the writing process remains uncleaned, unedited, and exposed without shame to the audience, as if this, somehow, was the intention all along… and maybe it was!

Getting old, tired, and beyond the point of caring about status and judgement, the great novelist Kingsley Amis once told his son Martin (an established author in his own right) that he was finished with the highbrow side of literature. From there-out everything he touched was only going to be light and entertaining, it was only going to be thrillers and murder mysteries – “I am never going to read a novel again unless it begins with a shot rang out.”

This was also a kind, roundabout way, of telling his son that he wouldn’t be reading anymore of his books. Martin Amis’s prose was too wordy, too deliberately intellectual, and there was too much delight in the play of language; to the detriment of the story. Working around this, Martin would jump into the genre himself, writing his own murder mystery, London Fields, and even dedicating it to his father. Kingsley still wasn’t interested, and never opened a page.

It’s worth remembering who this is coming from: Kingsley Amis lived and died at the apex of literary sensibility. He wasn’t falling apart with age, he was just re-confessing to an old truth – that reading should be fun. But it doesn’t always need to be a blunt-force commitment in either direction. While reading in this way, Amis’s last ever book, The King's English – published posthumously – was a writing guide on the uses and abuses of the English language.

So Kingsley Amis might not have had a problem with Jeong You-jeong’s opening sentence, he might even have cheered in excitement, but as the pages of The Good Son trundled forward he too would have discarded the book as it began to fall short of his only remaining criteria for reading: entertainment.

Grand literary entrances like ‘a shot rang out in the night’ or “The smell of blood woke me” are skyhooks for the heavy lifting to come. An acknowledgement that the reader is going to have to endure something a little tedious, a very slow-burn before anything really catches light. All with the hope that enough is promised from that first sentence – enough to keep people there, smiling, and trudging forward, searching desperately for the flames.

But what then happens if the spark never catches? Or worse, when the author stares back at you without love or interest, and throws away her box of matches without ever bothering to drag a lazy piece of red sulphur across the striking paper; smug and convinced in her own light, from her odd angle on things, that, in fact, the room is already burning with incandescent colour.

The Good Son is an odd mess of dreams, memories, hallucinations, side-effects of medication, memory-loss, flashbacks, and conversations with ghosts. In doing this, the book also jumps between times, tenses and perspectives without natural or obvious breaks; language bleeds into itself almost as a stream of consciousness, leaving the reader to catch their own steps, backtrack, and search for where, and why, the change happened – doing the author’s job for her.

And when the pace of things is eventually broken – marking out four large chapters – it still serves no purpose as each chapter simply flows from the same place and moment where the previous one left off (the epilogue being the only exception to this). The writing rolls forward breathlessly, without pause, patience or structure.

Our young protagonist, Yu-jin, wakes up smelling blood, then he sees it also. The room, the house, his bed, his clothes, all red from whatever happened last night – and downstairs his mother is also covered, cold and murdered. Jeong You-jeong’s disconnected mind starts here, with an empty memory, an obvious crime, and the realisation that “clues to who had killed mother were all over the place”.

Immediately that disconnect, and the limitations of the author are there to be seen, and the few literary devices she has in her toolbox repeat so often that they suffocate the novel, etched into every turn and twist like a heavy, creeping, oily fog. Time stamps bounce back and forth across every paragraph and sentence – these are from a single representative page: “1:30am”, “1:31am”, “1:34am”, “12:10am”, “12:15”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “1:34am”.

And instead of carefully sculpting the growth of intrigue and mystery, Jeong takes a sluggish shortcut and bombards her reader with a series of internal questions from the confused Yu-jin – these are from a single paragraph, if you can believe it: “she would have…”, “she would…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “did she…”, “maybe she…”, “did she…”, “why didn’t she…”, “why didn’t you…”, “why did you…”, “why did Mother…”, “why would you…”.

