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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/make-seoul-sang-young-parks-novel-gay-almost-romance-love-big-city/"></div>In recent years the internet has launched into the zeitgeist the term &#8220;incel,&#8221; referring to individuals filled with resentment about their state of involuntary celibacy — i.e., sexlessness. In nearly all cases the incel is a heterosexual male, though some have speculated on the nature of his homosexual equivalent: <a href="https://twitter.com/3vrlasting4ngel/status/1435116213265338370">a tweet I saw a few months ago</a>, for example, posited that &#8220;the gay version of &#8216;incel&#8217; is not finding a long-term relationship.&#8221; If so, then the protagonist of Sang Young Park&#8217;s novel Love in the Big City is a kind of incel. With opportunities for casual sex perpetually close at hand, thanks not least to smartphone dating apps, Young longs for nothing more than a deep and lasting connection. Yet all the overlapping cultures that clam him — gay culture, &#8220;hook-up&#8221; culture, social-media culture, Korean culture — seem to have allied themselves against the fulfillment of that desire.
Matters aren&#8217;t helped by the company Young keeps. His best friend Jaehee, namesake of Love in the Big City&#8216;s first section, acts as if given over to the pursuit of dissolution, compulsively smoking, drinking, and going to bed with any man who will have her. &#8220;Jaehee and I had very little sense of chastity, or none at all, to be honest,&#8221; Young tells us in his narration, &#8220;and we were apparently known for it in our respective spheres.&#8221; Having bonded over a shared penchant for the excesses in which impecunious twenty-somethings can indulge, he and Jaehee fall into a pattern of mutual support, and more so mutual reinforcement. When Jaehee falls pregnant, with predictable uncertainty as to the father&#8217;s identity, it is Young who accompanies her to the clinic in hopes of an abortion — and apologizes for the outburst of anger she releases on its moralizing doctor.
Despite sounding more troubled than not in his telling, Young&#8217;s time with Jaehee, which even includes a period of cohabitation, comes to look in retrospect like an idyll. When Young goes off to perform his mandatory military service, Jaehee goes off to study abroad in Australia, a choice that appears to plant in her mind the seed of reformation. Park has a knack for this sort of ironically telling detail: such is the disorder of Jaehee&#8217;s life that a stint in Australia, of all places, sets her on the straight and narrow. Or at least it sets her on a path just straight and narrow enough to lead to the altar: Park opens the novel with a scene at her wedding, and in it Young fields questions about his weight gain and inchoate writing career from their old French-literature department classmates at the &#8220;mid-tier university&#8221; from which they graduated.
Young may be a homosexual French-literature major, but in a victory for minority representation, he doesn&#8217;t exhibit a particularly strong instinct for beauty. Far from TV-drama Gangnam glamor, his is a dingy world familiar to readers of the kind of recent novels that regard the stifled lives of downwardly mobile Seoulites in their twenties and even thirties. Their clothing is cheap. Their food is cheap (and usually accompanied by great quantities of even cheaper drink). Their apartments are cheap, barely outfitted rooms in aging buildings, yet also burdensomely expensive. Jobs are temporary, and in any case unpromising; evenings not spent in front of the television wearing mask packs are spent at clubs that depress even with the lights down. Young takes an unsparing view of all this, as he does of his own hairy heaviness; his acknowledgment of Jaehee&#8217;s also-lackluster appearance implies a compensatory side to their sexual recklessness.
Whatever their motivations, they can have little to do with pleasure per se: in Park&#8217;s rendering, Young and Jaehee&#8217;s behavior comes to look like an anhedonic oscillation between repression of and capitulation to their own impulses. Jahee&#8217;s exit from this cycle by settling down with an implausibly stable-seeming man comes to Young as a shock (&#8220;It was more likely that I would take a bride than she a groom&#8221;), though Park allows little confidence in her marriage&#8217;s long-term prospects. We never do find out how she fares in sustained monogamy, since her wedding day evidently marks the end of her and Young&#8217;s friendship. Jaehee isn&#8217;t the only person suddenly to vanish from his life: men, too, come and go with little notice, leaving Young the up-and-coming novelist to write versions of the relationships he had with them, and thus to claim ownership over the vicissitudes of his life.
Young recounts his involvement with a series of men including an engineering student whose love is reserved primarily for his own unremarkable compact car. &#8220;We both had low self-esteem, regularly felt suicidal compulsions, were bullied as kids, and pretentiously enjoyed arty films and books while hating basic crap like <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/haruki-murakami-books-korean-ever-will-english/">Haruki Murakami</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">Hong Sangsoo</a>, French literature, and Audis.&#8221; Their relationship continues &#8220;until it became boring and I stopped returning his messages&#8221;; Young later learns that he&#8217;s been in a wreck, dying in his beloved Kia. A much more intense liaison forms with a man encountered in a continuing-education philosophy class (whose syllabus includes Spinoza&#8217;s Ethics and Barthes&#8217; A Lover’s Discourse). Referred to only as hyung, a Korean term with which a younger man addresses an older one, he turns out to have a dozen years on Young — and, worse, to speak like &#8220;a stuffy, middle-aged ajussi.&#8221;
As rendered in English by Anton Hur, Love in the Big City never breaks the narrative to explain what an ajussi is, or for that matter what a hyung is, and should thus become a model for future translations of Korean literature. Extremely common in Korean life, these words and others like them — Umma, sunbae — lose their feeling when presented as exotic linguistic dressing or objects of scholarly explication. Park wrote this novel in Korean for a readership that knows exactly what things like <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/hagwon-horror-stories-kevin-m-mahers-english-teaching-expat-novel-couches-korea/">hagwon</a> and Kongsuni dolls are, a perspective best retained in translation. Hur trusts the reader of Korean literature in English to look up unknown references, to infer their nature from context, or at least to pass over them without distress. And at this point, is it so unrealistic to assume on the part of such a reader a basic familiarity with Korean culture?
Even those barely acquainted with modern Korea will feel a certain sense of recognition at the character of Young&#8217;s mother. &#8220;Our family is extremely ordinary, and like any ordinary patriarch, my father had so many affairs that my mother eventually divorced him,&#8221; as Young puts it. The split initiated her transformation into a now-archetypal figure: the self-made, or rather self-remade, middle-aged Korean woman who leans heavily on the Bible. Having become a freelance matchmaker, she found success &#8220;when men and women from the affluent Gangnam and Songpa districts, who had almost ended up forever single after the upheavals of the Asian financial crisis of the late nineties, began turning their attention to the idea of marriage.&#8221; It was then, Young recalls, that she believed &#8220;that if our family put its best foot forward, we could end up in society&#8217;s top percentile and live the dream of a beautiful Scandinavian lifestyle.&#8221;
Things didn&#8217;t turn out as planned. Stricken by cancer, Young&#8217;s mother finds herself cared for by the son whose whose writing she claims never to have read. With her own exit from his life imminent, Young gets it in his head to introduce her to his &#8220;hyung&#8221; from philosophy class; a disaster is perhaps averted when he fails to show up at the appointed hour. This isn&#8217;t as a surprise: the man comes off as posturing yet furtive, in thrall to his past in bombastic left-wing campus activism and desperate to conceal his homosexuality. To an extent, Park depicts him as simply a product of a chronologically proximate yet culturally distant generation, some of whose members use phases like &#8220;the American Empire&#8221; without irony and take someone of Young&#8217;s age to task for listening to American music. Young&#8217;s reply: &#8220;What kind of a gay man isn&#8217;t into Britney or Beyoncé?&#8221;
Yet when Young later refers to himself, with characteristic sarcasm, as a &#8220;decadent by-product of American imperialism and Western capitalism,&#8221; it feels as if some of these arrows have stuck. Proficient in English, this avowed hater of &#8220;basic crap&#8221; admits to having developed that proficiency by watching &#8220;episodes of Friends, Will and Grace, and Sex and the City on repeat.&#8221; This in contrast to Gyu-ho, the more age-appropriate boyfriend with whom he takes up after the hyung, who &#8220;was surprisingly bad at English but was great at East Asian languages like Mandarin or Japanese.&#8221; A recent arrival in Seoul (or rather the more-or-less nearby city of Incheon) from Jeju Island, Gyu-ho exudes rustic earnestness and charm. This contrasts with, or rather complements, Young&#8217;s chosen persona of the jaded and sardonic urbanite. In due time after their chance meeting at a club, the two become lovers.
Or rather they become lovers after their third date, according to Gyu-ho&#8217;s personal rule about when to sleep with a man. Developing such a system in the first place would seem to imply a fairly active sex life, but it nevertheless strikes Young as impossibly quaint. The relationship that follows has rough patches, and seemingly severe ones: &#8220;Twice we even split up,&#8221; says Young. &#8220;We saw different people. A lot of people in my case, and probably the same for Gyu-ho.&#8221; Still, it delivers him into a kind of domestic bliss; the two even merge their lives to the degree that they study Chinese together and both arrange transfers at their respective workplaces to Shanghai. But that step is thwarted when Young learns he&#8217;ll need to undergo a physical, complete with blood work that will reveal the HIV infection he&#8217;d picked up from an even more promiscuous earlier boyfriend.
Gyu-ho moves to China, leaving Young to drift back into the open socio-sexual sea. There he finds a middle-aged Malaysian businessman in whose Bangkok hotel room (coincidentally, the same one in which he&#8217;d stayed with Gyu-ho on an earlier vacation) he spends days at a stretch. &#8220;Lying there on my Tempur bed, I came to the realization, Wow, this really is a very plush and perfect state of death, even boredom can get boring,&#8221; he says. This prompts &#8220;some half-hearted swiping on Tinder. Anyone would do, anyone to get me out of that coffin of a bed and into the world outside, from the rotting cesspool of my life to what lay beyond.&#8221; The effort yields little, and Young&#8217;s narration continues to transmit general disorientation and desensitization. If he feels out of place in the world — hardly uncommon among fiction writers — the cause may run deeper than sexuality.
Young&#8217;s aesthetic sensitivity manifests only in response to all-consuming desire. &#8220;Had the streetlamps and neon signs always been this spectacularly bright?&#8221; he asks himself on one such occasion. &#8220;Why was Seoul so beautiful all of a sudden?&#8221; It&#8217;s reminiscent of what impresses him in his resented mother: &#8220;A passion for loving Jesus, for throwing oneself wholly into the act of living. That was, perhaps, the feeling I had toward my guy at one time, a feeling of giving myself up to something.&#8221; But Young belongs to a generation for whom religious ecstasy is in short supply, meagerly compensated for by an ever-growing variety of algorithm-aided satisfactions. A couple years ago I even noticed ads in the Seoul subway announcing the local launch of no less a manifestation of the &#8220;American Empire&#8221; than Tinder. &#8220;A new way to discover friends,&#8221; announced the posters. That&#8217;s certainly one way of putting it.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coronavirus-breaks-itaewon-gays-foreigners-seoul-neighborhood-celebrated-hit-netflix-drama/">The Coronavirus Breaks Out in Itaewon, the “Gays-and-Foreigners” Seoul Neighborhood Celebrated in a Hit Netflix Drama</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/great-korean-plastic-surgery-novel-frances-chas-face/">The Great Korean Plastic Surgery Novel: Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/six-expatriate-writers-give-six-views-seoul-new-short-fiction-anthology-city-han/">Six Expatriate Writers Give Six Views of Seoul in a New Short-Fiction Anthology, A City of Han</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/los-angeles-seoul-tale-two-ugly-cities/">Los Angeles and Seoul, a Tale of Two Ugly Cities</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: A Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
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How to Make It in Seoul: Sang Young Park&#8217;s Novel of Gay Almost-Romance Love in the Big City

How to Make It in Seoul: Sang Young Park&#8217;s Novel of Gay Almost-Romance Love in the Big City

