“Faded, threadbare, worn out” – Review of Hwang Sok-yong’s ‘The Road to Sampo’

This is something of a departure for Hwang Sok-yong, a pre-departure. Ordinarily he writes to a theme, to what he knows, to what he can twirl and dance and seduce into a form of romance and remembrance.

An old socialist with weeping scars and a few large stories, Hwang’s work is all about protests, prison cells, life on the run, and the promise of sudden utopian change. Once a man desperately scratching around for fellow ideological travellers, he now puts pen to paper hoping for a little late-term recognition – one or two well-deserved awards which he can place high upon the mantle shelf, polish regularly, and point to when, and if, people come to visit.

He is an author of wonderful ability who writes, it seems, only to let people know how tough he had it back in the late years of the Korean ‘pro-democracy movement’ (the label now used as a coverall for the full spectrum of protestors – many of whom were not actually pro-democratic – who fought against the authoritarian governments of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan).

The Road to Sampo is a nice reminder that before this political tint took over his life and his work, there was a younger Hwang, still a writer, but interested much more in simpler things. For a start, he travelled! Not to form ties with some affiliate underground organisation, not to help the workers of some distant factory to unionise, not to escape a tightening circle of police, but only because there were things out there to see.

He is poor and walking! There are trains and buses, but they cost too much or are too inconvenient to wait around for. It is an old world where people go well out of their way just for the chance of a little company, a brief friendship on the trail… just someone to talk to: “Yong-dal ran after him. When he caught up with him, he said, gasping for breath, ‘Let’s go together. I’m going in the same direction as you are, at least up to Wolchul.”

Hwang’s characters here are a touch more desperate than he was at the time, and through them you begin to see the pre-echoes of what would later strangle his literature. There is plenty of delinquency and waste to be found in their choices, but the thick chains of work and money are always there, and always the reason for why they are travelling.

They chat in long and detailed sentences about the machinery at different work-sites, the training, the food, the benefits and the salaries. They speak quietly about the promise of distant jobs as if they were talking about pyramid schemes, hoping to get in fast before it all collapses and everyone is inevitably cheated.

There are bridges and tracks and paths and roads and rivers and trees and birds and fields and cows and dogs and clouds and wind and snow and lakes and eyes and lips and teeth and smiles and laughter and thick-running tears. They are all painfully alive, and aware of it in each moment. We are confronted by a fast changing Korea where very few people are actually changed, or have any hope of being so.

This is a story of men, so it is also a story of women and alcohol. A few loose coins for a few glasses of beer, or a few loose, flirtatious glances with the hope of sex, marriage, wives, and domestic bliss. Combine the two and you have a dreamy perfection: “Wouldn’t it be nice,” joked Chong, “If we had Paek-hwa pour wine for us?”

This is also a story of sloppy translation… or, perhaps more accurately, a story of sloppy writing through translation. No doubt all the hard narrative details are there, diligently scribbled from Korean to English, but there is no way to imagine that Hwang would be happy with the clumsy, unthinking, poorly selected, under-punctuated, and grindingly repetitious prose that finds itself onto nearly every single page.

Take the quote used above:

Yong-dal ran after him. When he caught up with him, he said, grasping for breath, ‘Let’s go together. I’m going in the same direction as you are, at least up to Wolchul.

Or this from page 1:

The construction season was drawing near to an end. Winter was not far off. The construction would come to a stop only to resume in the spring. He would have to leave. Three days ago they closed the construction office as he had expected.

Or this from page 2:

He walked up to Yong-dal, until he was only a few paces away from Yong-dal, and said…

And so it continues, page after page…

A barmaid (a “bitch”) stumbles unceremoniously onto the scene – “squatting on the ground… holding up the tails of her red coat with her hands… urinating” – and into the company of our two travellers. Just like that, The Road to Sampo becomes On the Road, all the way down to the loose sexual freedom that cut through Jack Kerouac’s novel and defined the genre of ‘Travel Diary’ ever since.

A quick inventory of each other’s “bundle” tells the story which the translated dialogue fails to. The men carry “hammers and saws”, their new female companion “a couple of old slips, panties, lipstick, powder and what not”. Each are stories of survival and suffering in a world without safety nets. What these few belongings have in common is the condition they are in, “washed out, faded, threadbare, worn out”.

With so little to go on, the faintest whisper of a pay day, of comfort, of any kind of improvement, steals the mind and turns people around. That whisper here is Sampo! A port town with nothing more than “some fishing and potato farming” now huffing on the rumours of government investment and the labour intensive business of “carrying tons of rocks and gravel”.

From one whisper others follow: Sampo is also “pretty”, with “lots of land”, where the “soil is good” and the “fishing is good, too”. So slowly, they begin to walk, only now with a little more purpose, a little more hope, and plenty more spring in their step. Because after all, “If it’s [Sampo] as good as you say, why not pitch our tents there and call it home?”

“The urine and shit dropped by foreigners” – Review of Nam Jung-hyun’s ‘Land of Excrement’

Mansu is hiding! Hiding and worrying about the “missiles”, the “soldiers”, their “colossal firepower”, and the “two or three hundred million dollars” that they are willing to spend just to kill him. Burrowing his way into the undergrowth of Mt. Hyangmi, Mansu thinks aloud about the disproportionate punishment coming his way, the army below him readying their weapons, and his ancestors… all of them!

Just as he has been reminded of throughout his young life, Mansu is now always looking to talk-up his pedigree. Three generations ago the mythologised noble bandit Hong Gil-dong stalked the Choson dynasty with the same blood in his veins. Before him, there was Tangun, offspring of a bear and god, ruler of the peninsula, and the mythologised first Korean.

With such royalty at his back, Mansu is chastising himself and trying to hush-away all that fear. The troops are American – the liberators and new foreign power to be tip-toed around. And that royalty, that legacy arching back to supposedly kind thieves and sacrificed deities, is Korean all the way down. Stories of appropriate hardship, injustice, and overdue righteousness – but more importantly, an inheritance so loose and deliberately empty that everyone has a claim, if they desire it.

Mansu spends most of his final minutes before us thinking about his final seconds: whether his body will be “broken into pieces”, or “explode together” with the mountain, or become reduced to “dust… blowing in the wind”. He thinks of Tangun and Gil-dong and whether, with such royal blood, he might be immortal, in a way: “will I really die because of that?”

He also doubts himself, doubts whether he is deserving of his genes and the label Korean – shifting fast between imagining himself as protected by heaven, and that of being “threw up… by the devil”, unrecognisable as a “human being”, “dirt, certainly dirt”. A man who “should die in vain without ever blossoming” having lived only a “ridiculous fable of a life, subsisting mainly on the urine and shit dropped by foreigners”.

It is here that Land of Excrement finds itself as a novel. No one will ever pick up this book and fall in love with the prose, the character development, the pacing of the narrative… This is an unpolished and unconcealed political statement about post-colonial Korea and its happy worship of a new foreign power to replace the old.

It is a story of national inferiority hiding behind a blanket of false pride and grandeur. Of streets and houses and schools and apartment complexes and jobs and shopping centres and parks and cafes and restaurants and of friendships and families and marriages and love affairs and chats about the weather, where people think themselves – at every turn – to be lions, while shuffling around in small steps, their eyes on the ground, and their shoulders slumped in subservient resignation.

Land of Excrement was the first novel to be dragged through the courts of an independent Korea, and its author, Nam Jung-hyun, the first writer to be arrested, indicted, convicted and imprisoned for putting pen to paper. All this, not for being anti-Korean, nor anti-government, but rather anti-American!

When it all kicks off we are on a twenty minute countdown to launch, “to ear-splitting noises”, and to death; and with Mansu contemplating sexual violence! The rape of his mother, his sister becoming the mistress of an American soldier, Master Sergeant Speed, and his own sexual assault of Mrs. Speed through near-childish curiosity:

I politely told her that I had to ask her a favour in the name of the Republic of Korea with its brilliant five-thousand year history… She smiled and asked me what that favour would be…

“I’m sorry, but you have to briefly take off your clothes.”

The full symbolism of this naïve lead-in to atrocity is open for interpretation. But the shallow symbolism is obvious, blunt and unimaginative – the work of a teacher trying to indoctrinate rather than that of a novelist trying to produce art, beauty or truth. And the juvenile simplicity of our main character continues after the attack:

[Mrs Speed] suddenly got up and frantically ran down the mountain, crying sharply,

“Help me! Help me!”

Why was she acting that [sic]? Running away with her dishevelled hair and torn clothes,

As Mansu watches on like a bemused student on the first day of school, we are supposed to nod our heads in agreement, as if everything was suddenly clear and obvious: decades of weakness and attachment has warped the Korean mind all the way back to childhood. But even children still have a sense of things, and can more often than not sniff-out right from wrong, good from evil. So where is the good to be found here? What is the message that Nam wants his readers to sit awake at night thinking about? The purifying value of revenge (even if only accidental) and the virus-like quality of depredation.

Either way, Mansu quickly finds himself on the run from Mr. Speed and his troops, and scrambling toward some brief salvation in the mountainside. It’s there, hiding, scared, and wishing to see his mother and sister one last time, that Mansu also begins retrofitting his crime to his adult frame, comparing himself to Jesus and humming about a newly discovered “very deep grudge”.

There was something of a controversy around the original publication of Land of Excrement, with Nam upset and claiming that it was done without his permission. The line which the establishments of Korean literature and Korean culture has settled-on is that this was all about Nam trying to assuage the censors and avoid prison.

Perhaps now we should think differently, or at least ask the question: with such rambling and raw prose, with such a subconscious-like flow to the story, and with such a disconnected and confused moral burn, maybe, just maybe, Nam Jung-hyun protested the publication for a literary reason? Maybe he didn’t want an experimental first draft pumped-out to the world and presented as the finished article.

His twenty minutes are up, and so Mansu makes one last desperate grasp for inspiration, for a legacy, and for national rebirth (in characteristically unmoored and probationary language):

Only ten seconds to go. Right. Now I’ll make a splendid new flag by tearing up my Taegeuk-patterned [Korean flag] undershirt. Then I’ll get on a cloud and cross the ocean. I’m planning to carefully stick this rapturous flag into the lustrous navels of women with milky skin, women lying down on that great continent, women that I appreciate. Believe me, Mother. I’m not lying. You still cannot believe me, trembling. What a pity! Look, now! Please look at these bulging eyes of mine! Well, do I look like I’ll die that easily? Ha-ha-ha!

“Unwanted life within” – Review of Pak Wanseo’s ‘Three Days in That Autumn’

It is one of those novels that starts with firm, knowing statements about past and future. Short, blunted sentences that stand outside the ordinary prose. “Three days remain.”, “The chair is absolutely useless.”, “In the spring of 1953, the war was still on.” On each one of these inflections we are expected to stop hard, our internal world shaking with the trace-discovery of gold – from here out we are supposed to be hooked with intrigue, and with the expectant pleasure of turning each page.

It rarely works!

The self-conscious writer can work like this, but the cheating mind often does not play along. It is the delicate work of psychopathy, plodding through life, never lost in the moment, always a step or two removed from the fun and emotion, dropping little traps for the unsuspecting reader. Often the habit cannot maintain. The act is forgotten. The words soon run without chains, and the actual writer can’t help but to soon show her face. With Pak Wanseo it’s different!

Naturally the self-conscious writer finds a self-conscious protagonist to do her bidding – young-ish, “all alone”, and quick to remind her audience that she is “perfectly qualified despite my childlike face.” She is starting-out in the shadow of the Korean War and the uncomfortably swollen laneways of Seoul, avoiding marriage, fighting back judgement, and swimming in cliché.

The neighbourhood is shabby, butting-up against degraded farmland and railway tracks, while our young doctor (and war veteran) waits impatiently for wealth and acceptance. Here the worn, fairy tale gloss of the narrative ends; and this feminist book rapidly becomes a book only of feminist pain and emptiness.

A victim of war-time sexual assault, our doctor decides to open a women’s clinic specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology; a first small step toward consolation. And immediately we are told just how brave and uncommon of a step this is, with local eyes narrowing-upon the new resident as if she were a pornographer:

Women in this neighbourhood are having babies left and right without any problems whatsoever. Why should a decent woman, unless she’s been cursed, need a woman’s clinic? What a shameful idea!

Everyone, from her landlord to her painters, her delivery men, the government inspectors, and her visiting father, feel this way. And the local women are in on the witch-hunt too, only knocking on her door when the pain of childbirth or miscarriage overcomes their otherwise jaundiced resentment: “If people find out later an unmarried girl’s been to a women’s clinic, she’ll be shamed… damned bitch!” They are followed into the surgery by unpleasant and unsympathetic relatives, hoping that the patient survives – and recovers – just long enough for a good scolding: “please save my wretched daughter.”