At every turn Jeong fails that old clichéd rule of writing: ‘show, don’t tell’. Trust your readers’ intelligence. If the details and connections are there, then they will be found. An overlay of language re-announcing every small detail – “Things that had seemed unrelated to one another and the clues I’d shrugged off or ignored were beginning to come together” – is redundant, unless the narrative is also. It’s here where most of the troubles seem to hit: it never feels like what the author had in her mind is what we are getting on paper.

It’s a disease that burrows deep into the prose’s bone marrow. At this point the problem might be in translation – or more accurately with the translator – but regardless, it stings the tastebuds; on every page, at every turn, there is new disappointment, something which claws you away from the story, and into the laziness of the writing process. I challenge anyone not to cringe when, without laying any context, Yu-jin is saying things like:

“I would have to focus and trust my cheetah legs.”

When the words ‘seizure’ and ‘severity’ are allowed to sit next to each other in this sentence, crashing the sounds together.

 “I wasn’t anxious about the seizure severity”

Or take this as a complete, intact, and horribly conceived passage:

“Whose feet were these? A doll’s? A ghost’s? Looking down from above didn’t provide any answers. I had to figure out what was going on. I gritted my teeth and continued ahead.”

Where to start with this? First, why would anyone see human feet and think it is a doll or a ghost? “Looking down”, as opposed to what? The feet, as with the body, are of course on the ground. “Whose feet were these”, “I had to figure out what was going on”? Well take a step forward, turn your head, and mystery solved! Ordinary people don’t pause to think in moments like these, especially when the only feet they could possibly be are your mother’s (she’s the only other person in the house). And “Continued ahead”? It’s hard to conceive of a more non-descript choice of language (except, perhaps, when later in the novel, heavy rain is being called “adverse conditions”). No care or thought – in any way – has been taken for the possibilities of expression and evocation.

It’s impossible to avoid the thought that The Good Son looks like this, and reads in this way, because Jeong You-jeong never really believes - at any point - that her audience is along for the ride. The whole novel is thick with a rough, grainy slime. Nothing about it is compelling, thought provoking or polished.

But then, just like that, around halfway into the book – when most readers would have already given up – something happens. The prose and style remain frozen and manufactured, but the pigments around it all change, everything takes a new light; a little more interesting, a lot more psychopathic.

From here, in retrospect, some of those previous literary calamities aren’t quite so bad. The author’s internal voice isn’t as broken as it first seemed. And the constant lack of realistic emotion and human reaction begins to make more sense. It all just takes too long, and sadly, I imagine, most people will never get this far into the book. Too much endurance is needed for far too little of a payoff.

In another late moment of his life, Kingsley Amis was personally sent a copy of Julian Barnes’s then-newly released book, Flaubert’s Parrot. Hanging desperately for his feedback, Barnes eventually contacted Amis and asked what he thought. Amis casually replied that he hadn’t managed to read past the third chapter: “[I] might have considered plodding on a bit further if only one of the two chaps there had pulled out a gun and shot the other chap”.

Shin Kyung-sook doesn’t see it this way! Attached proudly to the back cover of The Good Son, is her endorsement: “This book will pull you in; as you devour it, you may find yourself”. I have often suspected that Korean authors feel a strange need to be kind to their contemporaries, to help usher in new voices, or to be nice to old colleagues. A community where everyone hugs close, helps each other with positive reviews, where nobody criticises mistakes, and where a protective shield is erected between writers and their words.

But even then, for Korea’s most prominent writer – someone with a sharpened understanding of trade subtleties – to say such a thing, about this book, stretches the mind in impossible ways. It’s enough to make you wake up smelling blood.

“I don’t have the energy to die” – Review of Gong Ji-young’s ‘Our Happy Time’

“With the heart of a trapper awaiting a snared animal” Gong Ji-young watches her reader approaching, walking delicately onto the unassuming ground of her novel. Then, snap! The wire pulls tight as the supporting branch straightens into the air. Bouncing softly to rest above the grass, the carefully tied noose now dangles exposed – the cold, mechanical gadget is a success, and it’s clearly well-designed, but it’s also empty, set off too early by an impatient hunter; nothing inside.