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/beauty-queen-dead-kwon-yeo-suns-korean-millennial-murder-mystery-lemon/"></div>A murder mystery can end either resolved or unresolved. Most writers opt for the former, if only out of habit or crowd-pleasing instinct, though some habitually leave ends just loose enough to lead to a sequel. In the absence of any resolution, a novel&#8217;s very status as a murder mystery comes into doubt. It tends not to be described as belonging to the genre, but as using its elements — or, imprecisely, as &#8220;deconstructing&#8221; it. Reviewers of Kwon Yeo-sun&#8217;s Lemon (레몬), newly published in Janet Hong&#8217;s English translation, disagree about whether its central mystery is fully resolved. One could make a fair case either way, to my mind, but in this lack of a resolution over whether it even contains a resolution — its meta-unresolvedness, if you like — lies a clue to the source of its power, which critics have variously but unanimously praised.
The murder in Lemon is that of an eighteen-year-old girl named Kim Hae-on, the enchantress of her high school. &#8220;Her beauty seemed not of this world, a kind you rarely encountered,&#8221; remembers a former classmate who narrates certain chapters. After a glimpse of Hae-on&#8217;s face, &#8220;the classroom seemed to have transformed into a fictional, perhaps magical, place.&#8221; As for her body, it later turns up lifeless in a park, bearing evidence of blunt force trauma to the head. Her underwear is also missing, seemingly not the work of her attacker — &#8220;the autopsy didn’t reveal any traces of rape or sexual assault&#8221; — but the result of her own lifelong carelessness about matters of dress. &#8220;Before stepping out of the house, I stood her before me and circled her, checking her uniform to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything,&#8221; recalls her younger sister Da-on.
Apart from her defining (though vaguely sketched) looks, Hae-on comes across as in no way especially appealing. &#8220;It seemed she didn’t think about anything,&#8221; says Da-on. &#8220;She did nothing and thought nothing. She considered no one and harmed no one. She wasn’t interested in anyone nor bothered by anyone.&#8221; When hungry &#8220;she became incapable of empathy, of putting herself in someone else’s shoes, and hardly considered another person or the smallest etiquette.&#8221; She &#8220;seemed like an animal then, or even worse a sociopath, someone who could easily take a piece of bread from a starving child or elderly person.&#8221; Somehow, Hae-on&#8217;s less than fully human — or simply other than fully human — behavior hasn&#8217;t drawn more comparisons to Han Kang&#8217;s acclaimed <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/sex-surreality-social-conformity-han-kangs-vegetarian-sprouts-onto-u-s-literary-landscape/">The Vegetarian</a> (채식주의자), which also features an inert woman, withdrawn from human affairs, her actions relayed through the interpretations of others.
Lemon has three such interpreters: the sister Da-on, the classmate Sanghui, and another classmate named Yun Taerim. Taerim comes in second to Hae-on in the school beauty rankings, an order evidently agreed upon with an improbable unanimity. (Then again, it surprises me every time I hear Koreans discussing the looks of celebrities and airing essentially identical assessments.) Thus Taerim&#8217;s resentment for Hae-on knows no bounds, which draws the suspicions of the reader, if not the police investigating the murder. Their attention settles instead on two prime suspects: Han Manu, the delivery-boy son of a poor single mother, and Shin Jeongjun, the SUV-driving son of an accountant. That the investigators waste no time pressuring Manu to confess while Jeongjun gets sent to &#8220;study&#8221; in the United States suggests a critique of class in Korean society — or rather, a critique of wealth-based class to go with the critique of looks-based class.
&#8220;Some lives are unfair for no apparent reason, but we carry on, completely unaware, like miserable vermin,&#8221; declares Da-on, and certain readers will take it as something like the novel&#8217;s thesis statement. The sentiment is hardly at odds with Kwon&#8217;s literary worldview, premised as the latter is on misfortune and defeat. Such themes may be more palatable to Western readers in the context of a murder mystery, a form in which Kwon has never worked before, at least to the extent that Lemon qualifies as a murder mystery at all. The book, Kwon&#8217;s first published in English, is in most respects unrepresentative of the body of work she&#8217;s built over the past quarter-century. But it does share with her other novels’ roots in a real chapter of her country&#8217;s history: Hae-on dies just after the 2002 World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea in grudging cooperation with Japan.
In Korea, the 2002 World Cup is now remembered as much for its exuberant confirmation of the country&#8217;s modernity as its sporting value. It also retains outsized importance in the collective memory of the Korean equivalent of the West&#8217;s Millennials, the generation to which Lemon&#8216;s characters belong. Kwon (born in 1965, and thus of a member of the generation before) follows them through the long aftermath of Hae-on&#8217;s murder between 2002 to 2019, tracing the effects on each individual. Da-on is predictably hit the hardest, though her response takes an unexpected form: born homely, she takes it upon herself to undergo <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-seeing-korean-plastic-surgery/">plastic surgery</a> in order not just to beautify herself but to resemble her lost sibling. Running into Da-on in 2006, Sanghui describes her appearance as that of &#8220;an older, ruined Hae-on, who had been rejuvenated by force, a cross between the real Hae-on and a ravaged Hae-on.&#8221;
Just the idea of a woman surgically transforming herself into her own murdered sister would surely be enough to sustain a much longer novel. Plastic surgery itself happens also to be integral to <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/great-korean-plastic-surgery-novel-frances-chas-face/">If I Had Your Face</a> by the Korean-American novelist Frances Cha, another story told by rotating female narrators. Cha contributes one of the dozen blurbs included with Lemon&#8216;s English translation, another of which calls the book &#8220;quite the un-putdownable read,&#8221; perhaps the least promising such endorsement I&#8217;ve ever seen. At just 147 pages the book hardly requires putting down in the first place, and nowhere in evidence is the resistance to conventional form that has earned Kwon the reputation of a &#8220;difficult&#8221; writer here in her homeland. Yet beyond the mystery that gives it a plot, it also manages to incorporate enough cultural phenomena to provide a sense, if jaundiced, of Korean life in the 21st century.
The juggernaut of Korean Christianity makes an appearance when one of the novel&#8217;s least admirable characters calls a suicide hotline under the code name Christ, &#8220;as in Jesus Christ.&#8221; (Having seen a few of the names people choose as IDs here, I can confirm a degree of realism in this scene.) Korean regional accents and child-naming conventions also figure in, as does the importance of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reach-sky/">college entrance exams</a> and the therapeutic prominence of poetry in Korean society, all with a minimum of explanatory footnotes. One formidable translation challenge to which Hong rises comes just three pages in, when Sanghui ponders the nickname given to the suspected killer Han Manu. Its source is Cho Yong-pil&#8217;s late-1970s ballad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE6WJfJmQjI">&#8220;Han-o-baeg-nyeon&#8221;</a> (한오백년): to Manu&#8217;s classmates, &#8220;the opening words &#8216;ha-an-man-eu-eu-eun&#8217; sounded just like his name. If you slurred the n sound so that you said &#8216;ha-an-man-u&#8211;u&#8211;u&#8216; instead, it was perfect.&#8221;
Han maneun, those opening words, mean &#8220;han-filled.&#8221; Han, a concept anyone who reads about modern Korean culture will run across sooner rather than later, refers to a deep-seated sorrow and resentment instilled by the vicissitudes of national history. Though Manu never seems particularly resentful, Kwon freights him with more than his fair share of sorrows: a deadbeat father, a physically impaired mother, dangerous low-paying work, a series of police interrogations, a leg amputation, and finally death of cancer at 29. After reverting to her former state of dumpiness, Da-on finds a kind of peace, though one underlain by feelings of emptiness and guilt. The bitter Taerim ends up marrying Jeongjeun the prodigal son — and into the relative wealth of his family — only for their infant daughter to one day be snatched from her stroller (conveniently parked out of view of any of Seoul&#8217;s numerous CCTV cameras).
Are these fates traceable, as genuine han, back to the traumas endured by Korea itself? To her credit, Kwon draws no direct connections between national and individual fate. Lemon&#8216;s brevity also cuts off the possibility of lapsing into diatribes against Korean society, a temptation some novelists of recent years have been unable to resist. Yet as demonstrated by the reviews published so far, the book invites a variety of &#8220;critical&#8221; readings, not least to do with the valuation of beauty. If that is indeed what Kwon has in mind, she knows better than to pin it on any one culture or time. She also knows that the beauty&#8217;s power, fragile though it may be, owes nothing to any systems, hierarchies, or philosophies outside itself. It may take a woman to perceive the full extent of that power — or in the case of a beauty like Hae-on&#8217;s, three of them.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/great-korean-plastic-surgery-novel-frances-chas-face/">The Great Korean Plastic Surgery Novel: Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/book-jiyoung-explosively-controversial-korean-feminist-novel-comes-english/">The Book of Jiyoung: An Explosively Controversial Korean Feminist Novel Comes Out in English</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong’s The Good Son and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Kim Young-ha’s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae’s The Only Child</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-pyun-hye-youngs-law-lines-yun-ko-euns-disaster-tourist/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Pyun Hye-young’s The Law of Lines and Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
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The Beauty Queen Is Dead: Kwon Yeo-sun&#8217;s Korean-Millennial Murder Mystery Lemon

The Beauty Queen Is Dead: Kwon Yeo-sun&#8217;s Korean-Millennial Murder Mystery Lemon