The more this novel steps into the mud and blood of abortions and stillbirths, the more it feels as though it were written by a man and not a woman. Everything is appropriately graphic and unsettling… but stereotypically so! It’s as though Pak is trying hard – very hard – to appear convincing and knowledgeable of women and their world. Much too mindful of her expectant audience, what we get is prose that is so overworked, and manicured, that it hits the page like a mass-produced children’s sticker.

Soon the war ends, the Americans hang around, prostitutes begin to scuttle in-and-out of the military wire by night, and the women’s clinic flourishes by day. The waiting room bulges each morning with these desperate entrepreneurs – the only women who enter the story confident, resilient, and unashamed of their chromosomes. Through smiles and laughter they walk in for their abortions, and leave with the same unshaken, self-deprecating humour, chuckling, grinning, and roaring away the bruising, the discomfort and the emotion.

They also put our doctor on edge, with her morose, brooding angst and judging scowl turning in a matter of pages from the understandable outgrowths of trauma, to an indulgent hatred. These prostitutes are also the only customers who actually pay the advertised prices, with everyone else commonly leaving “three times the normal fee” as a form of “hush money”.

The more she drinks-in her own depression, and refuses the happiness of a changing world, the more our doctor is consumed by the increasingly mechanical job before her:

I’ve done my job, driven by malicious hatred. To finish the procedure successfully, I could not do without my hatred even for a moment, hatred not only for the woman lying there on the table holding her foul smelling vagina up in front of me like a face, but also for the unwanted life within.

The “Three Days” mentioned in the title, are part of a tangential countdown to retirement and remembering. But more specifically, they are a part of the uninspired writing and translation process, where language repeats forgetfully and often (describing the uterus as a “cherry, then as a “ripe cherry”, and also “overripe cherry” across a handful of pages).

In light of all this, it isn’t hard to see how Three Days in That Autumn was selected as a title: sheer, uninspired, uninterested, matter-of-fact laziness. With such dullness and lack of imagination it is dangerous to think what Pak and Ryu Sukhee (translator) would have done with their hands on some literary favourites. Instead of The Picture of Dorian Gray we would have Picture Gets Old, Man Doesn’t; Frankenstein would be changed to Man Makes Monster, Doesn’t End Well; Lord of the Flies becoming Kids Are Mean; The Lord of the Rings altered to be Orcs, Elves and Dwarves Fight; and Harry Potter improved upon with Boy Does Magic.

When the stench of the prose eases, the narrative continues to lose its way, turning towards the description of dreams and a return to those prodding, supposedly meaningful sentences about chairs and picture frames. None of which return with the pop and importance that the build-up deserves; while many are simply forgotten about and abandoned on the page.

It is hard to see what others do here! At each step it feels as though Pak is desperate to isolate her reader, as if testing some expected patience and loyalty. And strangely Pak does have plenty of both out there, with her own flavour of cult following across Korean literature. You will have to ask those people exactly what they find so appealing about Pak’s work, because there are no hints whatsoever within Three Days in That Autumn.

The prostitutes dwindle, church steeples replace the military bases, and still business booms. The small foetuses are “scraped-out” in their “badly damaged… curled-up forms”, then cast aside “along with ordinary garbage” in an uncomfortably graphic advertisement for the ‘pro-life’ anti-abortion movement.

Behind it all there is no redemption, no surviving morality, nor message of hope. As soon as our doctor is retired and wealthy in her old age, she is also moving away to a brighter and more respectable neighbourhood – those women, and the feminist pretence, left behind with dewy eyes and ever-slumping shoulders, used and abandoned by one of their own.

“North Korea from the shore of the river, weeping” – Review of Yi Mun-Yol’s ‘An Appointment with My Brother’

“Father’s death itself was hearsay” writes Yi Mun-yol, “and it was only then that I felt the need to meet my brother.”

Korea is a country of eldest sons. The inheritors not of prestige and bloodlines, but of unpleasant, agonising responsibility. Well beyond the natural burdens of raising younger siblings and dealing with the paranoia of new parents, here it is a life of endless ritual, the nurturing of the family name, the legal requirement (literally) to care for aging relatives, and then even in death, the manicured upkeep of family graves.

There is so much hassle and baggage attached to this accident of birth, that it is often the first question asked by interested young women on tentative dates; a positive response bringing an end to the romance with the same speed and disgust of a positive herpes test.

So with exhaustion and ceremony on his mind our eldest son sets-off, all the while counting, building mental lists of his obligations, the gifts he must purchase, the rituals he must perform. And that is where the mundane and performance ends here – instead Yi has torn into the psychological heart of blood and belonging… of what ‘family’ is, and what it is not.

Divided by the 250 kilometre long, 4 kilometre wide strip of barbed wire, landmines, fortifications, and nervous stares, it is still possible for separated Koreans (North and South) to meet. In fact, other than the slightly prohibitive cost – and the nagging worry about whether everyone who needed a bribe actually got one – it is a rather trivial affair these days.

It all has to happen in China of course, and on any given night the border towns are thick with family reunions. They all tend to look the same: aged brothers and sisters torn apart by war and the politics of decolonisation; or Northern defectors heading back to visit the people left behind. A much rarer version of this story involves defections from South to North and the remnant offspring on each side; both inheritors of an unpleasant and unshakable stigma:

Mother never mentioned Father again ever since she learned, in the mid-eighties, that Father had five children from his second marriage in the North. Such fertility of Father’s must have felt like a betrayal to her who, after she was left behind at age thirty-three by Father’s defection, preserved her chastity without a single blemish to her honor and devoted herself solely to raising us three children.

As flavours of stigma go, this is certainly powerful, unpleasant, stomach churning, ulcer inducing… But there is a national element here too, a question of who are the true inheritors of history and culture, of which government and society is the more legitimate, and of how much the family of a defector can be trusted. Especially when they have daydreams like these:

In my childhood, whenever there was news of unrest along the armistice line, I imagined my Father leading an army into the south, mounted high on a white horse… I simply believed that the reason my Father’s name was absent from the top 100 North Korean politicians was the unreliability of the news source and nothing else.

Amongst the ordinary political reasons for his father’s name not being on that list, the most obvious is what fills-in the northern half of this tragedy. A South Korean who organises pro-North rallies, who agitates for revolution and reunification, who fights for the invading armies of Kim Il-sung, and who abandons his family to defect with those same retreating soldiers, is still, despite it all, a South Korean. An impurity, someone with dual loyalties. Some stigmas run a little deeper, are a little more life-shaping than others.

There is a lot of intra-Korean politics here, and a lot of glossy talk about reunification. And that’s the point! This story of long lost brothers, is also that of sisters, parents, children, grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and spouses. It is the story of a lost nation. But sensibly Yi leaves most of that to the ensemble, the fringe characters; all those South Koreans – part of the same ‘tour’ group – all gazing across from river banks and mountain slopes (“an ancient territory of Baekje”), staring hungrily at what was once ‘theirs’:

When I beheld the land of North Korea across the Tumen River, I felt an urge to drink, and after getting drunk I became sentimental and made bows towards North Korea from the shore of the river, weeping.

Through all this heat and emotion and yearning and nail scratching discomfort, our South Korean brother offers the reader something strange. He walks along the pages with a deliberate, numbed, calm; reminiscent of the emotionally-attached nihilism in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. Firmly committed to simply getting past each moment, step-by-step through difficulty and sea sick emotion, we are never left behind to wallow too long, and the language never imposes itself on us with over-description.

Instead the tension sits as obvious as a loaded gun to the head, all the while our brother goes about his day in small details: eating here…, walking there…, watching this…, talking to them…, remembering that…, offering this…, bowing to him…

Just how Yi has managed to do this so well, without leaving behind empty spaces in the narrative is perhaps something only he and Houellebecq knows, but it circles around and slowly, inconspicuously, the reader’s own pain is drip-fed into the characters. With the irony and symbolism stripped back, there is no bloating or sag to the prose or pacing, no unnecessary language at all… well almost!

Time to mention the role of the translator. And with An Appointment with My Brother, there are two! First was Suh Ji-moon, and then later Yi decided upon a rework, a touch-up for English speakers, and a new employee. This time around Heinz Insu Fenkl got the job, and the changes he makes, well… they sag!

With a thesaurus in hand and all the shame of a desperate student approaching a deadline, Fenkl walks through Suh’s writing, tweaking just enough language to make each sentence his own. “He arrived” becomes “He got in’’, “He’s going to sleep over” becomes “He’s going to stay at”, and so on. Even the title is smudged from An Appointment with My Brother to A Meeting with My Brother. Beyond making things just different enough to pass the plagiarism sensors, I challenge anyone to find these changes significant enough to warrant a rewrite, or even capable of passing Fenkl’s own standard of being more appealing to Western ears.

That any of it was considered necessary, comes from Yi as an underestimation of his Western audience’s capacity for nuance, and from Fenkl as an underestimation of everyone’s (Korean and Western alike) intelligence. The core of the actual new material is a six page internal ramble about the history of the Korean War, and a scattering of unnecessary, and overly explained, afterthoughts like this:

When morning comes, I will finally meet my brother whose face I have not seen, who is one of the closest blood ties I have in this world. What does he look like? How was he raised? What is he like? How did the children fare growing up with a father, unlike the three of us?

Without the added droop and second-guessing, Suh’s translation forces us to live – rather than to just read about – the “in born antagonism that exists between half-brothers” and halved nations. What can possibly be said, even in the kindest of terms and best of intentions, that isn’t also laced with poisonous comparison… and the taste of insult? The most sympathetic of questions are dirtied with patronisation and superiority, the most perfunctory are hierarchical and belittling. Your family and your memories are an offence to his, the life you have an act of violence against his Korea.

Along the way a fellow traveller from South Korea to the Chinese border leans over, grabs a hold of our distracted brother, and reignites a worn and whispered lecture about North-led reunification: “the greatest risk point of the unified Korea becoming communized will come three years after unification. By that time, many South Koreans would fall below the poverty line, as the South Korean economy would have been depleted on account of unification expenses.”

And here the tableau remains frozen, with 75 million walking, talking cases of split personality disorder, all dreaming aloud about a bright future of cohabitation, about the great promise of renewing old vows and diving back into a second marriage to the same old spouse. And yet no one wanting any of it to be expensive, painful, or even the slightest bit inconvenient.

Perhaps the best, and only, thing you can do is mourn shared relatives, and dig your nails firmly into tradition, ceremony, and a little bit of indulgent fantasy. And then stare into the face of a departing brother (who you have only just met), and say this about the mother and family that replaced yours all those years ago [emphasis added]: “please give my love to my sister and my nephews and nieces. And to our mother, too.”

“A breath, a breath, a breath…” – Review of Lisa See’s ‘The Island of Sea Women: A Novel’.

Off the southern coast of Korea lies Jeju, a chubby little island of volcanos, seafood, and women. Still deep in their traditional lives, these woman are the men of their families – earning all the money, bringing home all of the food, and moaning loudly to each other about their lazy husbands back at home raising the crying children (“My husband drinks my earnings”… “Mine gambles away the allowance I give him”). They carry happy ocean-monikers like dolphin or mermaid, the fatter few are porpoises, the skinniest are eels; in all shapes they are the haenyeo, literally translated to “sea women”.

Territorial and protective of their beaches, the haenyeo dive in deep, frozen water for oysters, sea slugs, conch, sea urchins, octopus, abalone, and anything else that can’t swim fast or far enough from their knives and nets. But why women? The traditional answer has to do with subcutaneous fat and the challenges of staying warm during long periods at sea. The truth, like so much else in Korea, has to do with the Japanese.

During the colonial period, the sight of local men gathering along the coastline in the dim morning hours, heading-out together in a convoy of small boats, was much too much freedom and risk for the invaders to handle. So the men went home, sat in their gardens, and with defeated looks and loss of purpose, gazed away into the empty horizons; while the haenyeo took over their jobs, the ocean, the island.

Yet one can’t help but to wonder how many of those husbands, as they marched up the beaches – and away from their livelihoods – with bayonets at their backs, couldn’t believe their good fortune. The diving on Jeju is done without any kind of modern equipment, the ocean floor is sometimes 30 meters down, and the animals they hunt are hidden and protected by rocks and reef. So as you might imagine, every time anyone blinks or a page is turned in Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women, some poor haenyeo is drowning, passing-out under water and desperately being rescued, or getting unpleasant medical news about what a lifetime of oxygen deprivation and extreme cold does to the human body.