Our Happy Time holds an odd place in the Korean literary scene, as does its author. New readers to the genre will first stumble into Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, Hwang Sok-yong, and Kim Young-ha, then work their way through The Vegetarian, Please Look After Mother, The Guest, and I Have The Right To Destroy Myself. It’s a happy, fated initiation.

Then our reader – surfing a crescendo of prose and story-telling – will be prodded toward Gong Ji-young and Our Happy Time. And straightaway something feels off! The style is simple but impressive, the development of the characters hits in just the way it needs to, but it’s all a little childish at the same time. From the opening sequences, the author’s enthusiasm for her own story begins to run out-of-control, and the small details on which the narrative hinges are suffocated of the oxygen they deserve.

There is an incomplete, scattered honesty in this type of thing. George Orwell explained how a writer’s mind can be corrupted by their own integrity in this way: sitting down to write Homage to Catalonia, he found himself compulsively pasting long, meandering “newspaper quotations” in violation of his better “literary instincts”. When a critic pushed him on this decision, “Why did you put in all that stuff?” Orwell happily admitted that it – in part – “ruin[ed] the book”, but that also he “could not have done otherwise”. He had a purpose for writing Homage, a reason for why he first put pen to paper, and remaining faithful to that reason took precedence over form, flow and style.

With her own purpose for writing Our Happy Time obvious from the earliest of steps, Gong Ji-young is also restless and in a hurry to get there. And after a very brief throat clearing, Gong can’t bear her own suspense any longer – “So, what do you want to do? Stay in here for a month and go through therapy again? Or help me with something?” Not the most well-conceived premise, but nothing here is. Our Happy Time is light, ditzy, and structurally weak… yet it didn’t need to be, and this certainly wasn’t the intention.

Our loosely hooked protagonist, Yujeong, is young, intelligent, wealthy, and once mildly famous. She is also recovering from her third unsuccessful suicide attempt, and it’s her hard-edged aunt, a nun, that wants her help spreading the gospel at the local prison – “Since you agreed to help me out for a month, you have to promise you won’t kill yourself before then…Can you do that for me?” Thanks for the kindness, auntie!

From here out, the religiosity rumbles along like a sinister background noise; a Pavlovian type of indoctrination. So much effort is made to talk up the doubts and holes within peoples’ faith, the unassuming anti-proselytising approach of Aunt Monica, and the happy absence of religion in the lives of otherwise moral people, that it feels aggressive nonetheless – like a shy Mormon at your front door on a Sunday afternoon, he doesn’t pester you, or push you with questions and brochures. In fact he doesn’t even talk or ring the bell. He just stands there silently on your doorstep waiting for you to notice him out of the corner of your eye.

This is not a casual literary device, this is why Gong wrote the book. Religion aside, Our Happy Time is a deep dive into uncomfortable questions of morality, luck, and truth. It seems every well-known Korean author has a taste for Friedrich Nietzsche, and he gets his obligatory reference point here, but where so much of Korean literature tries-and-fails to be philosophically stout, Gong achieves this… and it feels natural, effortless even.

It’s just that it dances too often on a bed of inconsistent prose and a draft-like inner voice. Take for example how successful a passage like this can be:

“He was a being who transcended death, glimmering with some feral quality possessed by those who swear themselves in their youth to a lonely death in the wild.”

As opposed to these disturbingly lazy efforts:

“Everyone was going somewhere. No matter the destination, they all had to get somewhere. But did any of them really know where they were going?”

“As for me, I was beginning to think that I wanted to face him for a different reason. Was that because I was sensing that the person I really wanted to face was myself?”

The contrasts continue between thoughtful statements like this:

“You had to hurt in order to be enlightened.”