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pleasures-watching-korean-television-1980s-k-drama-went-global/"></div>I belong to the rapidly shrinking group of pop-culture laggards who haven&#8217;t seen Netflix&#8217;s hit new Korean drama Squid Game (오징어 게임). That&#8217;s counting people not just in Korea but all across the world. My latest glimpse of someone engrossed in the series&#8217; (so I gather) trenchant social commentary and startling violence came on a domestic flight in the United States, since I happen to be in the middle of my first post-COVID travels. While abroad I&#8217;ve kept an ear to Korean news, eaten Korean meals of varying quality, and even watched Korean dramas. Those last, however, long precede Squid Game, Netflix, and even the internet as we know it — yet before the era of streaming video, I couldn&#8217;t have seen them at all. I refer, of course, to the Korean television dramas of the 1980s now free to watch on YouTube.
These channels are maintained not by enthusiasts (though such unofficial operations do exist), but by the networks themselves. None go deeper than <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/KBSArchive">KBS Archive</a>, property as it is of the Korean Broadcasting System, the first major player in South Korea&#8217;s television industry. KBS got into single-act productions after purchasing fledgling TV station HLKZ fifty years ago; later in the 1960s came serial dramas, antecedents of the shows that have bolstered Korean soft power across the world for decades now. I&#8217;ve long wanted to watch these early examples of what trend pieces these days call K-drama, but it seems KBS&#8217; archivists haven&#8217;t yet worked their way quite that deep into the vaults. But they have, thus far, uploaded individual broadcasts dating back to the late 1970s, and on KBS Archive&#8217;s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/kbsarchive/playlists?view=50&amp;sort=dd&amp;shelf_id=9">drama playlist</a> have assembled several complete or mostly complete series of thirty or forty years ago.
On KBS Archive you can stream the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKQurQLHfSwVjeJYqEK_MTCj">The Tree Blooming with Love</a> (사랑이꽃피는나무), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKSlgrwBao4m0earV3stDR19">Fetters of Love</a> (사랑의굴레), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKRiiTK0XAyYWXOZY8Sx3sTI">Moonlight Family</a> (달빛가족), and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKQ3pUK5T9uw4sg1hKymyYFo">When the Flowers Bloom and the Birds Cry</a> (꽃피고새울면). These English translations of their titles do not, I would argue, wholly misrepresent the sensibilities on display. With their reliance on prolonged conflicts in the realms of romance, family, school, and work, these are entertainments of what could fairly be called simpler times, at least in the set of emotions conveyed and the techniques used to convey them. One frequently deployed technique is a zoom in onto a character&#8217;s shocked or pained expression accompanied by a music sting — almost invariably produced, in the 1980s, with now incongruously cheap-sounding digital synthesizers.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15899" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-2.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-2.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-2-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-2-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Until quite recently disparaged as chonseureoweo (literally &#8220;village-like&#8221;), this kind of look and feel inspires in today&#8217;s Korea an interest in the retro, and now the retro-inspired <a href="https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/global-trend-newtro-south-korea">newtro</a>. Korean dramas of the past decade have even taken the 1980s as a period setting: the most notable, Reply 1988 (응답하라 1988), has been followed by two sequel series set in the 1990s. To most current K-drama viewers, those two decades belong equally to yetnal, a category whose ambiguity frustrates non-native Korean speakers (or at least this one), but which refers broadly to &#8220;the old days.&#8221; The Joseon Dynasty, which spanned the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries — and which has provided a backdrop for historical Korean dramas practically since Korean dramas first aired — is yetnal. But so, to many, is 2012, as I was informed after mentioning having enjoyed watching a series originally aired in that year.
The term also appears in the branding of these YouTube drama archives: KBS Archive has the Korean name Yetnal TV (옛날 티비), and the network MBC maintains <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MBCClassic/featured">a channel called Yetdeu</a> (옛드), which mashes up yetnal and the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords/">Konglish</a> deurama. (The similar portmanteau mideu refers to serial television made in the United States, or miguk, encompassing everything from Friends to Game of Thrones.) But for those who will dig most deeply into these channels this explanation is superfluous, for comprehension of Korean is a prerequisite for their full enjoyment. Though regarded as dialogue-heavy today, Korean dramas were even more so in decades past, and the vast majority of these videos lack subtitles in any language. That isn&#8217;t so much an oversight as the result of the assumption that, produced solely for a Korean audience, these shows hold no interest for anyone else.
This is partially supported by the comments left so far viewers, many of whom rhapsodize about the chueokeui deurama, or dramas of their memories, that they can now revisit. And indeed, those with actual memories of Korea in the 1980s can enjoy these channels on a different, no doubt richer level than a foreigner such as myself who&#8217;s lived there for less than a decade. And yet I&#8217;ve come to consider vintage television dramas essential viewing for non-Koreans trying to get a handle on not just the Korean language but modern Korean culture. They amount to a means of internalizing the cultural memory on which one has missed out: think of immigrants to the United States who master English by watching, say, The Simpsons, and how much better they understand American society as a result.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15898" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-3.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-3.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-3-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kb-1980s-tv-dramas-3-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Korean dramas of the late 1980s in particular also offer a view of a country in an especially heady cultural, political, and economic moment. As intended by the powers that be, the Olympics announced South Korea&#8217;s arrival onto the world stage in 1988. Those same powers that be, however, were also on their gradual way out, the process of democratization having begun in earnest <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-cinema-looks-back-1987-students-died-democracy-born/">the year before</a>. Starting the following year, ordinary citizens would even be allowed to travel abroad, ushering in an unprecedented era of non-mediated Korean interaction with the wider world. With the national economy growing at a still-formidable pace, television dramas leaned hard into their viewers&#8217; aspirations, not least in the just-that-side-of-plausible domestic spaces in which they stage their many scenes of family interaction. (Here the American comparison would be to the immaculate suburban palaces seen on television of the booming 1950s and 60s.)
Not everything in these shows has aged well. The era&#8217;s aggressive &#8220;Westernization&#8221; now looks garish and often risible, especially when it comes to wardrobe and décor, and the overall aesthetic and narrative consequences of the kind of rushed production described in <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">Youjeong Oh’s Pop City</a> are difficult to ignore. Still, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-seeing-korean-plastic-surgery/">Korean plastic surgery</a> of the 1980s hadn&#8217;t yet come anywhere near its now-infamous extremes (I defy anyone to put a current K-drama starlet against her equivalent of four decades ago and admit honestly who comes out ahead), and however long they run, these dramas have little time to mount critiques of the society from which they arose. Squid Game, by contrast, has been received in the West as a critique of Korean society and little else — not least because we foreigners, with our deficiency of Korean cultural memory, have no experience of real-life schoolroom games at its center.
Yet some fans are making the effort to learn about those games, just as some viewers of Lee Isaac Chung&#8217;s Minari have looked up the Academy Award-winning Youn Yuh-jung and discovered <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/grandma-minari-grindhouse-femme-fatale-kim-ki-youngs-insect-woman-1972/">her past as an exploitation-film femme fatale</a>. Seeing Youn turn up as a psychiatrist in Fetters of Love, viewable in full on KBS Archive, will thrill those who know only her recent work. More actor-spotting can be done — and more honest reckoning with the actual conditions of Korean life seen — in KBS&#8217; short-story-adaptation series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKRedyCrPkkthd3axgsFRLLe">TV Hall of Literature</a> (TV문학관) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKSBIGKS19IDlz5h7jBIvO2l">Teenage Hall of Literature</a> (청소년문학관). Since late last year, the network has also been reviving on YouTube another long-running series of standalone one-act stories from the 1980s and 90s. Its both fondly remembered and now-trendy title: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN47-pAnbHKRd3AWteraUorO1RC9VYtH9">Drama Game</a> (드라마게임).
&nbsp;
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh’s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/looking-back-la-arirang-1990s-korean-sitcom-life-los-angeles/">Looking Back at LA Arirang, the 1990s Korean Sitcom about Life in Los Angeles</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/listen-seoul-1980s-real-imagined-streaming-mixes-korean-city-pop/">Listen to the Seoul of the 1980s, Real or Imagined, with Streaming Mixes of Korean “City Pop”</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/watching-korea-develop-sixty-years-commercials/">Watching Korea Develop Through Sixty Years of Commercials</a>
&nbsp;
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pleasures-watching-korean-television-1980s-k-drama-went-global/"></div>

The Pleasures of Watching Korean Television from the 1980s, Before K-Drama Went Global