With every tragedy, large and small, Shaman Kim becomes a wealthier lady. Seafarers of all stripes are a superstitious bunch, but down there in Jeju everything goes a step or two further than just reading omens, praying for good fortune, or even personifying the ocean and its moods. Throw-backs to lost dynasties and fearful empires, the sea women of Jeju talk to, and beg the forgiveness of, ghosts.

Greedy and generous in equal measure, the spirits demand money, gifts, and ceremony (in that order) to calm their anger. And they always insist that it be handed over to the welcoming arms of Shaman Kim… for safe keeping. That Kim is also the only person who talks to these needy ghosts, and who translates their intentions back to the haenyeo, is a conflict of interest that no one ever makes much of a fuss about.

See’s novel runs through generations of family and change and modernisation. The Japanese invade, and then they invade a little more thoroughly. Then they lose and the new foreign faces are Americans; the country divides; war starts again; the authoritarianism of Syngman Rhee becomes the authoritarianism of Park Chung-hee and then Chun Doo-hwan…

At each step, as an island – separated from the rest of Korea – Jeju suffers through suspicion and bleeds through massacre. And with it all, our novel both finds its purpose and loses its way!

After independence, the first and only rumours about Jeju were that it was ‘turning red’. That the North Koreans had infiltrated the island, were arming people for rebellion, and that those damn haenyeo with their collectivist fishing habits, and ethereal ideas about ownership and income, were the problem.

Yet with so much life and tradition along those shorelines, it was the inland mountains that authorities lost most of their sleep over. “On November 17, 1948, President Rhee placed Jeju under martial law and issued the first order:  ANYONE FOUND NOT WITHIN FIVE KILOMETERS OF THE COAST WILL BE UNCONDITIONALLY SHOT TO DEATH.”

Then, as every Korean knows, came the arrests, the executions, and the butchery. And it is stories like these that See is desperate to rinse-out onto the page for us. What is left is a story that screams and repeats, berating the reader with a simple sounding message: bad things happened on Jeju, and no one then, nor since, has cared nearly enough about them! Bukchon village is where the worst and most complete violence was found:

There are those who say no one survived the Bukchon massacre. Others say that only one person lived. Still others will tell you that four survived. Or you’ll see accounts that say 300 people died. Or maybe it was 350, or 480, or 1,000 people…

It was 300! Enough has been done and said and dug and excavated and argued and investigated since to know that 300 is about right. And 300 is plenty! 300 men and boys killed because they represented a threat, not because they were one. Stains like this ran thick across the peninsula in the days, weeks, months, years after liberation, and it’s no wonder that Koreans have preferred not to think about it too much since.

Imagine if, after the defeat of Hitler’s army, the few Jews who survived the worst horrors of the holocaust, staggered from the gates of Auschwitz and Dachau, took a few deep breaths of free air, turned on their heels, walked back inside with purpose and determination, fired up the gas chambers again, reignited the human incinerators, and continued on with the Final Solution, driving their fellow Jews back to their deaths.

I too would like Koreans to wrestle more maturely with this difficult history of theirs, this moment when they picked-up the whips of their oppressors and continued on with the flogging of their own people. But by forcing an extra 150 pages into what was (until that point) a wonderful little novel, is not the way to achieve it. Instead, most readers will likely get through about half of The Island of Sea Women and then stop, realising that the book has long-ceased to be about those sea women at all.

They are still there! Each year a flood of tourists fly or ferry their way down to Jeju, rush to the sandy beaches, and listen for the sumbisori, “the special sound – like a whistle or a dolphin’s call – a haenyeo makes as she breaches the surface of the sea and releases the air she’s held in her lungs, followed by a deep intake of breath.”

Walking-talking members of an “intangible cultural heritage”, the haenyeo are now, oddly, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and have to fight their way past holiday-goers and camera lenses in order to hunt in their traditional waters. But once there, away from the sand and rock, and underneath the slosh of waves and noise, everything becomes suddenly, delightfully, meditative.

As the depth and pressure increases you can feel the rhythm of your own heart, your pulse resonating softly in your larger veins. The cold water and the worries of life weaken with all other nervous sensations, and slowly with each dive, the nag of air and existence become less important too. Fading slowly away, until, finally:

“A breath,

a breath,

a breath...”

The Korean Romeo and Juliet – Review of Horace Allen’s ‘The Faithful Dancing-Girl Wife’

“He was not an ordinary man” goes the story, “in addition to a handsome, manly face and stalwart, he possessed a bright, quick mind, and was naturally clever. A more dutiful son could not be found.”

And just what counts as dutiful in this day and age? Obsessing over your father’s health and whims with the energy and dedication of a budding serial killer; guiding Dad’s head to the pillow each night, and greeting him with a smile when he opens his eyes in the morning. This is the fluff and ceremony of Choson, Confucian Korea.

Once he has finished massaging his father’s shoulders, spoon feeding him his breakfast, and praying over his daily happiness, our extraordinary young man has a few hours of daylight left for himself. Here he wanders the countryside, drinking-in “the beauty of the scene along with the balmy, perfume-laden spring zephyrs.”

He also takes endless fun from mistreating his faithful servant and bullying the local men. Ruling over the whole district, his father is a Prefect, which allows his sixteen year old son to saunter through both streets and fields with the air of a prince-in-waiting.

All of this harmony, hierarchy, and natural order is broken, appropriately, by a girl: “angelic face”, “ravishing beauty”, “the prettiest view he had ever seen”. Her age is anyone’s guess and clearly not important, but unsettlingly she is playing on a child’s swing.

“Dumb with amazement” our pubescent prince runs down the hill in a sweaty mess to meet her. But he is clearly not the most athletic boy, because by the time he gets to her house she has long since grown bored of the swing and jungle-gym, and has gone back inside.

His charming first impression goes like this: “demand[ing] her name” from the housekeeper (it is Chun Yang Ye or Fragrant Spring). Happy with this information, he begins yelling from the door-step “I yah! Superb; I can see her then, and have her sing and dance for me”, “Go and call her at once, you slave.”

But if you are thinking that our young prince could, and should, work on his manners and his seduction, then what is there to say about the “slave” who relays the message in the tone of a slut-shaming priest:

[It’s] the governor’s son, and he wants to see the Fragrant Spring.

Who told [him] my name?

Never mind who told him; if you did not want him to know you, then why did you swing so publicly?

She meets him, she smiles, and that’s more than enough: “you must be mine, you must marry me”, “heaven must have intended us to be man and wife.”

From here you can probably see where this is going! Of course Chun Yang is a girl, and so who is she to reject the little prince’s offer. But the problem is rather one of fathers and families. Our two young lovers come from different worlds, and are also bound to marry when, and to whom, their parents choose for them. They are star-crossed lovers… but not without options: “we can be privately married just the same.”

And so we have our story of woe… Juliet and her Korean Romeo!

But what we have before us with The Faithful Dancing-Girl Wife also comes through the pen and questionable discretion of Horace Allen.

A missionary in late-Choson, Allen dug deep into Korean literature, hoping to connect Western readers with his adopted home. The first trouble with his project however, was also the trouble he had in this specific instance: selection. With different titles, details, lengths and characters, The Faithful Dancing-Girl Wife was, and still is, ubiquitous across the peninsula. And based on what we have before us, Allen seems to have made his choice based on the relative popularity of the Seoul edition (gyeongpan).

Allen had another motivation for this as well, an unshakable idea about Korean culture, something that pushed his translation from restatement to reinvention. As the first American Presbyterian to arrive in Korea, Allen had few people to bounce his first impressions of the country against. Still he landed on something remarkably close to the truth, even if a touch reductive: Korea was stiflingly, rigidly, unpleasantly patriarchal.

This is where Allen imposes himself too much over the text, flushing each scene with a red-hot masculinity, overly submissive women, and a mistrust of even the slightest glimpse of sexuality. Further on top of that is a hard and constant slime of social hierarchy.

So despite his obnoxious behaviour, our young prince is built into a saviour of sorts, even when he is abandoning his new wife. At all moments she is falling over herself to be grateful for the prince’s attention; her emotions never properly articulated beyond a motherly concern for her husband. Always the happy captive to the higher world of men and their shifting morality:

If you go to Seoul you must not trifle, but take your books, study hard, and enter the examinations, then, perhaps, you may obtain rank and come to me. I will stand my hand shading my eyes, ever watching for your return.

With only half the characters allowed to develop and grow, the translation jumps and turns and pauses and lurches and twists with a nauseating inconsistency. Allen was no champion of the overly-male Korea he found shining-in from all directions, but he was a diagnostician. So when he describes Chun Yang as a “faithful wife, who became the mother of many children”, make no mistake, he is talking her up in the highest possible terms that would be comprehensible at that time… in the only way that would make sense to those around him.

In its final form, Allen’s translation reads almost as a coming-of-age novel, with only one central character – the journey of our young boy from adolescence to adulthood. And deep in the trenches of men and their misbehaviour, the translation nearly brushes over the key tension between our warring families, which is less Capulet and Montague than Prince and Pauper. A hierarchical strain that drains the life from the story, but which also keeps it shakily coherent.

Running the risks of cursed households, our besotted teenagers marry in secret and scoff at the risk of being disowned; vowing from there-out to “live and die” together. Each night once their parents nod off they sneak out to frolic, hold hands, and even dare to take swigs of “medicated wines”, stolen in advance from dusty liquor cabinets.

Until the inevitable happens that is, and our boy’s father manages to finally pull enough strings and get his son a cushy job at the treasury department… in faraway Seoul. Our hero is “struck dumb” his new wife suicidal “we must die, we cannot live apart”, and still, when push comes to shove, that freshly made marital promise is abandoned in a blink.

In fair Verona neither gang violence, nor murder, treachery, poison, criminal charges, nor banishment could hold love apart. Here in Choson-Korea all it takes is a job!

Soon a love triangle forms, Chun Yang finds herself “chained and thrown in prison”, and the neighbourhood cries in unison at the tragedy of heartbreak. Despite moaning-on about it to everyone within earshot, and talking-up her own convictions and courage, Chun Yang never does find the stomach to kill herself. Instead, of course, our young truant returns, saves the day as all good men should… and ruins the polish of our Shakespearian analogy.

The Korean Cinderella – Review of Rausch, Lee, and Lee’s ‘The Story of Changhwa and Hongnyon’

All good stories of a certain age start this way, with disappointment… and a sudden, swollen belly – a “warmhearted” husband, a barren wife, and the “pity” of “heaven”.

This is Korea, so things twist early with shamanistic intent. A single flower floats purposefully towards our wife, Mrs. Chang. As she catches it, a “whirlwind” kicks-up. From the dust and bluster a small fairy emerges, wiggles into Mrs. Chang’s “bosom”, and poof! Just like that, she’s pregnant.

It is possible in all of life to do too good of a job, and our fairy certainly seems guilty of this. The baby stays put in her mother’s womb for “10 months”, and when it is finally delivered has a glowing, “jade-like” appearance. Overdosed and over-treated for her infertility, Mrs. Chang’s luck swings too far in the opposite direction and soon enough there is a second pregnancy and a second child.

If you are thinking that Mrs. Chang and her husband (referred to only as the Overseer) might be happy with all of this magical good fortune, then guess again. Both children, Changhwa and Hongnyon, are girls, and hence obviously unacceptable! So much so that the Overseer spends his nights stressing about his wife’s karma: “This insignificant woman must have committed many crimes in her previous life and so cannot live long in this world.”

Sure enough she soon dies! But not before a deathbed request is asked of the Overseer: that his heart will not “gradually change” and that he will not “take another woman”.

But no sooner than Mrs. Chang is in the dirt of the “family plot”, her once faithful husband discovers that he is incredibly horny. So he quickly and appropriately marries “a woman named Ho”, and casually tells his two heavily grieving daughters that all is well, and not to worry, because he was unable to control his urges and so “he had no choice”.

And that brief sexual dry-spell really has lowered the Overseer’s standards. We are told that Mrs. Ho is, in all her animal detail, quite the nauseating picture: “her cheeks protruded, her eyes bulged out like a bug’s, her nose was like of someone who had suffered from smallpox, her lips were like those of a cat fish”… it goes on: “her voice was like that of a wolf”, and on, “her hair was like that of a pig…” A ridiculously long way around telling us that “she was difficult to even look at.”

Of course how she looks is a mirror of the person underneath, jealous, angry, manipulative and always plotting for “a way to harm Changhwa and Hongnyon.” So our story heats up with the one clichéd character that it was previously missing: the evil stepmother.