And unbearable platitudes:

“There was more than met the eye”

And just in case you think these quotes might be unfairly cherry-picked, take these two consecutive sentences – from meaningful to banal in an instant:

“Sometimes words can be so concrete and so real, and therefore so cruel. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said the pen is mightier than the sword.”

Gong’s central characters moan endlessly about hating two things in particular: cliché and hypocrisy. Throughout Our Happy Time they repeat the sentiment to nausea, cliché is mentioned on fourteen different occasions, hypocrisy seventeen. Through this echo, and the representative prose above, an obvious truth begins to build in the reader’s mind – these characters would likely also hate their author.

If you can battle through this awkwardness, there is still something impressive to be found – a horrible, nasty, metaphysical swamp; a place that pulls open scar tissue and exposes old nerve-endings, fizzing once more in the damp air. It’s all uncomfortably real, and morality regains its true dimensions here. There are only hard choices, mess, dirt, and self-disgust.

Here victimhood is ambiguous (often irrelevant), kindness is a different shade of selfishness, volunteers are hoping for personal reward, forgiveness is a base sentimentality, everyone is irrevocably broken, no one is strong enough to resist shame and judgement, some peoples’ lives are genuinely not worth living, and so the only solution is either murder or suicide; even then, in that moment, twisted, unsure and botched – “Why do they always talk about killing the rich when all of their victims are poor?”

It’s in this nervous energy and sinking life that Gong Ji-young rediscovers the lost threads of her novel. The conversations and building relationship between our central character and a death row inmate, Yunsu, are all, brazenly, clichéd. But Our Happy Time walks the line between good and evil incredibly well, one eye on brightness, light and possibility, the other one being gored violently from its socket by the realities of who we are, and the darkness inside us. And even when you surrender, and resign yourself to ending it all, you still manage to fail; pinned under this same weight, this same weakness – ”I don’t have the energy to die… I don’t have the will or the courage to die.”

In New Praise of Idleness – Review of Bertrand Russell’s ‘In Praise of Idleness’

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous” - Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell would have loved the coronavirus – he would have loved the pain that we are all feeling. Never someone to shy away from greater evils and the sacrifice of others, Russell was once famously so concerned about a nuclear standoff between America and the Soviet Union that he wished-out-loud for a pre-emptive nuclear war. An atomic blitz to wipe out Stalin’s emerging arsenal, and to force humanity into a peace it wasn’t otherwise capable of.

In Russell’s own words: “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.” Of course he was wrong, and would later change his mind on the issue, but the error says a lot about the blind spots that would run through most of his philosophy – and the happiness that he would now be feeling watching so many people isolated, underemployed and, importantly, idle.

Anything that we do or say largely by instinct deserves some questioning. There is no reason to believe that we are any more likely to inherit wisdom and knowledge than we are pain or suffering. And yet we take so much for granted – and accept so much as foundational truth (another weakness of Russell’s) – simply because it comes to us through cultural memes, passed on by family, friends and community; perhaps nothing more so than “the belief in the virtuousness of work”.

When was the last time you stopped to really think about work? Not the daily annoyances and challenges of the workplace, not the size of your salary and title on your name tag, or even if you should change professions, but rather if you should work at all? It’s unlikely that you have, and this is certainly – if for nothing – a little strange. We increasingly live in a world of scrutiny, where every little behaviour and choice is moralised over-and-over, so why not also with work?

Russell walks us back into the depths of civilization and the Industrial Revolution, and opens up with an analysis of what work actually is – a non-trivial exercise considering how blinkered he thinks we have become to its presence. And the distinction that becomes important is “surplus”.

Idleness is not new for our species, it has just tended to be something reserved in small circles – outside of which work was not only necessary and exhausting, but often also insufficient. People earned just enough to survive each day – so in times of famine these same people died, while the “warriors and priests”, and most notably “landowners”, lived in the “comfortable idleness” that was possible only from the exploitation of others.