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/understanding-koreas-unique-situation-routledges-new-handbook-contemporary-south-korea/"></div>I began living in and writing about Korea, an endeavor in which I&#8217;ve now <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/five-years-seoulite-looking-back-korea-blogs-first-half-decade/">been engaged for years</a>, with practically no academic preparation. After graduating university, I audited a few lectures on Korean popular culture, then tried to take community-college Korean 101, which ended up cancelled for lack of enrollment. Later, after moving to Los Angeles, I signed up for language courses at the Korean Cultural Center on Wilshire Boulevard. They formed a pyramid, the top being a modestly sized &#8220;advanced&#8221; level (though many of us could barely string a sentence together) and the bottom an introductory level popular enough to spread across multiple classrooms. Of the throng of beginners there, a large proportion seemed to have come to the language through love of Korean pop music and television dramas. Whatever our individual motivations, all of eagerly partook of the offerings of South Korea&#8217;s newly ascendant cultural empire.
Yet this empire isn&#8217;t quite as new as it seems. The Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles opened in 1980, as Keimyung University professor Seon Jung Kim notes in an academic paper on overseas Korean language education, and today there are 41 such centers in eighteen countries. That paper appears in the new Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea, edited by Sojin Lim and Niki J.P. Alsford. Following previous Routledge &#8220;handbooks&#8221; on modern Korean history, Korean culture and society, Korean politics and public administration, and contemporary North Korea, it collects articles on the various aspects of the Republic of Korea studied by its contributors. As in most academic anthologies, these selections read as if included for their suitability as assigned reading in an undergraduate course — or rather courses, given the range from &#8220;Historical Development of Judicial Independence in South Korea&#8221; to &#8220;The South Korean Literary Field and Its Recent Evolution.&#8221;
Only a small minority of this book&#8217;s purchasers will thus read it as I did, from cover to cover. Doing so may not yield a clear single narrative of South Korea, but it does — despite the frequent changes of author, focus, and prose style, about which more later — yield a coherent image of South Korea. Here we have a modern nation that spent the early part of its life in hopeless-looking poverty: more than one contributor cites its GNP of the early 1960s, which was comparable to the that of Ghana or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But over the two or three decades thereafter, factors including shrewd use of aid and loans (primarily from the United States and former colonizer Japan) as well as even shrewder industrial policy turned it into one of the economic champions of Asia. Today, South Korea&#8217;s economy is the world&#8217;s 11th largest.
South Korea&#8217;s military, just as notably, is the world&#8217;s 10th largest. This fact speaks to the country&#8217;s geopolitical position, strongly allied with the distant and increasingly fickle superpower that is the United States of America while physically located between China, Japan, and North Korea. Thus, a large chunk of the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea is taken up by papers on South Korea&#8217;s relations with all of those nations. Much of the theoretical language used in this section do deal with the balance of power sounded familiar to me (if not always palatably) from my own college days, during which I studied nothing specifically Korean but did end up majoring in political science. Fresher is the category in which several contributors describe South Korea as having found itself: that of the &#8220;middle power.&#8221;
A power of this class, as Aston University&#8217;s Virginie Grzelczyk puts it, &#8220;is neither big nor small when it comes to capacity, population and influence,&#8221; but &#8220;can help with how the international system is being shaped.&#8221; Official Korea, as I like to call it, outwardly embraced this role in 2008 by launching a &#8220;Global Korea&#8221; strategy, but how or even whether the wealthy, well-armed Republic of recent decades has exerted its middling power on the international system remains a matter of debate. &#8220;The vagueness of the concept of middle power and the related lack of consensus around the sources, the characteristics and the performance of this international role have led to a lack of consensus also on what comprises the real effectiveness of South Korea’s middle power diplomacy and to what extent the country’s foreign policy has benefited from this strategy,&#8221; writes University of Bologna foreign-policy scholar Marco Milani.
Nevertheless, as a &#8220;strong democratic middle power,&#8221; argues Hankuk University of Foreign Studies&#8217; Lonnie Edge, South Korea &#8220;as long outgrown its need to defeat North Korea, and narratives to this effect ring hollow among younger Korean voters, who fear the cost of absorbing North Korea.&#8221; As several of these papers frame it, relations with the North became the dominant political issue in South Korea at the division of the peninsula after World War II. So they remained until late in the 20th century, by which time the Republic of Korea had demonstrated its overwhelming economic superiority (an outcome far from obvious as recently as the 1970s) over the Democratic People&#8217;s Republic of Korea. Yet &#8220;South Korea’s identity still remains inexorably tied to its northern neighbor,&#8221; writes the University of Sheffield&#8217;s Sarah A. Son, and &#8220;this association continues to overshadow the South&#8217;s many independent achievements.&#8221;
Son may exaggerate slightly, but the North has arguably been the better-known Korea until just this past decade. In that time, as University of California, Berkeley&#8217;s Hannah Michell tells it, &#8220;the global visibility and mass recognition of South Korean hits such as Psy&#8217;s &#8216;Gangnam Style,&#8217; the record-breaking popularity of idol group BTS, and director Bong Joon-ho’s Academy award success with the film <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/parasite-bong-joon-ho-comes-back-attack-homeland-wins-palme-dor/">Parasite</a>&#8221; has conferred on the South the status of a &#8220;cultural powerhouse. Less visible or known, however, is how this powerhouse has been propelled by government investment.&#8221; The instrumentality of Official Korea in launching them is easily overstated (and <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/travelers-video-seoul-astonishes-official-promotion-korea-embarrasses/">high-profile incompetence in that department</a> is hardly a thing of the past), but the fact remains that these global cultural phenomena really have made South Korea attractive to much of the world, their often harsh, even damning portrayals of South Korean society notwithstanding.
Michell writes that, despite Psy&#8217;s critique in &#8220;Gangnam Style&#8221; of the excesses of the wealthy, &#8220;the government’s willingness to accept this is evident in the use of the song at President Park Geun-hye&#8217;s inauguration.&#8221; Her father, former president Park Chung-hee, was &#8220;known to strictly censor pop culture,&#8221; but she herself &#8220;seemed to embrace the song despite its critical lyrics because of its global success.&#8221; The violent class-war satire of Parasite invites a reading as an even stronger condemnation — &#8220;those familiar with Korea’s history might catch the subtle significance of the Western architecture built atop a basement bunker necessitated by war&#8221; — but its &#8220;critical commentary has been softened in the service of something greater,&#8221; namely &#8220;a celebration of Korea’s dynamism in producing cultural content capable of achieving record-breaking success&#8221; — success per se, on which every sector of South Korean society can seem monomaniacally, almost debilitatingly fixated.
Nowhere is this obsession more obvious than in the realm of education, the subject of a paper by James Madison University&#8217;s Michael J. Seth. In that as in so many areas, South Korea has effected an astonishing transformation in a short span of time. &#8220;When the country was partitioned in 1945, fewer than half the adult population had any schooling at all, and only 5 percent had completed secondary school,&#8221; Seth writes. But &#8220;by the end of the second decade of the 21st century, South Koreans by some measurements were the world’s best-educated citizens,&#8221; with 80 percent of all high school graduates going on to higher education. This hasn&#8217;t come without costs, one being that &#8220;the very nature of South Korea’s education zeal, the drive for the highest and most prestigious levels of academic achievement possible, made it difficult to supply the actual skills needed for the economy.&#8221;
What&#8217;s worse, organization around a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reach-sky/">single college entrance exam</a> has made the whole of South Korean education — and its attendant hypertrophied cram-school industry — look to increasingly many like &#8220;a wasteful system of status competition, placing enormous strains on young people for only modest returns.&#8221; On this level modern South Korea bears an troublingly strong resemblance to Korea under the Joseon Dynasty of the late 14th to early 20th century, when &#8220;a series of highly competitive examinations served as the means of selection for prestigious government positions&#8221; and elite families &#8220;devoted a great deal of energy and expense to education and examination preparation.&#8221; For all the promises every incoming administration makes about education reform, few complaints have been effectively addressed, and worries persist of society becoming &#8220;dominated by a hereditary elite like the one that characterized premodern Korea.&#8221;
To a country like South Korea, for which rapid economic development was an existential matter within living memory, the fear of backsliding would be hard to overstate. Much of the arrogance fueled by the country&#8217;s initial success had to have died out in 1997, when the International Monetary Fund provided the country with a bailout loan in exchange for enacting severe austerity reforms. (This was a local consequence of the wider Asian financial crisis, but Koreans tellingly refer to the period simply as &#8220;IMF.&#8221;) The 2014 sinking of the MV Sewol, in which 350 died, wasn&#8217;t the first incident to raise questions about whether the country had really emerged from what used to be called the third world. It also put on terrible display the consequences of the modern phenomenon University College Cork&#8217;s Kevin N. Cawley labels &#8220;Corrupt Confucianism.&#8221;
The captain of the Sewol, Cawley writes, displayed a &#8220;complete lack of the moral responsibility associated with Confucian ethics,&#8221; which had supposedly done so much to hold Korean society together. So did President Park Geun-hye, who &#8220;neglected to fulfill her moral duties in the aftermath of the Sewol tragedy, which to all intents and purposes seriously eroded the legitimacy of her mandate to rule.&#8221; This did its part to inspire the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/anti-trump-protests-anti-park-protests-koreanization-american-politics/">2016 street protests</a> that demanded, and ultimately exacted, her removal from office; so did the revelation of Park&#8217;s reliance on a hitherto unknown individual named Choi Soon-sil, who as Park&#8217;s confidant &#8220;had free access to classified government documents, edited Park’s public speeches and coached her secretaries, without any official position.&#8221; So writes Sogang University&#8217;s Dae-oup Chang, who also that &#8220;Park had offered various favors to chaebol in exchange for their investment in unknown foundations run by Choi.&#8221;
Few Korean Studies courses could provide an accurate picture of the South Korean economy, or indeed South Korean history and culture, without mentioning chaebol, the large family-run conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai, Lotte, and CJ. &#8220;Chaebol dominance of the South Korean society and market is truly remarkable,&#8221; write Ewha Womans University&#8217;s Eun Mee Kim and Nancy Y. Kim. &#8220;Their large footprint — ranging from mobile phones, semi-conductors, automobiles, and ready-made food products to entertainment, hotels, department stores, insurance, and hospitals — makes it impossible to live in South Korea without accessing their products or services for even a day or two.&#8221; These vast aggregations of enterprise are often resented, but having driven the country&#8217;s development, also regarded with a kind of awe: the question of which entity is more powerful, Samsung or the South Korean government, doesn&#8217;t produce much in the way of honest debate.
Most South Koreans seem to have made their peace with this arrangement; many &#8220;vie for the prestige of becoming an employee of a chaebol member firm while deriding the hierarchy and elitism of the chaebol.&#8221; But some prominent figures have aired complaints. &#8220;Filmmakers like <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">Hong Sangsoo</a> have blamed the squeezing out of non-commercial mainstream film on the dominance of oligopolies in the Korean market,&#8221; writes Monash University&#8217;s Andrew David Jackson. This dominance has intensified since the Asian financial crisis, which devastated small businesses but left successfully restructured chaebol with greater market share. &#8220;Although they were initially involved in distribution, they have come to monopolize exhibition through their control of multiplexes and have now also expanded into film production.&#8221; The stamp of the chaebol is also all over Korean television dramas, another medium employed, writes Michell, to &#8220;disseminate favorable images of Korea and Koreans to the rest of the world.&#8221;
The rest of the world has paid favorable regard to these images — or at least much of the world, to some of the images. But however impressive South Korea has become, its society has shown a dispiriting tendency toward dominance by controlling elites, themselves sometimes given to venality and ineptitude. Critically minded South Koreans thus insist that their outwardly robust country remains &#8220;politically backward&#8221; (or some such formulation), but the same condition also extends to business, education, culture, religion, and beyond. That, in any case, is the impression collectively given by the papers of the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea, most of which gesture at a need for reform in their area without coming to a definitive conclusion about it. Such hollowness is a vice of academic writing, as is the jargon that accretes around it: why simply convey information on a subject when you can &#8220;problematize&#8221; it?
Distance from the contortions of Western academia is one advantage of expatriate life in South Korea, come though it does with frustrations of its own. Foreigners working here quickly tire of the phrase &#8220;Please understand our unique situation,&#8221; deployed as it is to excuse every unreasonable request or inconvenience. All the more frustrating to realize, reading analyses such as these, that South Korea&#8217;s situation — developmentally, geopolitically, demographically, culturally — is indeed unique. And in the years since Routledge began publishing handbooks on Korea, it&#8217;s only become more intriguing as South Korea&#8217;s cultural empire has grown in ways <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">nobody would have predicted</a>. Like every empire, it does show occasional signs of strain (BTS, now in effect South Korea&#8217;s pop-cultural ambassadors, have of late turned to singing good-time anthems in English), but the next generation of Korean Studies majors can rest assured that, whatever happens, at least they won&#8217;t be bored.
&nbsp;
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh’s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/first-comprehensive-introduction-k-lit-past-present-youngmin-kwon-bruce-fultons-korean-literature/">The First Comprehensive Introduction to &#8220;K-Lit&#8221; Past and Present: Youngmin Kwon and Bruce Fulton’s What Is Korean Literature?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/rediscovering-korean-cinema-academic-look-zombies-mutants-criminals-prostitutes-south-koreas-silver-screen/">Rediscovering Korean Cinema: An Academic Look at the Zombies, Mutants, Criminals, and Prostitutes of South Korea’s Silver Screen</a>
&nbsp;
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/understanding-koreas-unique-situation-routledges-new-handbook-contemporary-south-korea/"></div>

Understanding Korea&#8217;s Unique Situation: Routledge&#8217;s New Handbook of Contemporary South Korea

Understanding Korea&#8217;s Unique Situation: Routledge&#8217;s New Handbook of Contemporary South Korea