Mrs. Ho goes after the eldest daughter first and plants the idea in the Overseer’s mind that Changhwa is a nightwalking hussy. So to restore some family honour it is quickly agreed that she must be killed – but not before a final chat with a compassionate tiger: “Your mother plotted against an innocent child and killed her. Did you really think Heaven would be indifferent to such evil?”

The tiger promptly loses his composure and starts selectively eating ears, arms and legs. And feeling the heady atmosphere, Hongnyon decides that suicide is the only path forward, and drowns herself in the same lake in which her sister was previously murdered.

Suddenly we are dealing with ghosts and paranormal detective work by the newly arrived Chong Tongho, who by day works as a government magistrate. He soon strikes-up a conversation with the dead sisters, chats-them-up talking about how “pretty and talented” they are, and is then blackmailed by the ghost of Hongnyon: “think kindly of this girl’s pitiful soul and resolve my grudge by exonerating my older sister of this false charge [infidelity]. If you do that, this town will be safe and enjoy peace.”

It ends as any good Cinderella Story should: redemption, unnecessary violence, happily ever after, and all the rest! Except for the limp-wristed Overseer that is, who, remember, happily agreed to have his daughter butchered. For her trouble Mrs. Ho is “cut in pieces”, while her husband is somehow awarded “a special pardon”… he was deceived after all!

Again unable to keep it in his pants for very long, the Overseer takes this new opportunity and marries a third wife. Looking less like a pig, she is also much more acceptable to the eyes of heaven. Soon she gives birth to twin girls, and then, just like that, at this late hour in the story we are having reincarnation thrust down our throats.

This is what passed for a Choson-era fairy tale, and remarkably also as a sustaining moral lesson in modern day Korea… The Story of Changhwa and Hongnyon.

“We’re tiny dwarfs” – Review of Cho Se-hui’s ‘The Dwarf’

Dwarfs are uncomfortable little creatures. Nothing fits the way it ought to and everything has a life of its own; no dexterity, no coordination between limbs. A Frankenstein of disproportionate body parts, nerves, bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and sinew, all dancing out of tune to impossible, foreign, music.

“Before the men with the sledgehammers moved to the next house they had watched the woman and children in silence.” Cho Se-hui is writing a story that everyone here knows, whether they witnessed it or not. It is Korea old and new, proud and ashamed, guilty and victimised, necessary and indulgent; it is national identity. “The woman and children hadn’t opposed the men, they hadn’t cried. The men had found this disturbing.”

Others fight and kick and cry and beg and threaten and repeat. This is the metal and fire of change and rebirth. It rolls over the countryside, over slums, and over people. Everyone will slowly benefit, but the price is high… and painful!

“In no time the roof and walls were levelled, leaving only dust.” And that night he is burning his kitchen door to cook and stay warm while “his children were asleep in the tent.” This is a novel about the next morning, the next evening, the exact moment when there is no more fuel for the fire; nothing else to burn.

This was Korea deep in the poverty of Japanese colonialism, war, and hand-to-mouth farming. Before it was cut in two, the peninsula was already divided: heavy industry in the north, agriculture in the south. So when that line was eventually drawn across the 38th parallel (hugged-tight by soldiers with guns) South Korea was at a sharp disadvantage.

In 1962 President Park Chung-hee was trying to change all of this. He announced the first ever Five Year Economic Development Plan, and stared back at his nation with a rough and step-fatherly contempt. He then did away with the mess of democracy, the atavism of environmental worry, and the tedious, obstructive pity of human dignity and labour rights. Park’s new South Korea would export its way to prosperity… no matter the cost.

Within a few decades everything below the Demilitarised Zone was dominated by “crony capitalists”, “powerful [family] conglomerates”, “strict national security laws”, and “societal ills caused by industrialisation”. It was also shockingly rich, turning the script on its northern brother, and chasing their former masters, Japan, into the smog of high-tech superpower.

It was also a country of panic and insecurity, where the tightest and most familiar emotion was always exhaustion. A world where sons are too physically tired to cry when their fathers die, where schooling and knowledge is only of the kind which drags children from families, and it’s not just that “there isn’t a country to save anymore” but that someday – with all this flood of globalisation – that child of yours, if by some marvel he or she is successful and alive, “would be thinking in a different language.”

If you are less lucky, then you are the dwarf! Living by an old river bank, the dark water creeping under your front door, chasing down odd jobs with the few tools you have left, and attacked by local gangs for daring to do so. When asked mid-beating “How many children do you have?” you answer with the only happy thought that ever crosses your mind, “three… they aren’t dwarfs”.

Written in short and urgent prose, nothing gets in the way here. The edges don’t fluff-outwards with colour and life… and there is no hope! Cho resists the obvious urge of redemption around the corner; the possibility of happiness, and of someone, anyone, saying aloud that it was all worth it in the end! This is humiliation and agony all the way down: “Our life is greyness.”

And there is an important undercurrent of purpose here, something that explains the language and the structure of the prose. This is a story written from within that horrible moment. So just like her characters, Cho was dodging the secret police and the national censors. She had to smudge the pages just enough, and in just the right way, so that the printing presses would still run, oblivious to what they had before them. And she had to do so with a simplicity that would appeal to the poorly educated man or woman on the street.

At a million copies, and in its 200th printing, it is safe to say that she achieved her goal, and that The Dwarf did its job!

It is a landscape and a pain that is now hard to imagine. Perhaps you are not the dwarf in this story, but you are his daughter limping into the local brothel, asking under her breath for an application form. Or perhaps you are his son, becoming “the man of the family” in his teenage years, only to quickly fumble the responsibility and lose his job for daring to join a trade union; at night watching everyone go hungry without your salary. Or you are the dwarf’s wife, keeping track of a pathetically slim “budget book” of the household expenses, as each day your family slips into an inescapable debt; thinking aloud that “dying is easier than living.”

Either way it is not long before you are sitting in the visitors’ gallery, surrounded by anger, and listening to the medical jargon of how a knife slides through human flesh. How those arteries break, those tendons snap, how the muscle peels-back, and how the body freezes with shock. Next to you people are whispering, wondering if the rumours are accurate, “if it was true that the defendant’s father was a dwarf.”

The pressure of the Park Chung-hee years broke with assassination and massacre – and soon everyone knew someone who spent their days throwing Molotov cocktails at lines of riot police. When the haze finally cleared, when the dictators were gone dead or arrested, and the new halls of politics were thick with former-activists and human rights lawyers, a final insult was written into language and culture. Something that was impossible to say at the time to describe those horrible decades: it was “The Economic Miracle”… A miracle!

“Father’s height was forty-six inches, his weight seventy pounds”… In Park Chung-hee’s Korea, in the bosom of the miracle, “We’re tiny dwarfs – dwarfs.”

“The hallmark of a Nunchi-deficient person” – Review of Euny Hong’s ‘The Power of Nunchi’

When you walk into the room, everyone is laughing a bit too hard at the not-particularly-funny joke of an older woman you’ve never seen before. Do you:

A) Step in with a really funny joke, definitely much better than the one you just heard. Your new colleagues are going to love this!

B) Laugh along with the others, even though it’s not very amusing.

C) Find a tactful moment to introduce yourself to the older woman, who you’ve correctly assumed must be the head of the company.

If you chose A, you seriously need to work on your nunchi. If you chose B, good work, you read the room correctly and picked up the right cues from your new colleagues. If you chose C, congratulations,

But if you happen to be a normal-enough, socially functioning adult, then you didn’t choose A, B, or C. And the rest of this circular ‘book’, full of similarly false choices and unashamed orientalism, is not for you either!

Nunchi, as Koreans will tell you, is the ability to understand people and situations with a fast and instinctive radar. It is there within the DNA of every Korean (literally), and coursing through the blood of the nation; all stretching back to the first Korean – and mythical demi-god – Tangun.

From this fairy story our ‘author’, Euny Hong, does not miss a beat… nor an opportunity. Nunchi was there helping Koreans to “overcome more than 5000 years’ worth of slings and arrows.” It was there inside “Confucian principles” helping to build “a harmonious society”. And it was there within “semiconductors and smartphones” as Korea manufactured its way to wealth.

Just how the rest of the world managed to achieve all these things – and often much more quickly – without access to this superpower is anyone’s guess! But don’t hangout for an explanation, a look into those fantastical claims, and a scouring of the detail; Hong is not that type of ‘author’. As an example of her disinterest in her own arguments, only a few pages after talking about those semiconductors and smartphones as the embodiment of modern Nunchi, she is – with neither irony nor memory – proclaiming “Nunchi’s worst enemy: the smartphone.”

Just how Nunchi-infused economics and development produces its own worst enemy, we’ll never know; because again, Hong doesn’t care to tell us. But in her absence, it is worth running the loop in your head and seeing how far your credulity will stretch: a society where everyone has an enemy in their hand, and who, through Samsung, are the world’s largest manufacturer of the enemy, are still somehow the clean-skinned gallant heroes, riding-in with purpose to save the rest of us!

The better instincts of the reader soon become a problem here. Accidental tautologies like this beg for clarity, beg for the ‘author’ to offer something, anything that shows her to be engaged in her own writing. Instead The Power of Nunchi wanders from thought-to-thought with the erratic indifference of an escaped mental patient.

A few breaths later Hong is re-asking and re-answering the same question, “where did Koreans get their Nunchi?” But this time the answer is Hong Gildong! A real life thug turned pre-modern folk-hero; and apparently someone oozing at the pores with a rich Nunchi. Which, we are told, helped him to avoid assassination and to rise from illegitimate cast-off to become king.

A lesson for all: when you use a reference of any kind, it is first helpful to read the bloody thing… in full. If Hong Gildong should be looked back upon as a paragon of Nunchi, then there are a few quick complications which need addressing: why didn’t it deter him from committing mass murder, from theft, from ritual executions, from dynasty-wide terrorism, and from owning sexual slaves. Read just slightly beyond the title, and Gildong was a nasty little character… in both official documents and in popular fiction.

So where to from here? “A Nunchi self-assessment quiz” and little gems like this:

Here, “yes” answers indicate high nunchi levels:

• I feel awkward saying something without knowing the other person’s mood/mental state.

• Even if someone is saying something indirectly, I still comprehend the subtext.

• I am good at quickly discerning the other person’s mood and inner state.

• I do not make other people uncomfortable.

• At a social gathering, I am able to distinguish easily between when it’s time to leave and when it’s not time to leave.

And this:

You are a tourist in a former Iron Curtain country. You are awakened one morning by a loud siren. You stick your head out of the window and hear an announcement from giant loudspeakers, left over from the martial-law era. You notice people on the street are scurrying. Do you:

A.      Say to yourself, “Oh, those alarms are so annoying. I guess you can take the nation out of communism, but you can’t take communism out of the nation.”

B.      Scream at everyone on the street to chill the hell out because you’re trying to sleep.

C.      Go back to bed

D.       Start packing your bags.

Correct answer: D. This one’s obvious in theory… this exact situation happened to me.

Just what the insight is here, again no-one knows and it’s not explained in any serious detail; except perhaps that we now recognize that our ‘author’ considers her own Nunchi to be in good standing. Next it’s “The Eight Rules for Nunchi”, a guide for slipping Nunchi into your dating life, and another guide to “Survive the Holidays”…

Soon you are expecting the next page to have a Nunchi jigsaw puzzle, followed by a Nunchi colouring page, then a Nunchi advent calendar, a Nunchi collage, a Nunchi stamp collection, and finally a few empty pages for you to fill-in yourself with the beginnings of a Nunchi diary.

The Power of Nunchi is a ‘book’ in desperate search of content, and Euny Hong is an ‘author’ with nothing to say. When she contrasts Nunchi-rich Korea with Nunchi-poor “Western culture” it is with statements like this: “Empathy is valued over understanding”. Confused? I bet you are! Which is the supposed bad side in this split, the empathy or the understanding? Which side is the good side? Aren’t they both fairly positive things? Aren’t they essentially the same? How is it possible to empathise without also having understanding? How can you have understanding of someone without also empathising with them?

But don’t bother looking back at Hong for help with this – she doesn’t know either!

This money-grabbing embarrassment of ink and paper ends with a casual attempt at reflection: “One reason I wrote this book is that many other advice books seem to offer “help” that I don’t consider helpful.” Now with that as her goal, and with the hollow nonsense that she sent away for publication, I challenge anyone not to ask aloud the obvious question: is this not “the hallmark of a Nunchi-deficient person”?

“Semblance of life” – Review of Kim Tong-ni’s ‘Red Clay Tales’

There are two ways for this to start. With a pair of yellow dragons, happy in their violence, wounded and bleeding into the soil. Or with a kind-hearted oaf, thick through his limbs, “grizzled” by overwork, and hoping – in between cigarettes – to feel just a little more alive.