But this is more than an attack on capitalism and an echo of Karl Marx. Bertrand Russell spent plenty of time musing over the benefits of communism – as a lot of people did in 1932 – but this is not that. Sure, some of the historicism remains (again another weakness that runs through his philosophy), but Russell saw the workers around him not as prisoners hoping for freedom, but as people who have already had their shackles removed; yet who just can’t quite bring themselves to accept it.

Work was made into a virtue at a time when, for most people, the wolves were still scratching at the door… at all times. Not to work, was to die. And that hangover persists, strong, nauseating and unshakable – “A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions.”

Beyond the booms of inevitability, Russell’s history is hard to argue too heavily with. But neither is it necessary – it’s in the next step where things get interesting. At the time of writing, Russell estimated each person only needed to work four hours a day to achieve their basic needs (a figure he shared with John Maynard Keynes). The exact number doesn’t really matter here either (three hours, four hours, five hours) – just the observation that, despite escaping hunger and starvation, most of us were continuing to work and sweat as if nothing had changed.

Russell was hoping to see a lot more people sitting around doing nothing! Because if “labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces.” Instinctively this doesn’t taste right – there are an uncomfortable number of assumptions being smuggled in to such an impatient sentence. But the fact that something is poorly explained doesn’t always mean it is poorly reasoned.

A Korean friend – who had grown up in the raw capitalist struggle of 1990’s Seoul – once explained to me something very similar. His company had temporarily transferred him to their new factory in Germany – he was to help get things up and running, and after a few months return home. From his first moment on the factory floor my friend did what he thought was expected of him – what he had always done back in Korea: he worked longer, harder and with less breaks than was legally mandated or expected. Eight hour shifts would turn into twelve. And his new German colleagues hated him for it!

Instinctively my friend began to look at the people around him with a certain contempt – they were lazy, even immoral, and now they were upset because the hard work of another person was drawing attention to their failures. After a few weeks of this an older worker sat with my friend at lunch and told him what perhaps should have been obvious from the start. His colleagues weren’t angry with him for exposing their sluggish work ethic, they were angry because for every extra hour he worked he was stealing the salary of another person.

If the factory needed three employees working eight hours each day on a particular task in the production line, then if one, or two, of those employees start working twelve hours instead, the third person is suddenly no longer needed. The over-work of a few people, take away the possibility of full employment for everyone.

This economic reality is central to Russell’s argument – but it still only goes halfway. My friend told me that after this discussion he made a commitment to put his Korean work ethic on hold until he returned to the peninsula. There he was, a man free – for the first time in his adult life – from the rigors of overwork, and yet instead of enjoying his new independence, and the loosening of built-up stress, he suffered through the experience in near-torture. “A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle.”

So how does idleness become fulfilling, what does Russell want us to do with all this time to ourselves? It comes down to a change in judgement: begin to value life, and what we do with it, only by the pleasure we find within it. It can sound a little delinquent, and pushes an immediate criticism into the mind: what if overwork, for the benefit of overconsumption, makes some people truly happy? Russell’s answer is as intellectually unsatisfying as it is emotionally gratifying: what we produce beyond basic necessity is always illusory, and fundamentally “not wanted”.

Much of the narrative here is weaved together with shallow dismissals of this kind – and Russell never properly tackles the infinite fungibility of the human mind (derived from the universality of computation). But again, the actual thrust of his argument doesn’t need it. It is less counterintuitive than it first sounds, but through idleness, even boredom, comes creativity and progress.

Anyone who watches children play will understand this – excused from the overwork of adulthood, children often find themselves alone, even when in the company of other people. When the entertainment of adults – or ‘passive pleasure’ (yet another glaring weakness of Russell’s philosophy of mind) – is unavailable, and when other forms of easy stimulus can’t be found (when the automatism of life and choices is switched off), children don’t sit around in “pure frivolity”. They instead go looking for pleasure, excitement and interest. They become – through the silence and space of idleness – Nietzschian self-creators.