prisoner-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/south-korean-writer-locked-daring-go-north-hwang-sok-yongs-memoir-prisoner/"></div>The reunification of Germany has long been a topic of interest among South Koreans invested in relations with the North. When the Berlin Wall fell, Hwang Sok-yong was one of the few such South Koreans actually there to witness it. Though known primarily as a novelist, Hwang split his energies between writing and political agitation in the early decades of his now more than half-century-long literary career. He often failed to strike an ideal balance between the two, as he admits in his memoir The Prisoner (수인), recently published by Verso in Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell&#8217;s English translation. This German sojourn comes early in the book, whose 624 pages (condensed from the two-volume original) ultimately constitute a full autobiography, albeit a chronologically shuffled one. Through these episodes of his life he interweaves the titular narrative, that of his half-decade&#8217;s political imprisonment by the South Korean government.
It bears repeating that this is a memoir not of captivity in North Korea, a genre in which the US publishing industry has shown an insatiable interest, but of captivity in the South. Nevertheless, it is also in part a travelogue of North Korea, Hwang&#8217;s trip to which brought down his prison sentence in the first place. He took it in 1989, the year international travel opened up to ordinary South Koreans, though by that time he already possessed the rare distinction of experience abroad. The then-West Germany had invited him in 1985, and his time there plunged him into uncertainty about his very identity. &#8220;Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had serialized since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea.&#8221;
&#8220;A country bumpkin on his first overseas trip,&#8221; Hwang decided that in Germany he &#8220;wouldn’t even bother mentioning literature: I would only talk to as many people as possible about the plight of the citizens of Gwangju and our democracy movement.&#8221; The nine-day long violent conflict between protestors and the military in that South Korean city — now called the Gwangju Uprising, or by some the Gwangju Massacre — had occurred just five years earlier. That Hwang had been living there at the time would align with his uncanny knack for finding himself in the way of historic events, but other organizing commitments called him up to Seoul before the fighting broke out. &#8220;It always weighed on me that I was not there to stand with the people of Gwangju in their hour of need,&#8221; he admits, a guilt he first sought to alleviate through writing.
The fallout from Hwang&#8217;s work on a clandestinely published narrative of the troubles in Gwangju, assembled according to the testimony of surviving protestors and their supporters, motivated his first visit to Germany. Interrogated after a week in jail, he was informed that he could avoid charges of &#8220;rumormongering&#8221; if he left Korea for a while. When he did so, he met with reunification-minded groups in not just Europe but Japan and the United States as well, which got him arrested and questioned again upon his return to his homeland. The authorities&#8217; concern seems to have been potential violation of the National Security Act. &#8220;Unilaterally legislated by the ruling party after the formation of separate North and South governments in 1948,&#8221; that law was &#8220;built on the premise that North Korea is not a sovereign nation but an &#8216;anti-governmental&#8217; or terrorist organization&#8221; — one whose sympathizers should be dealt with accordingly.
Despite South Korea&#8217;s simultaneous entry into the United Nations with the North in 1991, among other implicit acknowledgments of nationhood, the National Security Act &#8220;was never struck down and remains the law of the land to this day. Even the most vaguely positive-sounding mention of the North Korean regime can be construed as a crime of &#8216;praising&#8217; terrorists.&#8221; Giving a talk in Japan, Hwang deals with an audience member whose hostile questions spur him to contemplate more brazen action: &#8220;Was it enough, to avoid &#8216;praising&#8217; the North Korean regime, to say that communism was evil and that we had to destroy the communists if we wanted reunification? I thought of the people who had died in both North and South during the Korean War, the people who had broken the taboo of this border and were imprisoned or executed, and all the people in Gwangju who died while demanding democracy.&#8221;
&#8220;If I did not try to cross this border myself,&#8221; Hwang describes himself as concluding, &#8220;then I was not a writer. I wasn’t anything.&#8221; In fact he&#8217;d already crossed the 38th parallel once, in childhood, during his family&#8217;s harrowing escape south with national division underway. Insofar as that family was from the half of the peninsula now called North Korea, Hwang is North Korean himself, though he was actually born in Manchuria, which like Korea was still a Japanese colony in the early 1940s. They returned to Korea after the end of World War II, and history would keep him on the move throughout his formative years. The Korean War displaced him more than once — he retains vivid memories of playing with neighborhood friends amid the smoldering ruins of Seoul — eventually forcing his family to resettle for a time in the southern city of Daegu.
This sets the precedent for a certain peripateticism in Hwang&#8217;s life, both within Korea and without. His autodidactic tendencies encouraged by his mother, the young Hwang displays little patience with educational institutions, at one point running away to spend his days reading books in a cave, and at another going so far as to become an apprentice Buddhist monk. After a few months his mother turns up to extract him from the monastic life; years later, when he&#8217;s been sent to fight in the Vietnam War, she arranges his transfer out of what turns out to have been immediate danger. By then he&#8217;s already had nearer-death experiences than that in Vietnam, and indeed in Korea; on the whole, the number of close scrapes he recalls would approach implausibility in a work of fiction, as would his number of direct encounters with people, places, and events important in modern Korean history.
Throughout The Prisoner Hwang draws connections to his own stories and novels, never hesitating to name his real-life sources of inspiration. While reading it, the work of fiction that came to my mind wasn&#8217;t one of Hwang&#8217;s, but rather Yoon Je-kyoon&#8217;s 2014 film Ode to My Father (국제시장). A Forrest Gump-style historical blockbuster that tells the story of South Korea through the life of one man of Hwang&#8217;s generation, it, too, depicts wartime chaos, struggles in a poverty economy, and marches through the booby trap-laden Vietnamese jungle. But while Ode to My Father might be called a lighthearted tearjerker (surely a Korean speciality genre) and has been criticized as a conservative romanticization of a more authoritarian time, The Prisoner takes the opposite tack, avoiding opportunities for sentimentality and seizing opportunities to criticize the Republic of Korea, especially as it was at its height of developmentalism.
That developmentalism was personified by Park Chung-hee, who took power in a 1961 military coup and ruled as president until his assassination in 1979. During Park&#8217;s reign Hwang lived in Haenam, a rural hamlet already losing its traditions &#8220;due to the destructive effects of the Saemaul &#8216;New Village&#8217; Movement that was sweeping the country. Far from being revived, villages were emptying out.&#8221; While &#8220;today some regard the Saemaul Movement as Park Chung-hee’s jewel in the crown&#8221; for its modernization of the countryside, the result Hwang sees is that &#8220;the poorer farmers became the urban poor, clinging to the outskirts of towns, or low-income, unskilled laborers.&#8221; As for Vietnam, he writes that &#8220;to this day, I still cannot freely talk about everything that I witnessed&#8221; — which is saying something, given the vividness with which he relates his memories of destroyed villages and other sites of wanton killing.
Mỹ Lai, as Hwang sees it, &#8220;was just one of the many acts of cruelty on a mass scale that were perpetrated during the Vietnam War,&#8221; including, as one occasionally hears referenced in stories a long way indeed from the pratfalls of Ode to My Father, by Korean troops. &#8220;I believe it was the internalized violence from the Korean War and onward, exacerbated by the Vietnam conflict, that enabled the slaughter of civilians in broad daylight several years later during the pro-democracy protests in Gwangju. Korea’s lack of reflection on our role in the Vietnam War is especially shameful in the light of our eagerness to point out Japan’s atrocities.&#8221; 21st-century South Korea, in his view, retains something of the hypocrisy of the Park dictatorship, &#8220;wearing the fashionable clothes of democracy over one half of a body that remains divided by a militarized border.&#8221;
If Hwang&#8217;s contrarian streak made him a sufficiently outspoken anti-authoritarian for the South Korean government to peg him as a troublemaker early on, it has also kept him from permanently abandoning his homeland. He could have stayed in Germany, his next stop after his fateful visit to North Korea; he could have stayed in the United States, where he moved his family and which actually granted him residency after strings were pulled at the Department of Defense. He could even have stayed in the DPRK, having received a personal appeal to do in the embrace of Kim Il-sung himself. But he writes of having understood that he was &#8220;a product of South Korean history and therefore would never be anything more than a houseguest in North Korea&#8221; — and what&#8217;s worse, a houseguest whose presence would inevitably be milked by both sides for all the propaganda value it was worth.
Several years in Japan, Europe, and America followed Hwang&#8217;s visit to North Korea, but the whole time, he insists, he intended to return to South Korea and accept the punishment awaiting him there. When a German novelist suggests he apply for asylum, Hwang declares that &#8220;I have to go back to where they speak my mother tongue&#8221; — which is also where his case would become a high-profile illustration of what he saw as the absurdity of the National Security Act. Arrested right off the plane in April 1993, he within months inspired an &#8220;international movement led by PEN chapters around the world to free me from jail&#8221; (not including PEN Korea, whose tone-deaf intransigence becomes a minor theme). These and other efforts bore no fruit: Hwang received a seven-year sentence, five of which he ultimately served before being pardoned by democratic activist-turned-president Kim Dae Jung.
In North Korea Hwang had been introduced to well-known writers who shared his love of the Korean language. But &#8220;the country would fall into real peril a few years later, and from prison I would watch on TV what later became known as the Arduous March,&#8221; the famine of the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands (and potentially millions) of North Koreans, including two of Hwang&#8217;s cousins. Not that Hwang himself was fed particularly well during his imprisonment, especially given the nineteen separate hunger strikes he undertook to demand improvements in conditions. Sometimes he did so for better food, and other times, less successfully, for the mere ability to write: &#8220;It was true that I’d been more of an activist than a writer during my four years of exile after visiting North Korea, but they understood very well that preventing a writer from writing was a punishment in itself.&#8221;
Despite having had not so much as a pen to keep a diary, Hwang recalls the techniques he employed and adaptations he made to endure these psychological privations and physical discomforts in a remarkably high degree of detail. None of this is without interest, though the same could be said of the other chapters of Hwang&#8217;s storied life — mostly retained in equal clarity, which accounts in part for The Prisoner&#8216;s length — some of which must have made prison feel like less of an ordeal by comparison. Enthusiasts of Korean literature and politics will recognize many in the parade of scantily introduced names throughout the book, from novelist <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-greatest-living-novelist-never-published-english-introducing-kim-hoon-war-abstraction/">Kim Hoon</a>&#8216;s appearance as a &#8220;newbie reporter&#8221; the late Seoul mayor Park Won-soon&#8217;s as a lawyer doing pro bono work on Hwang&#8217;s case. The foreign notables are fewer, but include the likes of Ōe Kenzaburō and then-PEN America president Susan Sontag.
&#8220;Sontag let out a playful yelp at the sight of the writhing tentacles, her face full of curiosity and amusement, but couldn’t bring herself to take a bite,&#8221; Hwang writes of one dining experience during her visit to Korea. Whether or not she had another chance to taste sannakji, she might never have had one to read Hwang&#8217;s writing. Almost all English translations of his novels and stories have been published in the 21st century, mostly work he wrote after his release from prison. (<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/does-capitalism-make-good-compost-familiar-things-hwang-sok-yongs-novel-of-waste-and-reclamation/">Familiar Things</a> and <a href="https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/to-hell-and-back-modernized-myth-in-hwang-sok-yongs-princess-bari/">Priness Bari</a>, both translated by Sora Kim-Russell, were reviewed in the LARB.) Still unavailable to English-language readers is Jang Gil-san, the saga of a seventeenth-century bandit with which Hwang made his name — and managed covertly to criticize South Korean politics and society. Nowadays he does it overtly, of course, but also well understands that some ideas are still best conveyed in fiction.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/detroit-shows-americans-american-riot-taxi-driver-shows-koreans-korean-massacre/">As Detroit Shows Americans an American Riot, A Taxi Driver Shows Koreans a Korean Massacre</a>
<a href="http://plorers-history-korean-fiction-translation-social-tragedies-economic-miracle/">The Explorer’s History of Korean Fiction in Translation: The Social Tragedies of the “Economic Miracle”</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-presidents-artist-blacklist-product-insecure-state/">The Korean President’s Artist Blacklist, Product of an Insecure State</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/interested-north-korea/">On Not Being Interested in North Korea</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
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The South Korean Writer Locked Up for Daring to Go North: Hwang Sok-yong&#8217;s Memoir The Prisoner

The South Korean Writer Locked Up for Daring to Go North: Hwang Sok-yong&#8217;s Memoir The Prisoner