This is the Korean version of things, so we are dealing with the lumbering idiot… his name is Oksoe.

The taste of dragons still lingers somewhat, but only in the rough and impulsive tempers of our characters, and in the stained landscape: “Dragon Stream”, “Red Clay Valley”. And it’s in this weed-friendly valley – “green as far as the eye can see” – where everything happens; what little of it there is!

A sign of the smallness and the suffocation, on most days the people who live here are either drunk or working hard at it. Grinding her teeth with anger and purpose, Oksoe’s young wife wanders quickly onto the page: “Bastard and bitch together, one blow from a knife…” She is falling over her body as much as her words, and her jealous mutterings are about another man. She is also spilling her wine, which is much more unforgivable.

On cue the other man, Tukbo, is wandering down the mountain, happy and loud, his skin a “copper-like” blue. He is “swinging a wild boar upside-down in one hand”. The question of Puni’s fidelity doesn’t come up, in fact both men seem nearly indifferent to the pouting woman now dosing-off in the grass. There is something much more meaningful and much more exciting to plan for: bloodshed!

It is here, and only here, that this famous Korean tale finds something worth talking about; something half-insightful. “A flame blazed in both men’s eyes alike. It was a fearful flame, fierce enough to melt sulphur under the ground”, and so a bruising picnic is decided upon for the next day.

In the same familiar green field, our elephant-like men sit in deep grass and drink wine by the bowl. Repetition is a large part of the message here. They are naked to their waists, women don’t enter the conversation, cigarettes are smoked, laughter echoes between the mountains, and everyone is deeply, deeply happy in their moment.

Then with the same joyful tone – while still courteously filling each other’s bowls and sharing the best cuts of pork – carefully measured insults begin stumbling into the language: “You bastard…”, “You filthy old man…”, “You damned butcher…”, “You blasted thief…” 

It is all performative, an act of sorts; a limbering-up ritual so that both men are ready for the ensuing fun. And what fun it is! Jabs are thrown, heads are smashed, eyes swell, noses collapse, cheekbones fracture, ribs are bruised, teeth are lost, jaws are broken, groins are kicked, and skin is eaten: “Oksoe chewed noisily at the flesh from Tukbo’s shoulder he had in his mouth, then spat out the bloody lump.”

Yet through the near-death carnage, both men fizz with a rarely felt happiness. They egg each other on to try a little harder, to do more damage, shrugging-off explosions of blood, all the while continuing their previous conversation “in a kind of sing-song glee.”

It is violence for its own sake, but not violence without a purpose. In his biographical novel, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky talks about a moment towards the end of his prison sentence in a Siberian gulag. A fellow inmate, someone who had always followed the prison rules, suddenly, for no noticeable reason, launched into a fierce rage across the prison yard. Watching his friend do this, and imagining the horrific public torture that the guards would inflict upon him, Dostoevsky had an insight into what hopelessness and boredom can do to a man:

All this disorderliness has its special risk, so it all has a semblance of life, and at least a far-off semblance of freedom. And what will one not give for freedom? What millionaire would not give all his millions for one breath of air if his neck were in the noose?

It was the previous spring when Tukbo first wandered into town, and announced himself, naturally, through brutality and alcohol. A bar fight to be precise, and the lost pride of some unhappy gamblers. Oksoe watched-on with growing excitement as the slighted men were all “soon sprawling on the ground”. But it wasn’t until he felt that first punch and the tightening of Tukbo’s grip around his neck that “Oksoe suddenly felt his heart fill with joy as though he was being lifted into the air.”

Before this wonderful twinkling of asphyxiation, Oksoe had been alone – so different in size and power and energy from those around him, that his gifts sat with him as a scratching, schizophrenic voice in the ear. A silent and impossible stress.

Oksoe’s family tolerated him only as much as the rest of the village did – an attitude more closely described as fear or vulnerability. If they didn’t tolerate him, what else could they do? Like a tiger who has taken residency in your house, it is best just to smile, over-feed him, and hope he doesn’t get too playful with you.

Lonely evenings spent climbing to the peaks of mountains, throwing boulders around for entertainment, and casually self-harming with agricultural tools, all came to an end that night in the bar. Tukbo quickly moved himself into the house next door, and “their lives had begun from that day.” Both men had found their semblance of life.

But this is a story about Korea. One that Koreans love and retell. Just why that is? Who knows! Ask a Korean and shoulders begin to shrug and unsatisfying answers about how tradition doesn’t need explaining are offered.

Based on when it was written, Red Clay Tales probably has something to do with Japanese colonisation; and perhaps even the division of the peninsula. But if so, then who represents Korea in our story? The two powerful giants? Unlikely! The villagers skulking around in the shadows, trying desperately not to offend them? This is certainly more plausible. But things still don’t quite fit!

Red Clay Tales is a revelry in the joys of violence, not in the impotence of the average man. This is power and pain, insult and trauma, blood and bruise; no place for the weak, no place for suffering of any kind. These are the type of men that set dates on their calendars, pack festive lunches, and plan ahead for frenzy and carnage… even murder if it comes to that. They are Greek gods rampaging through the countryside, scarring the landscape in their image, and building-up their failures into hard virtues.

Take it as you like, but whichever way you try to spin it, this is not a Korean story!

“The leftover hours of life” – Review of Kim Young-ha’s ‘I Hear Your Voice’

“A motorcycle takes on different styles for different drivers” writes Kim Young-ha, “Taeju’s driving was like an effortless, dashing cursive”.

The adrenaline and the professional subtleties of the road, cars, speed, noise, engineering, and oily exhilaration, are not new themes for Kim. A near-Freudian repression forcing itself into his mind and pen, he’s been here before in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself as well as Your Republic is Calling You. But never before has he tried it on so thick and mushy.

Through simple, clumsy, unpolished prose – all childishly decorated with twists and gimmicks – of those few novelists in Korea today that can claim international audiences, Kim is by far the worst. He is also the most interesting!

It is tempting then to boil his success down to a matter of selection: a Korean slave labourer shipped to Cuba (Black Flower), a reactivated North Korean spy living a quiet, comfortable life in the South (Your Republic is Calling You), a suicide consultant on the prowl for new clients (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself), an elderly serial killer with the onset of dementia, waking each morning to news reports of murder and trying to remember what he did last night (Diary of a Murderer).

All poorly written (aside from the short and experimental I Have the Right) – all wonderfully playful and the type of subject matter that sells itself. Now we have a world of street kids turned motorcycle gangsters, and the disaffected yet sharply romantic life of the social outcast.

Kim steps into all of his novels through the same door, with the same dirty feet. Latching onto alienation, musing over the details of personality and micro-behaviour, he grovels around in common pain… until it becomes just a little bit beautiful. Until the reader is left seeing themselves in the agony and purpose of such a life.

“I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious” the suicide entrepreneur in I Have the Right tells us, “the lust, once freed, starts growing. The caller’s imagination runs free, and she soon discovers her potential.”

Gang books, gang stories, gang TV shows, gang movies are a dime-a-dozen here in Korea. A country torn down and built new, the chance for everyday nostalgia is lost to most people without the correct map or memory. That is until you hear an over-cooked engine, then two, then twenty. It’s unusual, it’s loud, and it’s a little bit cheap. The mafia are gone, but the outcasts remain.

There is nothing all that impressive about the bikes, plastic-looking, factory-made, and brightly coloured. There are no imposing figures here, no beards, no leather, no sweat nor dirt… no Harley Davidson’s; they cost too much and these gangs don’t have the stomach for real violence and real crime. Instead these bikes deliver food from poorly paying restaurants to the doors of impatient customers.

Writing in the 1970’s about the Hell’s Angels, Hunter, S. Thompson put it like this: “There is an important difference between the words ‘loser’ and ‘outlaw’. One is passive, and the other is active.” The Hell’s Angels that Thompson saw were definitely outlaws… their Korean cousins are losers.

But there is a story here, and an original one at that. The characters’ inability to actually live it tough – camping in the dirt, living beer-to-beer, disconnecting from all social comforts, and only seeking the straight-and-narrow in order to rob or extort it – adds a juvenile smear to them. Not people to fear – no matter how hard they try to convince you of it – but only to pity.

Without the liberation of the Angels nor the rubbed-in embrace of hardship, these Koreans are pathetic in completely new ways. Moaning about the fast-paced consumer culture around them, whimpering-on about not being understood, all the while wanting secretly to be included. They are children in need of parents… the Angels are parents who abandon such children.

What sifts-down and settles on the page is a kind of umbilical-attached nihilism; a hatred for a world that you desperately want to be part of. Kim writes his characters light and on the fringes – people looking up beneath the neon glow and wanting a subtle hug, preferably one that no one sees. He does for Korean literature what Michel Houellebecq does for French:

I read novels when I am travelling but I don’t read them in Seoul. Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

And just like Houellebecq, Kim is at his best when thinking about violence and about sex… ideally violent sex! The more perverse, hedonistic and cruel, the better. “Leaking body fluids” Hanna is tied to a chair, molested and tortured. She is intellectually disabled. But when our hero tries to save her, she begs for him to re-tie the knots so that she can wait for another round of humiliation from her captor: “I love him. Because he loves me, he’s doing this. I can bear it. Tie me up again”, “[s]he kept stubbornly whining, then she cried. She began to hit Jae. She stank of urine.”

The real problem with I Hear Your Voice breaks down to naivety and translation. Jae is a rough and tumble gang leader remember, and yet every time he speaks it is in the tones of a new age spiritual healer, nattering-on about god, the devil, souls, and holy numbers (“3,6,9 and 15” apparently). And everywhere that the chance presents, Kim throws-in an allusion to Jesus: “The first time they laughed; the second, they approached him; the third they paid attention. Then, silently, they began to follow him.”

When it’s not Jesus, Jae is also a conduit for Native American wisdom:

They [Native-Americans] didn’t have any concept of money – they were directly connected to the objects around them. The act of accepting money to work blocked you from your awareness.

Or backyard philosophy:

I remember how as a kid I’d make shadows when the lights had gone out in the house, my hand becoming a wolf or a rabbit. Maybe Jae was one of the shadows I’d made.

And Buddhism:

‘Siddhartha also left home as a teenager’

‘Siddhartha? Who’s that?’ Mokran asked

‘Buddha’

‘So Buddha was a person first?’

‘He was once a teenager, like us’.

Imagine if you can, a hardened street gang listening to this drivel from their leader, and still choosing to take up arms for him each day! Well they do! The boys follow, the girls fawn. It’s all a little hard to get through, and makes you think that Kim doesn’t personally know any wayward youths; and was too scared to do any close-up research.

But most, if not all, of the real derision here should be held for Kim’s Korean-to-English translator, Krys Lee. It is the first time that Lee has done this job for Kim, and the stain of her own prebaked novel, How I Became a North Korean, is thick across these pages. Everywhere you look there are inexplicably lazy turns of phrase: “Jae avoided the patrol cars with his dazzling manoeuvres”,

And basic errors in punctuation (emphases added):

This new Seungtae[,] who wasn’t considered gay by any of his family members or friends[,] explored the sexual identity buried deep inside him.

This kid was more disgusted by[,] than afraid of[,] Seungtae, as if he wasn’t even worth hating.

The role of the translator is always heavy with moral hazard. Authors own their art, they suffer and bleed for it, fighting into the small hours for evermore slight edits of language; poking desperately for just one more minuscule improvement before it is all parcelled-up and sent for publication; exposed to the world.

Good translators do this as well. They make the story their own. But there is a different incentive structure on the table, something that easily corrupts. When a translator finally gets their hands on a project, they too are often paid a proportion of the sales, but they don’t carry much of the risk, if any. If the book fails in the market place, it is not their reputation on the line, at least not in the same way as that of the author.

So, all too often, translations are spat out to publication; the next project quickly in hand. What you get is the destruction of good literature through shoddy manufacturing. But there is still some good literature sneaking-out through the circling gloom here. What Kim does so well is still there on the page, just diminished in quality and much less of it.

Thankfully the fifth, and final, section of I Hear Your Voice takes an intriguing and insightful twist back towards its author. Suddenly Kim is writing in near-autobiography. The speed changes, the characters re-discover themselves, and a flat-lining story breathes again through an honest look back down the lens. As well as from the warm, connected feeling that you get from seeing the writing process affect its author in the same way as the reading process did for you:

[S]ummer was coming to an end, and tourists returning from their travels waited for taxis at Incheon International Airport, holding duty-free shopping bags,

I got in, started the car, and returned home. As I exited the airport expressway and entered Seoul, I began spotting motorcycles. Delivery service men in black helmets and protective gear sped ahead as soon as the lights changed.