In Russell’s brave new idle world, “every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity.”

Sounds nice, doesn’t it! And yet it likely also sets you on edge, skin tingling with a sense of familiar tragedy. The parallels to communism, and the remembered promises of utopian paradises – built on the liberation of workers from workplaces – is a difficult mental hurdle to overcome. And despite offering significant criticisms of communism – quite presciently believing that new elites would inevitably form to live, once again, off the work of others; and that the overwork of the masses would never end with leaders “find[ing] continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity” – Russell never quite manages to win his case.

This was a deliberate attempt at public philosophy – and everyone pays a heavy price for playing this game. The lack of time to explain yourself, and the uninitiated position of your audience, demands a certain degree of shallowness and half-baked argumentation. Think about how much time and space would need to be roped-off if Russell were to really step this out in detail, and fill-in every auxiliary claim, such as “the taste for war will die out…because it will involve long and severe work for all.”

Instead they are forced to sit there, ugly and exposed, while the author self-consciously feels the need to reassure the reader that he is, in fact, addressing them “in all seriousness”. It’s for this same reason that it feels a little inappropriate to be too critical of the finer details, or lack thereof.

What is certain though, looking back from the present moment, is that Russell was wrong! He was wrong about the inevitability of nuclear warfare, he was wrong about how enticing a dramatically reduced working week would be, as he was wrong about the promises of full-employment and the positive response that people would have to the idea of idleness. So instead of muddling forward through slow improvements, Russell would likely have seen the coronavirus as a wonderful, revolutionary, opportunity.

People, who for so long, have been unwilling to accept their freedom and throw-off the burdens of work, suddenly don’t have a choice in the matter. The virus has not only forced quarantine and isolation onto a huge percentage of the world’s population, but it has also, invariably, forced many people out of work. The economic questions that Russell hoped we would ponder are now inescapable, just as the idleness – from which he expected so much creativity and happiness – is now ubiquitous.

Perhaps, once the shock and discomfort has worn-off, we will develop a taste for this new type of living – Bertrand Russell was sure that we would: “there is no reason to go on being foolish forever”. I’m not so sure! Maybe it’s the slave in me talking, but it all still feels a little unrealistic, a little dangerous even, and definitely a little indulgent.

“I used to be pretty famous” – Review of Kim Young-ha’s ‘Diary of a Murderer’

Perhaps, after all these years, we should start taking Kim Young-ha at his word – he has “nothing to do with literature”. And yet, somehow, he is still far-and-away Korea’s most interesting writer.

Kim’s fame came early and thick, taking his reader into a difficult and strangely personal world – the life’s work of a suicide consultant on the streets of Seoul, with I Have The Right To Destroy Myself. In length and development it had the feel of a side-project, a warm-up for something real. It was as if Kim wasn’t yet sure of his ability to make it as a novelist, and was first testing the market with a short, introspective, draft-like piece of writing; something that didn’t require too much time and commitment, and so wouldn’t hurt too much if it failed to find an audience, or even a publisher.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself did something long overdue and remarkable. The Korean literary scene at the time was dominated by a few large names, all writing with a single theme and purpose. Through delicate, Mandarin prose, they wrote Mandarin novels about ancestral wounds and sacrifice, of suffering and its romance, and the impure – un-Korean – effects of social change.

From the beginning Kim was far too animalised and muddied to play this game, instead he pushed into the uncomfortable pulse of modern Korean life – rolling unashamed in its shallow, nihilistic masochism; remembering throughout just how funny all this pain and suffering can sometimes be. “I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. The caller’s imagination runs free, and she soon discovers her potential”.

The leap from Kim’s first book to his latest, Diary of a Murderer, isn’t one at all. Despite the years of writing and tradecraft under his belt, there has been a complete flat line of literary growth and style. Kim is still dark, still unbearably human through the slight details of his work, and all the weaknesses of his writing are still exposed, raw and lumbering. And yet there is still a substantial leap here, and something to cheer, because what he gave us in those middle years – through books like Black Flower, Your Republic Is Calling You and I Hear Your Voice – had the smell of disease.