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-tv-dramas-lee-hyeong-pyos-sky-seoul-1961/"></div>This is one in a series of essays on important works of Korean cinema available free to watch on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvH6u_Qzn5RQdz9W198umDw">the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel</a>. Previous selections include <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/grandma-minari-grindhouse-femme-fatale-kim-ki-youngs-insect-woman-1972/">The Insect Woman</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/beloved-childrens-story-turned-psychedelic-rural-reverie-go-yeong-nams-shower-1978/">The Shower</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/sex-please-korea-jang-sun-woos-road-race-track-1991/">The Road to the Race Track</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-body-seoul-kim-ho-seons-yeong-jas-heydays-1975/">Yeong-ja&#8217;s Heydays</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/american-dream-dies-los-angeles-bae-chang-hos-deep-blue-night/">Deep Blue Night</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Aimless Bullet</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">Iodo</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-301-302-park-chul-soos-stylish-film-food-sex-horrors/">301, 302</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/march-fools-college-comedy-darkened-dictatorship/">The March of Fools</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seopyeonje-surprise-art-house-megahit-showed-korea-forgotten-culture/">Seopyeonje</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/wangshimni-hometown-gangster-filmmakers-pledge-devotion-korea/">Wangsimni, My Hometown</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/watching-madame-freedom-movie-scandalized-postwar-korea-fifty-years-later/">Madame Freedom</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/unbearable-preposterousness-westernization-park-kwang-sus-chil-su-man-su-1988/">Chil-su and Man-su</a>, and <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/boring-heaven-exciting-hell-kim-soo-yongs-night-journey/">Night Journey</a>. You can watch Under the Sky of Seoul <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxMG1IhCLZY">here</a>.
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More literally translated, the original Korean title of Under the Sky of Seoul (서울의 지붕밑) would be &#8220;Under the Roof of Seoul.&#8221; Whatever it lacks in mellifluousness, that version hardly seems inapt during the film&#8217;s opening sequence, which offers a series of views of the South Korean capital as it looked in the early 1960s. A near-total absence of high-rise buildings makes the first of them almost unrecognizable to those who&#8217;ve only known the city in the 21st century. But subsequent shots focus on more familiar sites: Tapgol Park with its Buddhist pagoda, the United States Embassy designed by Kim Swoo-geun (an architect to whose work I&#8217;ve paid <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/walking-deep-seoul-expert-korean-built-environment/">more</a> than a <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/finding-new-seoul-old-buildings-kim-swoo-geun-architect-modern-korea/">little</a> <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-looking-kim-swoo-geun-koreas-poet-brick-concrete-much-else-besides/">attention</a> here on the Korea Blog). What most catches the eye, however, are the roofs, and specifically those with the curved tiles and lines of the traditional hanok courtyard house.
There were more hanok in Seoul 60 years ago than there are now. As Under the Sky of Seoul depicts it there were many more indeed, but the film needs them for their symbolic value as built representations of the old order. For almost every episode of this highly episodic narrative deals with one theme above all: the coming of industrial modernity and the socioeconomic changes brought with it. To do so requires not just un-modern homes but un-modern men: hence protagonist Kim Hak-kyu, a traditional doctor who has prescribed herbs and performed acupuncture (scoffing at the very idea of disinfectant) in the same hanok for 30 years. In only a few scenes does he actually practice medicine; the rest of his time he seems to pass eating, drinking, and playing baduk with his similarly middle-aged buddies, one a destitute real-estate agent and the other a fortune-telling reader of physiognomy.
The blustery, out-of-touch patriarch is a standard figure of fun in Korean film and television today, but even in 1961 he was getting his supposed comeuppance onscreen. Despite his own struggles, or indeed due to them, such a character must be fiercely defensive of his family&#8217;s social position. So it is with Hak-kyu: early in the movie he examines the daughter of a local tavern owner attempting to conceal an obvious pregnancy, only to find out later that — much to his chagrin — his son is the father. He&#8217;s already been keeping a wary eye on his own daughter, a war widow fancied by the young doctor who recently opened up a practice across the street from her hair salon. Outfitted in Western suits and possessed of advanced medical equipment, this suitor is, irritatingly, not just a Johnny-come-lately to the neighborhood but a personification of the new, modern Korea.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15808" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2.png" alt="" width="1000" height="1392" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2-216x300.png 216w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2-768x1069.png 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2-736x1024.png 736w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
When the young doctor runs for City Council, Hak-kyu naturally decides to throw his hat into the ring as well. His hat, incidentally, is one of his few visibly Western elements of his appearance, his usual attire being plain white, generously cut traditional hanbok. But no sooner does he start campaigning (an effort that, then as now, involves broadcasting vague promises out onto the streets from high-powered speakers mounted on a slow-moving truck) than he puts on a vest, tie, and jacket. Whatever the change of dress does for his image, it isn&#8217;t enough: when his bid fails, only his rival&#8217;s generosity saves him from the financial ruin, and soon thereafter that same rival&#8217;s medical acumen saves his life. The film closes on Hak-kyu cradling his new grandson, the picture of grandparental satisfaction, yet his humiliation throughout the course of the preceding two hours could scarcely have been more complete.
Such an all-is-well-again ending belongs less to the feature film than the sitcom, a form of which Under the Sky of Seoul feels like a prototype. One-off dramatic productions had begun airing on Korean television not long after broadcasting began in 1956, but it wasn&#8217;t until 1961 that regular scripted series — the forerunners of today&#8217;s internationally popular &#8220;K-dramas&#8221; — began to take shape. They entered a field of episodic entertainment occupied by radio dramas and serialized fiction, both of which seem to have influenced this movie. Its sound design is impressive by the standards of the time: the performers speak their own lines rather than having been dubbed over by different voice actors, and touches like a recurring record of &#8220;Besame Mucho&#8221; give the setting sonic character. But many of its music cues, brimming with organ and accordion, could have come from the broadest radio comedies of prewar America.
Like most Korean films of its era, Under the Sky of Seoul was adapted from a novel. Its author Jo Heun-pa belonged to a generation of writers who found their readerships in newspapers, and so meted out their stories in short chapters that could entertain either standing alone or in sequence. This, we could say, is why the film feels today like a binge-watch of four or five episodes of a light comedy series about the people of one particular neighborhood (Ihwa-dong, according to the dialogue, just northeast of central Seoul). Before the one where Hak-kyu runs for City Council, there&#8217;s the one where his physiognomist pal takes three separate bribes to fix the same couple&#8217;s marriage-prospect forecast and fakes his own death to get out of it, not to mention the one where a young lady fleeing the police hides in Hak-kyu&#8217;s room, bringing down his wife&#8217;s jealous wrath.
Hijinks ensue, as they say, and also distinguish what first-time director Lee Hyeong-pyo was doing here from what, say, Ozu Yasujirō was doing over in Japan at the same time, the twilight of his own career. Both filmmakers worked with the same basic material: the dissolution of traditional family structures in an impoverished Asian country facing both reconstruction after a devastating war and an influx of Western products both technological and cultural. But while Ozu&#8217;s pictures tend to exude sympathy and even sorrow for the parents and grandparents engulfed by a reality unlike any they or their ancestors had known, Under the Sky of Seoul straightforwardly ribs the Hak-kyus of the world and their feckless friends for their unwillingness to get with the program. Lee had previously worked for the United States Information Agency, something of whose propagandistic view of American-style nation-building might have rubbed off on him.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15807" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3.jpeg" alt="" width="1920" height="816" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3.jpeg 1920w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3-300x128.jpeg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3-768x326.jpeg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3-1024x435.jpeg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" />
On the whole, the political interregnum of the early 1960s constituted a relatively free time to be a filmmaker in Korea, certainly in comparison to the sixteen-year presidential term of Park Chung-hee that followed. More aggressively developmentalist than any regime the Republic of Korea had known before — or indeed, has known since — Park&#8217;s administration cracked down on most forms of popular culture unlikely to instill the properly nationalistic attitudes. (In his speeches, he now and again made frustrated reference to Koreans&#8217; invincible tendency to put the family before the state.) Only before Park took power could a film like Yu Hyun-Mok’s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Aimless Bullet</a> dare to depict Korean society as too demoralized even to collapse. Shot the next year, Under the Sky of Seoul tells its story amid a less dire milieu, if one clearly kept out of destitution by little more than its social interconnections.
The mot juste here, at least according to the abundance of wistful comments below the film on YouTube, is jeong. Alongside the history-inflicted bitterness and resentment of han or the penchant for collective expression of joy known as heung, it stands as one of the putatively untranslatable concepts that characterize Korean life. Jeong, as I interpret it, has to do with uniquely strong bonds that develop between Koreans who find themselves &#8220;in it together&#8221; in one sense or another. &#8220;Jeong may have meant something at some point in the past, but that today, it&#8217;s a referent to something that simply doesn’t exist in general within Korean society,&#8221; <a href="https://www.gordsellar.com/2012/10/14/the-정-challenge/">argues Canadian blogger Gord Sellar</a>. &#8220;Even if such a thing did exist in the village life of Korea centuries ago, it seems largely dead and gone.&#8221; Those Korean YouTube commenters expressing their longing for those jeong-filled days of 1961 might well agree.
These feelings could have been inspired by Under the Sky of Seoul&#8216;s unusual vividness. An audiovisually crisp restoration by the Korean Film Archive allows a richer appreciation of the performances given by a cast that includes many Korean film stars of the day, but even more so the incidental details of everyday life captured in between the shenanigans. One character mentions a monthly wage of 50,000 won, the cost today of a good bottle of wine; another character hails a taxi, apparently an ex-military jeep, with the English-by-way-of-Japanese expression sutoppo. Few pictures of the 1960s offer such a clear view of Seoul&#8217;s built environment, on the brink of the city&#8217;s transformation into a world capital. However modest, it back then seems to have afforded even a family on the decline their own hanok, a miniature walled compound within an urban village — and good walls, they say, make good neighbors.
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Related content: 
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet (1961)</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/watching-madame-freedom-movie-scandalized-postwar-korea-fifty-years-later/">Watching Madame Freedom (1956), the Movie that Scandalized Postwar Korea, Sixty Years Later</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/watching-korea-develop-sixty-years-commercials/">Watching Korea Develop Through Sixty Years of Commercials</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">Living the Vertical Life in Seoul</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-tv-dramas-lee-hyeong-pyos-sky-seoul-1961/"></div>

Before There Were Korean TV Dramas, There Was Lee Hyeong-pyo&#8217;s Under the Sky of Seoul (1961)

Before There Were Korean TV Dramas, There Was Lee Hyeong-pyo&#8217;s Under the Sky of Seoul (1961)