“Jangmadang” – Review of Kim Byung-Yeon ’s ‘Unveiling the North Korean Economy’

The famine came fast, but it had been quietly building for years. Leeching off their Soviet big brother, and pushing through a series of fast-gain agricultural policies worked… until it suddenly didn’t. As the Soviet Union began to collapse, so did North Korea. By 1994, it was all over, nothing could be done; a famine so deep and wide-reaching that it needed its own moniker – the ‘Arduous March’ – had settled over the country.

This was the same year when the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the only ruler that North Korea had ever known, died. He left the country, as a death-bed gift, to his son, soon to be the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. The young man was not his father. He lacked any form of charisma, and was so nervous around large crowds that he only ever spoke in public once. And he had a problem. Maybe the famine could be ridden-out, maybe he could avoid dangling from a light pole in downtown Pyongyang, but a fundamental change was on its way.

Hardship is always a catalyst for social change. American napalming of the peninsula during the Korean War had helped bring post-war North Korea to accept a dictator, someone who promised to protect them, to manage every aspect of their lives. The same people, now no longer able to rely on their government for food and assistance, would have to either die or innovate. North Korea – after the famine years – would never be the same.

It naturally took some time. But as desperation grew, everyday North Koreans began to try something new. A starving population just didn’t have the luxury of attempting to wait things out. Market stalls began to pop-up, and employees, unpaid for months, stopped attending their state allocated jobs. The tentative steps of a few were followed by everyone with the capacity to do so, once they realised that the state no longer had the will to stop them.

After enough people had died, the famine came to an end; and the North Korea that survived was, to an important degree, a market economy. The rules are still there, but no-one follows them. A residual fear still hovers, and people still pay lip-service to their assigned jobs and laws against buying and selling property. But today there is no part of the North Korean economy that sits free from market forces.

A fairly new phenomenon in North Korea, bribery, breaks down the best laid plans of all governments. Previously, anyone bold and enterprising enough to elicit kickbacks, had a very hard time finding anything to do with it. Anything worth having, in a material sense, was not available for purchase. It took the collapse of society, and its rebuilding, to change things. The empty hole once occupied by the government, was quickly filled by consumerism. And soon police, supervisors and officials were walking past criminally capitalist scenes, with an indifference that only comes from knowing they have a share in the profits.

Soon enough consumer choice was in, and everything was available for a price. The early market stalls started small, with families selling vegetables, rice cakes and personal possessions. And still shadowing an impoverished society, the most common items are cigarettes, chocolate, soda drinks, beer and other alcohol, non-government issue clothes, low grade-electronics, and meat (though this is still hard to come by). In this mix are (once contraband) foreign products – available at a premium, but there nonetheless for anyone with enough disposable income.

As these new markets began popping-up at busy intersections, or occasionally in constructed-for-purpose buildings, a new piece of terminology came with them. Language dies when it’s not used. So the Korean word ‘jangmadang’, literally translating to ‘marketplace’ – and with an ancestry reaching back to the farmers’ markets of ancient Korea – found itself without a purpose in the state controlled economy of North Korea. Now it’s back, and echoing freely across the country.

The further away from Pyongyang, and other city centres, the sooner these markets began to emerge. Proximity is the friend of a domineering tyrant. The further from the heart of government, the longer it takes to get designated rations and clothes, and the easier it is to be forgotten about when things get hard. As the first to feel the full bite of the famine, the distant, isolated regions of North Korea were also the first to ignore previous word-of-god regulations. Totalitarianism breaks, from its edges, inwards.

So it goes with the new North Korean fad – Special Economic Zones. Cities such as Rason, on the outer-most edge of the border with China and Russia, are now burning as signal fires to the rest of the country. Watching wealth move north, thriving at the fringes of Pyongyang’s control, the regime – pushed along by the neighbouring super-powers – surrendered what they could not win. The streets of Rason, rich with international investment, and governed by foreign currencies, are now increasingly unrecognisable as North Korean.

As rich and important as the northern border with China has become, there is now also a resilience to the economy. As the private sector has moved into export-heavy commodities such as coal and seafood, they have also had to bear the costs of new, strict international sanctions. But monitoring individual traders is hard, if not impossible. Up-and-down the Chinese border, North Koreans, with government issued permits, or after bribing the soldiers on guard, move easily between countries. These individual border-jumping operations are small, but also high in volume and frequency. Through them, the North Korean economy has a growing immunity to international pressure.

This has all been very uncomfortable for the North Korean elite. For a time, the privilege of entrepreneurialism had been fenced-off for themselves – it was ‘collectivisation’ for the masses, and individual enterprise for the elite. And as long as the economic order was written by them, and in their favour, they could remain ‘elite’. Open markets mean open competition; a challenge to the life they know. But it also means something more frightening.

As markets open, so do minds. To compete people need to be creative, independent, and willing to take risks; seeking out new opportunities also means questioning the world around them. This is the dilemma that has kept all manner of dictators awake, sweating in their beds at night. There are only bad choices – let the markets continue to open so that people can feed themselves, or crack down and risk another famine. Either way, if you play the game badly, the cost of losing is uprising and public execution.

As a cold, wet winter was settling-in over North Korea in 2009, the regime went in for the jugular. With the new markets came unofficial and uncontrollable currency exchange rates. The North Korean state, unable to set even the most basic of commodity prices, decided it would make a move and revalue the currency. Old denominations of the North Korean Won would be cancelled, and replaced with new notes, minus two zeroes. 100 won became 1 won overnight.

But the real kicker was the imposition of a trade-in limit for old notes. Each person, after years of stashing private wealth from the grey economy, could suddenly convert no more than 100,000 won. It was a clumsy way to reclaim market control, and to transfer some of those vast private fortunes back to the elite. What actually happened was that savings were wiped out across the country, but prices didn’t follow as businesses thought they could ride things out. Panic set in.

A humming economy crashed in a heap, and the North Korean Won, never the most trustworthy of currencies, fell into the hole that the government had just opened-up before it. Inflation exploded, and the Chinese Yuan became the only currency of any use. Then something new happened, something predictable, and yet no one saw it coming. Unrest gripped the streets. And, in a panic of their own, the government quickly reversed policy, and calmed the angry crowds with 100-fold increases in their wages – bringing things back to even, but only after significant skin had been lost, and the regime itself risked.

What had been missed by the North Korean regime, was just how fundamental the new capitalism had become. And indeed, just how sophisticated the traders were. After years of fierce competition, North Korea was highly tuned-in to even the slightest of market indicators. It is now possible to predict the future arrival of aid shipments, and their contents, simply by watching sudden falls in domestic prices, as traders try to sell out their stocks before the market is flooded.

In some ways, the safest place to be in this new North Korea, is out in the open, at the heart of market-life; in technical violation of the law. Private wealth holds a precarious place in this society. It was needed to escape the famine, and it is needed for even the most minor steps in social mobility. But surviving like this, around people who are trained and encouraged to snoop into your life, comes at a cost. A new found prosperity often attracts the suspicion of the existence of defector family members, sending money back to the country they escaped. Traders can be tolerated, defectors cannot.

With the average income reaching 15-20 times higher than official salaries, North Korea now has the semblance of a middle class. And these people are naturally seeking ways to invest their excess earnings. Small market stalls selling personal items, ill-gotten aid, and Chinese imports, are quickly becoming private restaurants and large scale shops manufacturing their own merchandise. In part, North Korea’s Industrial Revolution has finally arrived.

Official permission to start such a business is never asked for and never granted. Instead partnerships form – unofficial agreements with local bureaucrats and authorities – and private enterprise is registered as state enterprise. Nothing actually changes here, but the businesses have legal protection, and the local authorities involved receive significant enough bribes to make it all worth their while. 

This bleeds through the larger economy, with quasi-state, or semi-state, businesses replacing the ‘State’ wherever it is inefficient, unresponsive or unwilling to produce central funding. The government-owned construction industry, once run on little more than an oversupply of free labour from the military and work units, has been forced to turn to private partners for more complex tasks. And the aging transportation system is being superseded by private buses and mail services, to keep up with the needs of a growing merchant class; there are now five or six taxi companies in Pyongyang alone.

All this new wealth brings with it a new, locally sourced, consumerism. Beyond the growing product ranges flowing in from abroad, North Korean companies are expanding into the early stages of conglomerates. Air Koryo, the state airline, now produces alcohol and energy drinks; the cigarette company, Naegohyang, has expanded into fashion apparel and electronic goods; and the Masikryong ski-resort offers a rare taste of luxury to everyday North Koreans who should, by all accounts, not be able to afford it.

With the new café culture and expanding shopping centres, a similarly recognisable consumer phenomenon has walked through the door slightly less noticed – post-code envy. All housing in North Korea is still allocated by the government, and only one residence is assigned to each family. Which leaves open a niche real estate market, where wealthy families can trade-up to more desirable neighbourhoods (the Mansudae district of Pyongyang is the most prized) by swapping apartments – along with a very large one-off payment – with another family who is conversely looking to downsize, and could do with the money.

But all this choice and opportunity comes at a cost. Behind the property boom in Pyongyang, the designer clothes and conspicuous consumption, is a growing gap within society. North Korean inequality used to only mean the space between the regime and the rest. Now as the average employee walks to work or takes their family shopping, they are bombarded with the luxury of other citizens. Constantly reminded about what they are missing, there is a growing risk of resentment within the new market-orientated North Korea. Though be it in a different direction, the regime has found itself slow-walking toward another tripwire.

Through all the discomfort of a rapidly opening society, one group of people have undoubtedly been the biggest winners – women. In the early days of the famine, when people were still fearful of leaving their allocated job sites, the only people in a position to test the waters of capitalism, were the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, who after their schooling, and after marriage, were largely forbidden from joining the work force; their place was in the home. So, as the men of North Korea were still forced to clock-in for work that they were no longer being paid for, it was the women of North Korea that ventured out, set-up the first market stalls, and saved their families from starvation. Long-held ideas die slowly – but the old misogyny is unmistakably fading-away.

The memory of the famine still haunts North Korea – the hills of every town, including Pyongyang, are littered with the graves of those who starved to death. At the same time, the regime looks no more likely to collapse than it has before. Across the country monuments to the Kim dynasty still stand, and are being added to daily. Even though state ideology has not yet caught-up, North Korea is a changed society. This has been said before – and been wrong – but a corner seems to have been turned. And things cannot go back to how they were.

“In accordance with the Party” – Review of Tatiana Gabroussenko’s ‘The Potato Revolution in the DPRK’

Everything had already been tried, and most people weren’t listening. Now firmly on the edge – after four years of famine – it seemed like their world was finally coming to its natural end. Potatoes would be a last, clawing attempt at survival.

It started when it all started. Waiting until he was sure that the Japanese shadow would never return, a stout man, with a patchy reputation, skulked into the eastern port of Wonsan. There was no welcoming party, and no one recognised him; just as he didn’t recognise the country around him. Then in his mid-thirties, this was a home that he had fought for, but which he hadn’t seen with adult eyes.

Soon he was the ‘Great Leader’, and the same people who couldn’t tell him apart, and who only had a spattering of preposterously over-the-top war stories to base anything on, were suddenly expected to adore him. It was too early to risk ruling by fear alone, but the young leader, Kim Il-sung, needed to rapidly stake his reputation. The alternative – if history was anything to go by – was coup d'état, and it all coming to an early end, dangling from a lamppost in downtown Pyongyang… passers-by too scared to cut him down. 

The average citizen needed something measurable – they needed rapid improvements in their daily lives. Money was borrowed from the Soviet big brother, subsidized fertilizer was distributed, terraced fields were erected, and traditional irrigation systems were replaced by electric pumps. Once an impossibly hard place to farm successfully, North Korea was transformed overnight… and the slow burning fuse of famine was lit.

When he died in 1994, the Great Leader got out at just the right time. The Soviet Union had collapsed, fertilizer had become too expensive to import, and an energy crisis put an end to the irrigation system. For the first time in generations, farmers were left to themselves, toiling unassisted in the harsh mountainous conditions. They failed. Utopias don’t do disaster planning – so when the floods came, no one was prepared. The terraced fields were submerged, and soon swept away entirely… the famine had arrived.

And immediately reports of hunger, or food shortages, became crimes in themselves. When this became impossible to police, it was playfully renamed the “Eating Problem”; this failed to do the trick. A more evocative, nationalistic tact was attempted – the famine was the ‘Arduous March’.