We are dealing here with a style of writing designed for blunder and emptiness; it overreaches – not as a calculated literary device – but with a greedy, salivating hunger. Like a smug high school student trying to impress his teachers, no plot twist is too crude, no drip-feed of detail too obvious, and narrative selection is absolutely everything.

A suicide consultant (I Have The Right To Destroy Myself), a Korean slave labourer in Cuba (Black Flower), a North Korean spy in Seoul (Your Republic Is Calling You), a motorcycle outlaw (I Hear Your Voice), and now, with Diary of a Murderer, an elderly serial killer with encroaching dementia. Someone who remembers who he is, and how much fun he has had strangling his victims – “those were good times” – but is now waking up confused, covered in mud, and wondering who he might have killed last night, and where he might have buried them; or reading of new murder cases in the local newspaper – “they found another female body… on a country road” – and asking himself ‘is that one of mine?’

Apparently this is how the “Alzheimer’s-diseased brain” works, old memories are the last to fade, so – at least in the early stages – it’s really “future memories” that become a problem. The patient is frozen in time, forgetting that there is food on the stove, why they’re in their car and where they’re going, or who the dog that keeps digging up human bones from your garden belongs to. A careful, methodical, career serial killer becomes clumsy and amateur.

It’s a wonderful premise, and the humour writes itself:

“One bad thing about living so many years as a murderer: you have no close friends to talk to”

Or

[Asked by his adopted daughter where her birth mother might be today] “Where do you think she is now?”

“Who knows? She might even be somewhere very nearby.”

In our yard for instance.

But, as with Black Flower and I Hear Your Voice, too much of the story feels hacked together and borrowed from existing art and history. The echo from the 1980’s Hwaseong serial killings in Gyeonggi Province is impossible to miss, but Kim Young-ha still can’t help himself, fumbling-in an unnecessarily explicit reference, along with a mention of its movie adaption Memories of Murder (Directed by Bong Joon-ho).

What isn’t mentioned but deserves to be, is Christopher Nolan’s Memento from which Kim seems to borrow an extraordinary amount of memory-related detail. Still none of this is as crude or blunt as the opening line, carved unmistakably from Albert Camus’s famous first sentence in The Stranger. Camus was trying to quickly set an emotional coldness to his leading character, a casual indifference to things that shouldn’t be possible. Kim is clearly impressed by this effort:

Camus: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”

Kim: “It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?”

The uncomfortable literary decision-making doesn’t stop here. There are repeated analogies to gods, religion and zombies; our serial killer is somehow both completely amoral and yet morally introspective: “my punishment is Alzheimer’s”; an amateur philosophy runs over the text like out-of-control backup vocals – “Montaigne’s Essays”, “Greek classics”, “Homer”, “Odyssey”, “Odysseus”, “Sophocles”, “Oedipus Rex”, “Oedipus”, “Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche” – only for the reader to be later informed that “I don’t know philosophy”; and the use of “hunting” as a metaphor for murder repeats so often that it becomes impossible not to ask if the author – just like with his protagonist – has forgotten what he has only just said a few pages earlier. 

For the author Clive James, successful writing was a process of “turn[ing] a phrase until it catches the light.” Labouring over the elegance of a sentence is not something that Kim Young-ha has likely ever done. At the end of I Hear Your Voice, when the story takes a semi-autobiographical turn, Kim speaks of the difficulties he was having finishing the novel. His blunt-force solution? “I began writing to a word count every day”. When Diary of a Murderer repeats the same turn into memoir, we hear it again: “We’re [novelists] built differently from Poets or critics. We’re the marines of literature, its manual laborers and butcher shop owners”. Perhaps for Kim, but it’s hard to imagine Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, or Hwang Sok-yong thinking this way about their work.