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-pyun-hye-youngs-law-lines-yun-ko-euns-disaster-tourist/"></div>This is the third of a three-part series of essays on Korean crime fiction. The first part, on Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters, is <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">here</a>, and the second, on  Kim Young-ha’s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae’s The Only Child, is <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/">here</a>.
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Watching a lecture from <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-version-ted-talks-aims-heal-korean-society/">Sebashi</a>, the Korean equivalent of TED Talks, I heard the speaker mention a previous speaking engagement he&#8217;d had in an unusual venue: a women&#8217;s prison. Most all of the inmates, he said, had been locked up for financial malfeasance of one kind or another. This mildly surprised me, despite the well-documented lack of propensity on the part of womankind toward more violent varieties of crime. Then I considered the disproportionately numerous stories of financial ruin that I&#8217;ve heard in Korea. In the United States, one can still only get so many degrees of separation away from lingering effects of the Great Financial Crisis (to say nothing of coronavirus-related economic hardship), but here it seems that everyone knows at least a few people who&#8217;ve lost everything in a failed business, got swindled in a bad deal, or emigrated in flight from crushing debt.
Given that, it seems implausible that the first four Korean crime novels I&#8217;ve covered in this series — <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">Jeong You-jeong’s The Good Son, Kim Un-su’s The Plotters</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/">Kim Young-ha’s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae’s The Only Child</a> — have so little do do with money. This contrasts with American crime fiction (or at least what I&#8217;ve read of it), many if not most of whose plots are set in motion by the desire to ill-get some gains. In this sense Pyun Hye-young&#8217;s The Law of Lines, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, and Yun Ko-eun&#8217;s The Disaster Tourist, translated by Lizzie Buehler, go the American way. Two of the most recent works of Korean crime fiction successful in English, they both tell stories intimately concerned with money and what people will do get it, but without the heists, drug deals, and gangland machinations familiar to Western readers.
Like The Only Child, The Law of Lines opens with a deadly house fire — or rather, an explosion — the accidental or deliberate ignition of which comes under investigation. It destroys the home and eventually kills the single father of a 27-year-old woman named Se-oh, who already had it bad enough: having struggled to extract herself from a multi-level marketing scam, she lives in fear of being recognized by one of the many acquaintances she attempted to recruit. Figuring that her dad set off the explosion on purpose, committing difficult-to-detect suicide as an escape from his own financial woes, she makes it her life&#8217;s mission to hunt down and murder the debt collector who had been badgering him day and night. But that debt collector, a fellow late-twenty-something soon to be priced out of the dank apartment he shares with his disabled mother, is hardly doing better himself.
Pyun constructs an intersection of Se-oh&#8217;s life with that of a woman named Ki-jeong. A schoolteacher who, in her late thirties, still lives with her mother, she counts by this novel&#8217;s pinched standard as the most successful major character. But she, too, incurs a great loss right at the outset, when a call from the police informs her that the body of her younger sister Ha-jeong has been dredged out of a river in a distant provincial town. The product of their father&#8217;s dalliance with another woman, Ha-jeong had come to live with Ki-jeong&#8217;s family at five years of age. But never was she granted full membership: when her mother — who &#8220;regarded herself as the child’s babysitter&#8221; — would give Ha-jeong her daily bath, the look on her face &#8220;had always been flat and harsh, less like she was bathing a young child than scrubbing a mud-caked, oversized radish.&#8221;
Understandably inclined to go her own way, Ha-jeong ended up in the acquaintance of Se-oh, or so Ki-jeong discovers when she looks into her Ha-jeong&#8217;s cellphone records. Curiosity about what her sister had to say this Se-oh before she died turns Ki-jeong into an amateur detective; Se-oh, for her part, launches an even more intensive one-woman investigation into the daily routines of Su-ho, the collection-agency employee who had been assigned to her father. Their individual searches lead them through a Seoul of dingy apartment complexes, cheap blood-sausage joints, and crowded subway trains, all of it far indeed from the images of nouveau-riche Gangnam even now projected around the world by Korean television dramas. When Ki-jeong and Se-oh finally meet, they do so in a room of a goshiwon, the spare and coffin-like accommodation rented by the month to students in particular and the destitute in general.
One connection between Ki-jeong and Se-oh takes the form of a young man named Bu-wi, who had been involved at different times with both Ha-jeong and Se-oh&#8217;s best friend Mi-yeon. But whatever his favor with the ladies, money problems alone have shaped his life. &#8220;His troubles had begun during the summer vacation of his third year in high school,&#8221; Pyun writes. &#8220;His father had expanded his business a couple of years earlier and overextended himself. The ensuing financial trouble was like a runaway train. Bu-wi knew there was no money for him to go to college, but he took the entrance exam anyway, and despaired to learn that he’d been accepted into the top medical school of his choice.&#8221; Hence the surprising ease with which a desperate Se-oh brought him into the multi-level marketing scam, just as Mi-yeon (herself already escaped and vanished into Seoul) had previously done to her.
Apart from the claims of violence and sex, crime fiction holds out to its readers the promise of professional knowledge. Usually the professions are related to the criminal or policing arts, but in these novels — which, incidentally, treat violence un-luridly and sex hardly at all — none of the protagonists specialize in either the breakage of the law or its enforcement. The Law of Lines&#8216; characters are more mundanely employed, when employed at all. Su-ho, the debt collector, did without work until a former army buddy recommended the David Credit Information Company. &#8220;His criteria for selecting a job had been simple,&#8221; Pyun writes. &#8220;It had to be a place where he could wear a suit and be at work by 9:00 a.m.,&#8221; given that &#8220;his father, a manual laborer who’d been dead a long time now, had always had to check the weather before heading out to work.&#8221;
Alas, even this degree of class mobility proves elusive. His office his team leader wears &#8220;a suit perfectly tailored to fit him in the shoulders. Compared to Su-ho’s suit, which grew shabbier by the day, his suit grew sharper by the day. Why was that? And why was Su-ho still unable to buy himself a single decent suit despite working so hard?&#8221; His daily dealings with dissembling, hostile debtors shed light on his own downtrodden condition. &#8220;The bad luck poverty ushered in was close to fate. That is, once you were under its evil spell, everything turned bad. Paying for surgery for a parent on the verge of death. Cosigning for an older brother who was starting a new business. Getting injured on the job when no one else in your family was bringing in any money. No matter how they started, the stories all ended the same way.&#8221;
Su-ho barely scrapes by at his job; Ki-jeong, at her school, performs somewhat better, though her impulsive striking of a kleptomaniac student brings her to the verge of termination. Being put on mandatory leave as a result provides her with the time to find the facts of her sister&#8217;s death, a process that eventually forces her into self-reflection. &#8220;She’d gotten a lot of things wrong,&#8221; Pyun writes, leading into a litany including everything from &#8220;using grades as a way to keep kids in line&#8221; to &#8220;scoring their work based on their attitudes or personalities, and thus grading them according to her own assumptions or prejudices rather than their individual efforts or achievements&#8221; to &#8220;not bothering to conceal from them how exhausted the work made her.&#8221; Whatever her failings of professional ethics, Ki-jeong&#8217;s narrative journey could well be read as one toward an understanding of basic personal decency.
The Disaster Tourist centers on another professional woman, albeit one employed in a much less conventional industry. The 33-year-old Yona works at Jungle, a travel company that organizes group tours to the world&#8217;s trouble spots. It is to the kind of people who carry &#8220;survival kits, generators and tents as they searched out disaster zones worthy of exploration&#8221; that Jungle directs its advertising: &#8220;Experience the Ashen Red Energy of a Volcano! Feel Mother Earth Tremble. Ride Noah&#8217;s Ark and Be the Judge of the Seas. Tsunamis: Calamity and Horror Before Your Eyes.&#8221; But after a decade at the company, Yona has come to understand that &#8220;adventures like these reinforced a fear of disasters and confirmed the fact that the tourist was, in fact, alive. Even though I came close to disaster, I escaped unscathed: those were the selfish words of solace you told yourself after returning home.&#8221;
Despite appearing to be a dedicated and reasonably successful disaster-tour designer, Yona has, like Ki-jeong, recently committed the kind of professional foul that necessitates time away from the office. Her superior orders her to go on an underperforming disaster tour herself and report back on whether or not Jungle should keep offering it. And so, not far into this short book, Yona finds herself at resort on Mui, an island off the Vietnamese coast whose disastrous attractions amount to no more than an unthreatening-looking volcano, a lake that used to be a sinkhole, and a nasty tribal massacre that occurred back in the 1960s. The first thrill of this underwhelming trip comes — for the reader, at least — on the train back to the airport, when Yona ends up in a section that detaches from the others and takes her to an even remoter corner of this remote place.
In this part of the world traveler&#8217;s English is apparently useless, as Yona discovers when she asks a member of the train staff for help. &#8220;The employee didn&#8217;t understand,&#8221; writes Yun. &#8220;Even so, she comprehended the situation and explained something energetically in the local language.&#8221; There follows a substantial direct quotation of her explanation — &#8220;Two stops ago, the car you were supposed to be on shifted on to different tracks. That train&#8217;s an express. You won&#8217;t reach your destination on this local track,&#8221; and so on — followed by a bit of omniscient narration declaring that &#8220;Yona couldn&#8217;t understand the words, but she managed to catch a few things from the woman&#8217;s gestures and the atmosphere.&#8221; Though brief, the episode reads in English as a disorienting break from the conventions of free indirect speech, which normally, when following Yona, would convey only what Yona herself knows or understands.
Such ambiguity of voice isn&#8217;t uncommon in Korean fiction, and at any rate it becomes more useful to Yun as the novel goes on. Drifting from one character&#8217;s consciousness to another — or to the consciousness of no one in particular — allows her to illuminate the pressures acting on the residents of Mui, as well as to comment on the dynamic between the island and the wider world. Sometimes this comes from a character&#8217;s mouth: &#8220;Since signing a contract with Jungle and building the resort,&#8221; one of them explains, &#8220;Mui has been tailoring everyday life to fit its role as a disaster zone. That&#8217;s led young workers who left for other regions to come back. Now, if disaster disappears from Mui, life disappears, too.&#8221; Hence the need to engineer a new disaster, an endeavor with which the stranded Yona gets involved, and into which she soon thereafter throws herself.
Yona collaborates not for the money, exactly, but to maintain her standing at the Jungle. The company provides for its staff&#8217;s every personal need: &#8220;It encouraged office couples, and it even provided opportunities each weekend for single employees to meet other singles. It also offered nearby employee housing. A doctor&#8217;s office, theatre, sports center, and shopping mall were all located inside the office.&#8221; But &#8220;the moment you quit your job, you had to restructure your entire life,&#8221; and part from her consistent if often thwarted efforts at Jungle, she has only the standard-issue daydream of one day opening a coffee shop. She is, in other words, the childless, unmarried, office-optimized Korean Everywoman of the 21st century, albeit one involved in an unusual line of work. (And even at Jungle, she still has to endure her boss&#8217; groping in the elevator.)
The locals who take part in staging a new and distinguishing disaster for Mui, however, do it very much for the money. Hoping to set their families in good stead, some sign up for likely or certain death: one volunteers because, &#8220;like many others, he needed money more than he needed life.&#8221; But the best-laid schemes of Koreans and islanders gang aft agley, and any reader who takes Yun&#8217;s early mention of a giant trash island floating across the Pacific as an ill omen will be right to do so. The outcome is a commentary, not exactly subtle, on how now-developed countries like South Korea do as they destructively please with neighbors still belonging to what&#8217;s these days called the developing world. (At the same time, Yun illustrates, a vogue for Korean lettering has the Vietnamese applying it nonsensically to their vehicles in hopes of raising the resale price.)
Plans also fall apart in The Law of Lines, the subsistence lifestyles of whose characters suggest that South Korea never did make it out of the developing world. The real crime, a rudamentary reading might convince one to say, is capitalism; I think more of Venkatesh Rao&#8217;s concept of the <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/04/08/weirding-diary-7/">&#8220;fourth word,&#8221;</a> which emerges where &#8220;large numbers of people fall through the cracks of presumed-complete development and find themselves in worse-than-third-world conditions: more socially disconnected, more vulnerable to mental illness and drug addiction, with fewer economic opportunities due to the regulation of low-level commerce, and less able to stabilize a pattern of life.&#8221; The reception given to The Law of Lines — and to The Disaster Tourist, which won this year&#8217;s Dagger award for Crime Fiction in Translation from the U.K. Crime Writers&#8217; Association — suggests, in the West, a certain familiarity with the root of the evil at hand.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong’s The Good Son and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Kim Young-ha’s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae’s The Only Child</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/six-expatriate-writers-give-six-views-seoul-new-short-fiction-anthology-city-han/">Six Expatriate Writers Give Six Views of Seoul in a New Short-Fiction Anthology, A City of Han </a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/american-taiwan-korean-tour-group/">An American in Taiwan — with a Korean Tour Group</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-pyun-hye-youngs-law-lines-yun-ko-euns-disaster-tourist/"></div>

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Pyun Hye-young&#8217;s The Law of Lines and Yun Ko-eun&#8217;s The Disaster Tourist

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Pyun Hye-young&#8217;s The Law of Lines and Yun Ko-eun&#8217;s The Disaster Tourist

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/"></div>This is the second of a three-part series of essays on Korean crime fiction. The first part, on Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters, is <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">here</a>.
 