Starvation edges its way on top of you. Like a knife to the throat, you may try to pretend it’s not there, but the cold metal still nags at your skin and forces a shiver all the same. The scenery began to noticeably change, with once clear hills suddenly littered with fresh, shallow graves. The worst stories of Ukrainian cannibalism were resurfacing with a Korean face, and those willing to risk gunfire were crossing the Yalu River into China in record numbers. As a percentage of the population, more Koreans died in the famine than Chinese in the Great Leap Forward.

And it was now all on the head of a new Kim. Having inherited the leadership from his father, Kim Jong-il, though one of the few people in the country that was still well-fed, was nonetheless staring-down his own death. All that North Korea was, was no more. The effeminately named ‘Dear Leader’, if he wanted to survive, would have to start again.

State ideology twisted. Six weeks after the ‘Agreed Framework’ was signed, when U.S. aid was flowing into the hands of famine victims, after President Clinton had personally written to Kim Jong-il to reassure him about their intentions, at an absolute apex in American-North Korean relations, Songun – or ‘military first’ – was incongruously announced. The ever-predatory American enemy, and the heavy cost of keeping them at bay, was the reason for the scarcity and suffering.

But more was needed – something positive that people could cling to. And this would be potatoes.

North Korean propaganda, when it turns inward, has the badgering, we-are-all-in-this-together, tone of a passive aggressive spouse; beginning its demands with an imploring ‘let’s’. “Let Us Defend the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence” – “Let’s eat two meals a day” – “Let’s breed more high-yielding fish” – “Let’s expand goat rearing and create more grassland in accordance with the Party!” – “Let’s grow more sunflowers” – “Let us raise more grass-eating animals!”

At one point, this messaging was all about corn. The famine put an end to that. It also put an end to the lazy, one dimensional style. Learning directly from foreign media and Western marketing techniques, North Korean propaganda, at just the moment that it needed to, matured into something capable of salvaging the regime. And it would do so, strangely, by trying to alter the cultural significance of root vegetables. The Dear Leader would be saved by gamja hyeongmyeong’ – the ‘Potato Revolution’.

It all began in October 1998, with Kim Jong-il taking a trip to Taehongdan County in Ryanggang province. Once there he announced that the military, in their time-off from fighting the “Yankee Bastards”, would be working to make North Korea the “potato kingdom of Asia”. A favourite story of the new propaganda machine, involved the pregnant wife of a soldier-farmer having her unborn child named (a great honour) by the Dear Leader. Prophetic as always, Kim had the foresight to offer two names; Hongdani for a girl, Taehongi for a boy (both derivatives of the county’s name). She gives birth to twins; a girl and a boy.

Imagery of the Taehongdan field trip, such as Kim Song-min’s painting, ‘A Long Awaited Meeting in Taehongdan’ (2009), shows Kim sharing potatoes and ‘guidance’ as local farmers huddle around a campfire. Taehongdan is ground-zero. A symbol for a desperate people. With hard-work and direction from the leader, the suffering could be over; and a new affluence, beyond pre-famine standards, would be felt. As the propaganda goes, the soldiers were gifted new apartments, personally furnished by Kim Jong-il, and the farming community broke free from a starvation that they were never allowed to admit existed.

When the North Koreans want to add legitimacy to shaky ideas, they go back to Kim Il-sung. So despite having nothing to do with the Potato Revolution – as you would expect for something that began four years after his death – stories started to emerge of the Great Leader’s guerrilla days in Manchuria. So affected was Kim Il-sung by ‘the potato’, that he never stopped lauding them as a bulwark, backs-to-the-wall resistance against starvation. He remembered in vivid detail how the local peasants “survived on potatoes”, and how his first wife Kim Yong-suk would cook the vegetable in camp, fuelling tired men to continue fighting. While the new epicentre of ‘the potato’, Taehongdan, became, almost overnight, the historical site of a great anti-Japanese resistance.

The placement of Soviet-linked propaganda is another, slightly more surreptitious, attempt to link the potato back to a previous era, and a leader whose credibility was beyond question. It is an old communist tactic, that when selling improvement it is done in the basest possible terms – food security. Selecting a town, almost at random, and then building it as a national example, based on a single, new, agricultural initiative, such as the 1950’s slogan, “corn is queen of the fields”, is a lesson learnt from Soviet experience.

Credit for the Potato Revolution would go to the dead leader – appropriate enough considering he was posthumously conferred as ‘Eternal President’. The role of his son would be to, once again, bathe publicly in his father’s afterglow. Propaganda would paint the picture of a master organiser, a man implementing the Potato Revolution and polishing the rough edges; all the while being guided from beyond the grave.

As sweet potato stalls began popping up around Pyongyang, and as people were tasked with collecting and donating their own faeces for fertilizer, it was all being personally overseen by Kim Jong-il, in an effort to “spread the potato-growing industry to the whole country”.

When visiting Russia in 2001, the Dear Leader was pressed to explain the policy in a way that he would never have to in North Korea. “Look at the Germans. They have grown used to the potato and it’s become their staple food. Why can’t we do this in North Korea?” he responded. “You Russians have a good tradition of eating potatoes. I am also trying to introduce the potato in Korea but with little success so far”.

To kick things along, propaganda started looking back to the pre-1945 period of Japanese rule. There were no potatoes back then, and there were no potatoes when the famine hit in 1994. It was shockingly tenuous, but – consciously stoked along through the years – anti-Japanese sentiment had never waned, and there was likely some value in reviving the old scape goat.

But pointing to something that is not there, doesn’t quite catch the mind in the same way as pointing to something that is. And at a time of such extreme famine this would have to be done delicately. The old promises of meat, eggs, pork, chicken and rice wouldn’t work, hence the potatoes; though neither would anything that promoted – even inadvertently – consumption. The new propaganda would have to be, at least in the beginning, careful not to remind people about what they could no longer afford, and the shortages they were now feeling.

One of the few things known for certain about Kim Jong-il, was his love for cinema. So the Potato Revolution was naturally ushered in by a new wave of North Korean film. This became the spear-point for the campaign. Suddenly in every corner, of every frame, of every new movie release, were the non-subtle product placements of bulbs, flowers, raw harvests, and recipes. Layered on this, was similarly blatant dialogue – casually spliced into unrelated scenes – talking up the nutritional benefits, and indeed moral importance, of potato farming. Through it all, the imagery was always pre-culinary – an encouragement to produce, not to consume. It was all about raw food, abundant fields, and hope; never the prepared dishes. Always treading carefully not to needlessly remind people of their hunger.

Everything in North Korea is a comparison with the outside world, whether it’s the ‘tallest building’, ‘largest hotel’, ‘best language’ or replica of the Arch De Triumph deliberately made slightly taller than the original in Paris. And so, through the flood of potato-related images, movies and TV series, this old-form of self-aggrandising nationalism was understandably smuggled in. With the benefit of “love of the Marshal for his people”, the North Korean potato – despite being grown from imported seeds – became a vegetable of exceptional quality. With a unique nutritional make-up – such as new amino acids – this potato would prevent cancer, protect the liver, reduce swelling, cure blindness, and extend life in general.  

In the grainy cartoon, Hyanggigol-e on gamja, designed to work the revolution into the minds of children, a scientist makes the terrible mistake of neglecting research into the potato, in favour of rice. The young protagonist fumbles through a rough spiritual awakening, realises her error, and becomes an unwavering advocate for potato cuisine. At this point, any self-imposed restrictions on the propaganda effort had fallen away. Consumption was now being promoted, with an increasing number of movies and TV shows being written to include chefs as central characters; along with people savouring beautifully prepared dishes such as potato bread, potato porridge, potato cakes, potato soups and potato doughnuts. The marketing of consumer choice had finally arrived in North Korea.

It would all hit a logical wall. When the North Korean party organ, Rodong Sinmun, declared “We have started to see the Potato Revolution as an ideological revolution”, people naturally understood what was being asked of them –‘stop thinking about rice and other grains’. But rice was still being farmed, imported and cooked. It was just all going to the elite. While most North Koreans couldn’t possibly have known, through the rise in black market trade, and the breakdown in ordinary state security, a growing number would have been aware that rice was still available; and that a significant number of people were managing to survive without wholeheartedly embracing the potato (considered to be a last-resort food item).

Any excitement about the Potato Revolution being a miracle fix for the famine, would likely have been lost when the farmers were told they had no choice but to participate. Raising potatoes is not the same as grains. When you seed potatoes, you are seeding something that is already edible; a hard thing to do when you have a starving family in front of you. Harder still when the local population – aware that you are being forced to plant potatoes – are all just as hungry. Crops planted in the evening would run the risk of being dug-up and eaten before morning. All this producing fewer seeds for the next planting season, and shrinking the overall size of the industry year-upon-year.

For the few crops that remained in the ground unmolested, they predictably suffered from the same famine-related problem as other crops. Despite new inflows of foreign aid, the Dear Leader still couldn’t get his hands on anywhere near the amount of fertilizer needed for productive farming in North Korean conditions. And a starving population just didn’t have the luxury of allowing soil to sit idle and replenish itself naturally. Desperately the propaganda shifted again. To buttress the Potato Revolution, new campaigns started extolling the virtues of raising livestock in the hope that the manure would fertilize the fields. People whose primary crops had failed, and who were so close to starvation that they couldn’t afford to wait for seeds to grow into potatoes, were  being asked to somehow get their hands on herds of animals, and then rather than butchering them for meat, wait, in the hope that potatoes might be on the way.

After enough people had died, and there was finally enough food to go around, North Koreans moved-on and quietly left the Potato Revolution behind them. And the propaganda followed. The imagery stopped, the film industry moved on to new things. But the lasting impact wouldn’t be insignificant. North Korean propaganda had road-tested a range of new techniques, the lessons learnt from this would lay a solid foundation around future campaigns, and with it the regime as well.

Kim Jong-il only spoke in public once – and it wasn’t about potatoes. His son, and the new leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, has spoken about them, but only to talk down their importance. In Pyongyang today, catching sight of a potato – whether in a field or on a plate – is rare. Once again it is a food held in reserve, only to be turned to in hard times. But for those old enough to remember the famine, the vegetable has a new significance. It produces painful memories, as well as an uneasy nostalgia that comes from understanding just how fortunate they are to have survived – to have overcome the Arduous March. Perhaps a sign of changing fortunes, the once highly spoken of North Korean potato is now most commonly used for making cheap liquor.

“Maybe it’s a puberty thing” – Review of Sohn Won-pyung’s ‘Almond’

“‘He could die,’ I said, fiddling with one of the chewy caramel packs neatly lined up on the display stand.”

“‘Is that so?’”

By far the most interesting thing about this novel, is just how bad it is! The next thing that catches the reader’s attention – the only other thing – is how incredibly well it is selling.

And it’s not so hard to understand once you get your hands on this mess, and roll through a few lazy paragraphs. Every page crashes with clichés, circles back to quickly repeating literary devices, has the up-and-down pacing of hard drug addiction, and builds suspense in a sweaty, premature, panic.

From the title down, Almond is written with all the subtlety of a trench coated pervert, nervously trying to blend in with the other parents as the school bell rings. The prose and the content and the characters and the narrative are so underdeveloped, and so amateur, that an explanation is needed. This is more than just a mistake, or poor trade craft. This is something much less forgivable. 

It starts with a happily recycled theme in Korean literature: psychopathy. Always a young man, always an outcast, someone struggling and failing to understand the world of emotions. He is cold… and it shows.

And Sohn Won-pyung is unashamed to lay it on thick: our young man doesn’t frown, grimace nor smirk, is never touched by fear, survives by diligently following a behavioural check list (“When others smile → Smile back”), is ushered through life by an overbearing and financially struggling Korean mother (someone who naturally blames herself for her son’s medical issue), has an nice old grandma who calls him “a monster” (leaving the reader to think about how that word is stressed), and eats a bucket load of almonds in the hope that “the almonds inside my head would get bigger” (apparently they are the same shape as his underdeveloped amygdalae).

There is never a need to double back here, and think about the boy’s condition; the reader is instead drowned with information and told at every opportunity that “the evidence kept adding up”. That it does… because that is all that happens!

A teenager with a spare five minutes could sketch this out in their heads, and come pretty close to nailing the story as we now have it on the page. He plods through school in mediocre ways, until he meets another young man, who, surprise surprise has the opposite problem: too much anger and emotion pumping through his violent body. They meet in melodrama at the end of a chapter: “But the boy he found was nowhere near ready to meet his mom. Because that boy was Gon.”

The odd couple balance each other out. He then meets a girl, but lo and behold she is different, quirky, and not like all the others. She too balances him out. And again it is done so at the end of a chapter soaked in melodrama: “Panting, she stopped right in front of me and our eyes met. For five seconds at least. That was Dora.”