In love with storytelling but not language, Kim is just never going to be a literary sniper, someone who steps back from the action, steadies his thoughts, delicately selects a target, squeezes the trigger, and bets his success on a kill-shot. No! He is a lunatic, a mass shooter with too many guns and too much ammunition, firing indiscriminately into a crowded school yard. Sure, he misses the target a lot, but he was hoping only for a massacre, and that it definitely is.

His novels do this to you. They reach up from a pool of unconscious emotion and strangle the reader, ever tighter with each passing page. The imperfections fade under this grip, and you become absorbed, even fascinated, by the violence playing out on your own body. As the bruising settles into your skin, the sharp pain hums-down into a satisfying ache, you catch sight of yourself in a broken mirror and notice that you are smiling. It then dawns on you, that maybe, just maybe, you quite enjoy a little light choking from time-to-time. A little harder next time, please!

Kim’s mistakes here are not the result of laziness (not always anyway), but of bravery and impatience. This distinguishes Diary of a Murderer from his previous few books. Written as a journal, the short, punctual, detached, hasty musings of the author fit perfectly to theme; taking us into the cracking mind space of illness. There is no subtlety here, and this is just as well because subtlety wouldn’t be appropriate.

What I Have The Right To Destroy Myself and now Diary of a Murderer both gave its author, was a chance to be himself. To stop playing-up to his audience. All of Kim’s central characters are outcasts on the edges of ordinary life, but with these two books he doesn’t try so hard to universalise individual emotion. The numb disaffection of his prose is allowed its own space, unmolested by normalcy. Cold, callus, and inaccessibly fun, Kim’s literary style was always going to find a natural home with the internal thoughts of a suicide consultant or serial killer; those who hope for, and enjoy, the deaths of others.

And then just like that – with an overly-conceived, unwieldy, and yet satisfying twist – it ends prematurely and Diary of a Murderer breaks into short stories that feel more like lost ideas. Small, fractured, writing projects that our author couldn’t quite squeeze into a novel, and yet couldn’t bring himself to throw out. The less said about The Origin of Life and Missing Child the better, but then there is The Writer, and something delightful begins to happen.

Kim Young-ha is looking back on himself, and the unexpected success of his first book, with the harsh, sceptical eyes that he ordinarily applies to other people. He talks about the blur of writing, of being engulfed by a muse, of rediscovering himself in his work – “I hadn’t experienced such heights of productivity since my debut.” And he does it all with a raw honesty, “an unpublishable, erotic, experimental, disjointed novel, I didn’t need to reread what I’d written, and consistency of character wasn’t important”.

Asked by a young love interest what he does for a living, our narrator-author responds “I used to be pretty famous”. He talks her through the details of his first novel, and she looks back at him with an unimpressed glare, “Never heard of it”. But make no mistake, Kim Young-ha is back in his pomp here, and new audiences – not old enough to understand why he is famous – will at least begin to understand why he is so transfixing, and such an important counter-point to the Korean literary scene. (Even his Korean-to-English translator, Krys Lee, has dramatically upped her game from her previous effort on I Hear Your Voice).

Then the reader – with growing mood and excitement – gets to the last page, and is hit with “I slowly opened my eyes”. The moment crushes you. No! He isn’t going to do it! Surely not! But it continues like an all-to-obvious practical joke, and – in disbelief – you begin looking around for the hidden cameras. Kim is sometimes a little crude and loves to smuggle in a twist-for-twists sake, but certainly even he couldn’t possibly finish such a promising piece of writing with the child’s cliché of ‘then I woke up, and it was all a dream’. But, he, inexplicably, does!

If I wasn’t in a public café at the time, I would have thrown the book across the room. Do yourself a favour, and save yourself the aggravation, tear this last page out without reading it. Finish the book a few paragraphs early. Don’t let Kim Young-ha destroy your spirit and literary sensibility – forever a bad writer producing wonderful books.