Almost every significant first meeting of characters happens with this literary tactic – with this type of language. And it’s by paying a little more attention to the author and her resume that we can begin to understand the necessary question: why on earth does this book look this way?

In the author’s own words: “I wrote the first draft of Almond for a month in August 2013, when my daughter was four months old. Then I revised the draft heavily for a month at the end of 2014 and another month in early 2016.”

Sohn may have applied a few late-term edits as she says, but it still reads with violence; a near criminal indifference to literature and readership. It reads like a book that took only a month to write!

But there is more to it than just clumsiness and haste. It appears that Sohn has a lot more experience with films than she does with literature, and with Almond hustled into movie theatres long before it had time to mature on bookshelves, things begin to make some sense.

It is an innovative idea, but one that you can only hope doesn’t catch on: why write a movie script and wait years for it to bounce around production companies, when you can instead first publish it as a novel, and make some money in the interim.

If you are somehow unfortunate enough to be on tenterhooks here, well Almond ends as it always would, with our young man discovering his emotional side in a grand and selfless gesture. Basically another vampire love story, a book for the young and the dumb…

…“Maybe it’s a puberty thing!”

“A thin voice” – Review of Han Kang’s ‘The White Book’

White bird,

White dog,

White butterfly,

White gulls,

White fur,

White hair,

White pebble,

White bone,

White cabbage,

White grains,

White flakes,

White things,

We have all experimented like this. We have all thought this way about ourselves. Jotting down scribbles of pain and emotion and inner-life – paragraphs, sentences, phrases, single words that feel just too good to throw away. Little fragments of supposed genius. If you don’t grow out of it through your teenage years like most people, the appropriate thing to do, still, is to wait. Wait for a project that fits the language, somewhere or something that you can re-smuggle those old feelings into.

The inappropriate thing is to bundle together those scraps of paper, gather an audience of people who are expecting something else, and then dump them out on the table, proud, knowing, and sure. Thinking to yourself that because the words are personal, and because these people care about you, that this is enough; that they will also care about those words. They are an extension of you after all!

Ideally it ends with the concerned looks of family, friends or editors – those few people who have an interest in being honest. With Han Kang it’s different.

White clothes,

White city,

White pills,

White nights,

White paper,

White film,

White wicks,

White sweater,

White cloth,

White touched,

White splotches,

White colour,

The Vegetarian was one of those books that – before it was there – was also fairly unthinkable. It disorientated the world of Korean literature, which had long-settled on a comfortable style, something that seemed to work for translation, for export, and for international awards. Instead Kang wrote through oddity, darkness, uncertain passion and sensations and trauma, a shivering, nervous agitation.

Even then however, so much of her success came from how she put pen to paper, and not what she wrote about. And so perhaps – at the time – it made sense to go searching for a follow-up novel, rather than to let it find its author. What Kang found (Human Acts) was disturbingly poor! As far as second books go, it was an impatient mess: an aching demonstration of manufactured art, and the unconcealed, unglued image of the writing process. It was Kang trying much too hard to be meaningful, and also a pre-echo of the mistakes we now have: thinking that once spoken aloud, meaning and meaningful moments become universal.

Grey-white,

Voices white,

Smooth white,

Dirty white,

Dazzlingly white,

Dull white,

Shine white,

Crisp white,

Frozen white,

Billowing whiteness,

Applauded for her success and then applauded for her failure, it must have been hard to know what to do next. Trauma Writers can move forward in a few different ways: ideally they have personal suffering to talk about, next best they can go searching for it in warzones etc., then in a very distant last place they can build and embellish it.

Trying to extract more-and-more from less-and-less, with each book Kang is slipping a little closer toward mortality. What we have is an author plumbing her mind for new pain, each bit smaller than the last, and much less serious (perhaps not to herself, but certainly to her audience). Everything sucking down through frozen and tired language. Life is mildly harrowing for everyone, it is just that most people don’t think to make announcements to the fact, nor presume the interest of others.

Cold pavement,

Cold fists,

Cold-numbed,

Cold hand,

Cold air,

Cold mornings,

Cold light,

Cold and irrevocable,

So cold,

Sub-zero cold,

Cold,

Here we find Kang in flight, running away from her mother’s horror. The first order of business? Paint the door of her rented apartment from red to white. The rust and flaking wood disappears as “vestige[s] of violence, like long-dried bloodstains, hardened, reddish-black”. If you find this a difficult head-space to relate to, well, don’t read on – this three page chapter (“Door”) is also the best cut of language, the most emotionally accessible... and it is also, shockingly, the longest.

A blunt inflection point between poetry, prose and moaning aloud, what we are being handed here is not really a book at all. Just a selection of daily scribbles, tied together between photographs and deliberately blank pages, in the whitest possible tone. Everything circles inward from that gimmick, somehow we – as adults – are supposed to accept the mere presence of colour as significant. And a list of white objects (“Now I will give you white things”) as worthy of publication.

Sweet,

Rice,

Raw rice,

Cooked rice,

Rice cake,

Salt,

Porridge,

Milk,

Grains,

Sugar,

Kitchen,

Stove,

Stomach it if you can, and save yourself the nagging thoughts of conspiracy: she is serious! This is not some errant cup in the corner of a modern art museum. Nobody is going to walk over smiling and tell you that you’ve just been had, pointing out the hidden cameras and actors in the room. No! Kang really believes that white matters, that it heals, that it has answers, that it transcends.

Illumination,

Incandescent,

Shimmer,

Glistening,

Bright,

Lights,

Power,

Flashes,

Crystals,

Hazy,

Faint glow,

Alight,

So what about her grief, the reason that we are being asked to play along. It goes like this: “My mother’s first child died, I was told, less than two hours into life.” She was told because, of course, she wasn’t there, she didn’t live it; she only soaked it in as a distant story (just as her readers are now doing). A horrible story, but not hers. Still here we find her abandoning her country, her family and her home for a snowy European winter (ideal if you are looking for white things), quarantining herself indoors, and humming as a “dumb witness” about pale shades.

“I felt that yes, I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like white ointment applied to swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed.” Pain has its own life, it works within people in difficult and impossible ways, but it is the job of the novelist to turn the private into the public, to make the reader feel and sympathise and understand, to make the finished article relatable. This does the opposite!

Blizzard,

Winter,

Ice,

Ice capped,

Spring,

Snow,

Frost,

Sleet,

Glacier,

Freezing,

Snow flakes,

Moisture,

Early morning,

As one suspected with The Vegetarian, Kang is her own protagonist, and she does have a wonderful ability to drag the reader in through small untamed details. It all borders on hallucination and it all works… when Kang is at her best. What we have instead now, from the hackneyed title – The White Book – to the desperate search for content and page-fillers and substance, has the feel of a different kind of creative illness: when someone is trying (really trying) to be poetic, they are – more often than not – just being pretentious.

Either way, The White Book reads as a cautionary tale on the limits of compassion, and the realities of an adult life. Most people cannot get vicariously lost in the swings of history like this, time and responsibility just won’t allow it. New problems and new hurt... new life… are always there, dragging most people from indulgence.

Scorching sun,

Sky,

Afternoon sky,

Summers day,

Sunlight,

Winter sun,

Beach,

Sandy shore,

Waves,

Sea,

Winter sea,

Puddle,

Soot,

Smoke,

Moon,

The best that can be said, is that maybe (unlikely, but maybe) Kang, from her sudden apex of fame, is trying to write a self-help book of sorts. Kind words and guidance for others, a gift to the world. But even then, the author still needs something to actually say. The book still requires content. Crisp prose, and a stern focus on too little for too long just won’t do it, no matter how agitated and hot it makes the author. Self-help books are fine in their own way, but not when they have a target audience of one. 

Freshly laundered,

Pristine,

Unsullied,

Clean,

Wash,

Bathed,

Scoured,

Vanished,

Invisible,

Empty,

Sterile,

Bleach,

Powdery,

What does carry over from all three of her books, is an odd and interesting fascination with the human body. The language seems to echo from a distance, as if Kang is dislocated from herself and her limbs. The slightest change in air temperature, pressure and environment sets off a war within. Her flesh, nerves, tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones, fighting a war without surrender nor prisoners: migraines, headaches, discomfort and near-masochistic pain.

Bones,

Anklebone,

Kneebone,

Collarbone,

Crossbar bone (another name for collarbone),

Breastbone,

Powdered bones,

Clean bones,

Rib,

Skin,

Nipple,

Breast,

Bare flesh,

Teeth,

Windpipe,

Puffy eyes,

Part of the business of writing involves an aggressive type of people-watching, something just short of stalking and harassment. Studying human traffic, and not letting a curious subject – someone interesting enough to write about in some way, no matter how mild – walk away. Writers follow people down streets, from cafe to cafe, from shops to restaurants to their cars; jotting down details about mannerisms, fashion, tone of voice, posture, attitude, the shape of eyes and mouths, food choices, birth marks, scars, anything that can help to fill out the details of a character.

Kang does this with an unhealthy dose of fear and panic. Like she is expecting to be found-out, confronted, and somehow punished for the intrusion. Rich with nerves and unease, it is no wonder that she sees so much of it mirrored back at her from the world: “Seen from behind, men and women bundled up in heavy coats are saturated with a mute presentiment, that of people beginning to endure”.

Chain,

Lace curtain,

Silver,

Scales,

Cotton,

Canvas,

Glass,

Candle,

Wax,

Bedsheets,

Feathers,

Blank paper,

Shroud,

Gown,

Stone, 

Flower,

This is a game of self-torture that everyone can play, if they are inclined: imagine the obvious truth that someone, somewhere in the world, has just starved to death. A long and denigrating end to a life, and one that is – and should have been – avoidable. It is excruciating and yet we are hopeless to intervene. Sure, we could donate more to charities that help prevent and remedy global poverty, but for that particular person right now, it is all too late, there is nothing for us to do. The pain is already baked-in.

Now think long and hard about the suffering involved in such a moment and such a life. The sensations of a slow wind-down through malnutrition, of hoping for any kind of help or rescue that never comes, the terrible feelings of shame and humiliation and abandonment. And then the physical anguish, over days and weeks. Think of it moment by moment… focus on it! It’s enough to edge us all towards depression. It’s more than enough to write a book about.

But what would you think of someone who, when it came time to hand-in their final draft, had chosen to write from the perspective of the distant dreamer, the person imagining the pain in their head and struggling with it all, as opposed to the person who was actually there and suffering. It would take some ego to do such a thing, to holiday in another person’s grief and then claim it as one’s own… for the benefit of art.

Childhood,

Child’s voice,

Breath,

Fragility,

Fear,

Love,

Anguish,

Pain,

Isolated,

 Sleep,

Mute,

Stillness,

Silence,

And it would likely show-up in the language and flow of the finished product; labouring under its own effort to convince. Instead of just seeing a white dog, the author would really see a white dog. Everything pregnant with a purpose and symbolism that just isn’t there. Each line and idea trying, straining to say something, desperate to be evocative and romantic.

This wouldn’t be easy. Maybe the dog works for some people on some level, but then what about the white bird, the white butterfly, the white stain… It quickly stretches thin, even for the most gullible of readers. And while struggling to transform the mundane into the profound something unpleasant would then happen. Cliché after cliché would begin to litter the language, and clumsy literary devices such as the use of ghosts would repeat, page after page, taking over the story and further alienating anyone still trying to follow along.

Ghosts,

Spirits,

Sacred,

Reanimated,

Graceful,

Soul,

Eternal,

Fog,

Gas,

Gaze,

Clouds,

Dusting,

Rejuvenation,

Revivification,

There is an important lesson here for people who want to be writers, and who mistakenly think it’ll be fun. Good stories come from within, and so the writing process involves long hours alone, in silence, sinking into your own subconscious; trying to magnify your own pain. And it’ll get to you! If Han Kang weren’t a writer, it’s hard to imagine that she would have the constitution for much else.

There is a lot of pomposity and gibberish to be found in these pages, but Kang is too good at what she does to not occasionally hit gold. The picture of a mother alone in her house, holding the baby that she had just given birth to, haunts and tears at the emotions in horrifying ways: “For God’s sake don’t die, she muttered in a thin voice, over and over… For God’s sake don’t die.” And while most of her efforts at list-making are appallingly hollow – white, whiteness, whitening, whitely, white things, all whiteness, whiteout – even those occasionally catch the right, fragile, nerve.

Kitchen floor,

Birth,

Perfection,

Precious,

Crying,

Umbilical cord,

Breast milk,

Clenched,

Final breath,

Frozen body,

Dead baby...

“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…

“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”.