Whatever its country of origin, crime fiction prizes murderers. Even more suited to the demands of the genre are serial killers, murderers who — according to most of the definitions available — kill three or more people on two or more separate occasions. Though the protagonists of both <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters</a> do meet these requirements, neither quite fit the cultural image of the serial killer, at least as understood in the West. In the former book, the young ex-athlete Yu-jin performs three separate murders, though all within a short span of time and for the most part impulsively. In the latter, the more mature Reseng is a professional assassin, raised from orphanhood to carry out contract hits for the government. Much truer to the serial-killer stereotype is Kim Byeongsu, the 70-year-old narrator of Kim Young-ha&#8217;s Diary of a Murderer.
Published in Krys Lee&#8217;s English translation last year, Diary of a Murderer consists of what its title promises. The title itself has, however, lost something in translation; more faithful to the original (살인자의 기억법) would be &#8220;Mnemonics of a Murderer,&#8221; which I once heard suggested by another American fan of Korean literature. For Kim Byeongsu writes his diary as an aide-mémoire, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer&#8217;s disease of a rapidly increasing severity. Its entries register his fears not just for his own state of mind, but for his adopted daughter Eunhui and her recent engagement to a man named Pak Jutae. Recognizing Eunhui&#8217;s fiancée as one of his own homicidal kind, Kim Byeongsu resolves to emerge from retirement: &#8220;I&#8217;ve decided on a final goal before I die,&#8221; he writes in his diary. &#8220;To kill Pak Jutae. Before I forget who he is.&#8221;
Living with Eunhui in the foothills of a remote village below the North Korean border,  Kim Byeongsu has put more than one pursuit behind him by the time the story opens. &#8220;It&#8217;s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone,&#8221; he writes in its opening lines, &#8220;or has it been twenty-six?&#8221; He&#8217;s also closed the veterinary practice that constituted his public-facing career. (&#8220;It&#8217;s a good job for a murderer. You can use all kinds of powerful anesthetics.&#8221;) And no longer does he write poetry, a literary avocation — and in Korea, not an uncommon one — taken up through classes at the local community center. Writing what he knew, he composed visceral poems that drew praise from his instructor, but audience reaction was beside the point: &#8220;The way you feel about writing poems that no one reads and committing murders that no one knows about is not that different.&#8221;
A self-styled man of letters, Kim Byeongsu makes reference in his diary to Montaigne, Borges, and Nietzsche; he quotes from the sutras, suggesting Buddhist beliefs. Here we have a serial killer with a wider capacity of mind than most, albeit a mind slipping away even as we read his words. This makes him an unreliable narrator, though one increasingly convinced of the truth of his own perceptions; that his voice and his voice alone conveys to us the gap between those perceptions and reality ever widened by his intellectual dissolution speaks to the skill of the author. Kim Young-ha, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lost-causes-the-novels-of-kim-young-ha/">whose novels in translation I perviously wrote about in 2013</a>, comes to crime fiction as something of an interloper, having made his name as one of Korea&#8217;s most famous novelists with a Kubrickian penchant for genre-hopping, previously following an existential noir with a spy thriller with a piece of historical fiction.
At novella length (published in English alongside three short stories), Diary of a Murderer is more readily adaptable than Kim&#8217;s other books, and indeed a film version directed by thriller-and-horror specialist Won Shin-yun came out in 2017. In English it appeared under the title Memoir of a Murderer, maximizing the potential confusion with Bong Joon-ho&#8217;s Memories of Murder (살인의 추억). That acclaimed movie is also referenced in Kim&#8217;s novella, and both works take as a theme the changes that swept Korean society in the transition from military dictatorship to democracy, down to the ground of crime and punishment. Memories of Murder portrays homicide investigation in the disordered Korea of the 1980s as a Sisyphean exercise in futility. &#8220;Back then there was no such thing as DNA testing or surveillance cameras,&#8221; remembers Kim Beyongsu. &#8220;Thousands of cops wielding batons climbed up the wrong mountains to investigate.&#8221;
&#8220;Those were good times,&#8221; when the Republic of Korea&#8217;s law-enforcement showed concern for fifth columns and practically nothing else. &#8220;While everyone was trying to catch the phantom that was communism, I was doing my own hunting. An official announcement about a man I killed in 1976 declared than an armed spy had murdered the man&#8221; and presumably fled back to the protection of the North&#8217;s &#8220;puppet regime.&#8221; No such references to Korean history or politics appear in Seo Mi-ae&#8217;s novel The Only Child (잘 자요 엄마), whose English translation by Jung Yewon was also published last year. In fact, apart from the names of its characters and the highly specific Seoul geography they inhabit (&#8220;as Sangwuk climbed over the Muakae Hill and drove onto Moraenae Street from the Hongje three-way intersection, his phone rang&#8221;), most of its story might as well take place in the West.
Here and there, however, Seo scores satirical points against certain aspects of modern Korean society, such as its abject over-valuation of any connection to the United States, no matter how tangential. The novel&#8217;s protagonist Yi Seonkyeong, a criminal psychologist and university lecturer, becomes a campus celebrity as soon as word gets around that she&#8217;d trained at the FBI&#8217;s Behavioral Analysis Unit — once, for a two-week seminar, buy why split hairs? This gets her nicknamed &#8220;Clarice,&#8221; and The Silence of the Lambs isn&#8217;t even the book&#8217;s most prominent Western pop-cultural reference. Seonkyeong soon finds herself face-to-face with a Hannibal Lecter of her own, a serial killer named Yi Byeongdo (no relation, or least none established in this book). Having been made into a killer by his mother&#8217;s abuse, as Seo tells it, he lives on tormented by the Beatles song she always used to sing to herself.
That song is &#8220;Maxwell&#8217;s Silver Hammer,&#8221; one of Paul McCartney&#8217;s most reviled compositions. A &#8220;cheery tale of a homicidal maniac,&#8221; as music critic Ian MacDonald calls it in his study Revolution in the Head, it &#8220;represents by far his worst lapse of taste under the auspices of The Beatles.&#8221; Byeongdo recalls that one member of the band was shot to death, then adds, &#8220;If I&#8217;d been born a bit earlier, or I&#8217;d had a chance to meet them, I would probably have killed them with my own hands. I would&#8217;ve really liked to ask then why they made a song like that.&#8221; Whatever its offenses, &#8220;Maxwell&#8217;s Silver Hammer&#8221; isn&#8217;t the kind of song a Western reader expects to come across in a Korean crime novel — though one who&#8217;s spent enough time in east Asia knows how oddities from the other side of the world can attain inexplicable popularity here.
As Seo tells it, however, &#8220;Maxwell&#8217;s Silver Hammer&#8221; is even more obscure in Korea than it is in the West. &#8220;Seonkyeong was somewhat surprised that Yi Byeongdo knew the song,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;Neither Seonkyeong nor he was of a generation that had easy access to the song,&#8221; but Seonkyeong happens to have had a Beatlemaniac advisor while studying abroad in America. This provides her with one point of connection to the infamous murderer, as does her mother&#8217;s early death, albeit under different circumstances from that of Byeongdo&#8217;s. &#8220;You don&#8217;t know, do you? What it feels like to kill your own mother?&#8221; he asks Seonkyeong during one of their interviews in his maximum-security confines. &#8220;You don&#8217;t realize at first. It happens in an instant, like a lightning strike. You do it with your own two hands, but&#8230; you&#8217;re nothing but an instrument. Yes, as if someone made you do it.&#8221;
Those words could also describe the matricidal experience of Yu-jin in The Good Son. In Byeongdo&#8217;s case, the act, committed as a teenager, planted in his psyche a serial-killing seed that would sprout, and prolifically, fifteen years later. Kim Byeongsu also began his murdering career with an abusive parent, not his mother but his father, and with the involvement of his long-suffering mother and sister as well. It was after slaying the young Eunhui&#8217;s parents decades later, as he tells it, that he decided to adopt her. Death puts Seonkyeong, too, into a non-traditional family arrangement: her husband&#8217;s eleven-year-old daughter Hayeong moves in with them when a house fire kills the grandparents with whom she&#8217;d been living since the passing of her own mother, Seonkyeong&#8217;s husband&#8217;s ex-wife. As in most crime fiction, these deaths must have darker, more complex stories behind them, only to be told over subsequent chapters.
The photograph of a young girl peering through a cracked-open door on The Only Child&#8216;s cover primes the reader to perceive Hayeong as a threatening figure. And so, much of the time, she proves to be, given to unpredictable emotional outbursts and minor but escalating acts of violence. But Seo writes her as having come by it honestly, subject as she was first to the machinations of a mother who saw her only as a tool to win back her ex-husband, then to the inattention of grandparents mainly interested in cashing her father&#8217;s child-support checks. Many of Seonkyeong&#8217;s strenuous attempts to integrate her into the household do more harm than good, though when Seo shifts into the first-person voice of Hayeong — chapters that reveal a fuller character than the singleminded child-psychopath we might have expected — she brings her quite close to warming to her new stepmother.
Alas, in the reality Seo has constructed, no maternal relationship of any kind can end well. This holds as true for Seonkyeong and Hayeong as it does for the killer Byeongdo, who&#8217;s first motivated to contact Seonkyeong when a glimpse of her reminds him of the woman who took him in and became a kind of surrogate mother after he murdered his biological one. Two of these three characters get their fates sealed when they converge, in one of the final chapters, on a dark and stormy night. The movie-of-the-week dénouement that ensues leaves matters just open enough for a sequel, and as the back-flap copy states, &#8220;Film rights for The Only Child have been optioned by Carnival Films.&#8221; To an extent, the feel of having been written for adaptation compromises the work as a novel, though the same could presumably be said of much Western crime fiction as well.
The crime novel, as the genre&#8217;s Western fans know it, is in Korea a borrowed form. (But then, in a country with far more established short-story and poetry traditions, so is the novel itself.) Nevertheless, as the books covered in these essays demonstrate, Korean crime fiction in translation has begun to manifest distinctive characteristics, not least its prominent use of relationships both familial and quasi-familial. As represented in Korean literature and film in general, these relationships are disproportionately liable to strike Western viewers as unhealthy, even traumatic, especially those involving what&#8217;s often academically referred to as &#8220;the figure of the mother&#8221; (as essayed by Bong-hoon Ho, with characteristic extremity, in his film Mother). But trauma, as the substance of literary and genre fiction alike, has become a hot property in publishing, generating both sales and acclaim, and Korea certainly has a deeper well of it from which to draw.
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Part three of this series is <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-pyun-hye-youngs-law-lines-yun-ko-euns-disaster-tourist/">here</a> on the Korea Blog.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/">The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong’s The Good Son and Kim Un-su’s The Plotters</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-superstar-tells-countrymen-read/">A Korean Literary Superstar Tells His Countrymen Why to Read</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">The Making of a Korean Monster: Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High-School Novel Mina</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">We All Had a Hard Time Back Then: Lee Seung-U’s The Private Lives of Plants</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/"></div>

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Kim Young-ha&#8217;s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae&#8217;s The Only Child

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Kim Young-ha&#8217;s Diary of a Murderer and Seo Mi-ae&#8217;s The Only Child

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/"></div>Americans in general don&#8217;t emigrate at particularly high rates, but some Americans in particular are given to declaring, in moments of frustration, their imminent move to another country. Often that country is Canada, possibly because of the vague impressions it inspires of a more humane and orderly civilization (and more probably due to linguistic and geographic convenience). Sometimes that country is Sweden, which to certain observers represents the fullest possible realization of political and economic idyll in this world. But as enthusiasts of crime fiction know, not quite all can be well in the land that produces such great quantities of what has been labeled &#8220;Scandi noir.&#8221; In the United States — a nation whose readers&#8217; appetite for crime fiction seems downright insatiable — that bleak, society-indicting genre is most popularly represented by Swedish journalist-novelist Stieg Larsson&#8217;s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels.
With the final book of that trilogy having been published in English translation more than a decade ago, and Larsson having died years before that, the publishing industry has cast around for other societies capable of producing counterintuitively stark and savage crime fiction. Certain well-established Japanese mystery novelists, like Hideo Yokoyama and Natsuo Kirino, have ridden the waves of this boom. But over the past decade here in South Korea, a number of younger writers have been working so productively and so squarely in the realm of crime fiction that they&#8217;ve made their country almost too likely a candidate to run with Scandi noir&#8217;s torch through the English-reading world. Earlier this month, Yun Ko-eun&#8217;s The Disaster Tourist, won the UK Crime Writers&#8217; Association Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger award, which over the previous decade had gone three times to Scandinavian novels, all of them Swedish.
If an international Korean literary crime wave is indeed afoot, an examination has to proceed from an earlier point in time. We must go back at the very least to 2019, when more than one high-profile, critically acclaimed Korean crime novel began appearing in English per year. 2019 saw the publication of both Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son, translated by Kim Chi-young, and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters, translated by Sora Kim-Russell. In each book the protagonist is a killer, hardly an out-of-line choice for the genre, but the style of the killings themselves could hardly be more different. The Plotters tells the story of a professional hitman who has hardly known any other form of existence; The Good Son, of a 25-year-old layabout (a &#8220;NEET&#8221;) who wakes up to find his mother slain in the next room, with all signs pointing to him as the culprit.
When it came out here in 2016 (titled 종의 기원 or The Origin of Species, not to be confused with <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/">Kim Bo-young&#8217;s recent collection</a>), The Good Son became an inescapable hit. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">Considering Kim Sagwa&#8217;s Mina</a> back in 2009, I wrote of my curiosity about why Korean children almost never kill their parents. It&#8217;s not that I expect a nationwide vogue for patricide and matricide, but that the combination of the pressure exerted by parents on children and the penchant for explosive rage attributed to Koreans by Koreans themselves struck me as a ticking time bomb. Jeong quickly establishes her young protagonist Yu-jin did indeed kill his mother, an idea that seems to have struck a resonant chord indeed with domestic readers. But the murder, as she crafts it, turns out to have been the result of nothing so simple as the son&#8217;s having been pushed too hard.
However dark and complex things look to begin with, they can always grow darker and more complex: this, so I&#8217;ve gathered, is the rule with crime fiction, whatever its country of origin. Deepening the darkness and complexity makes great demands on the author&#8217;s ability to provide information to and withhold information from the reader, sometimes alternately, sometimes simultaneously. On that level, this genre is a pure test of storytelling ability, and in The Good Son Jeong puts her own to the test on a spare stage. &#8220;I was the investigator interrogating the criminal,&#8221; says Yu-jin, also the story&#8217;s narrator. &#8220;But the two were one and the same, the criminal had a slippery relationship with the truth, and his memory was spotty.&#8221; His problems with recollection owe to the medication he takes at the behest of his psychiatrist aunt, ostensibly to treat epilepsy, but really for reasons darker, more complex, etc.
The Good Son has been acclaimed as an exploration of the mind of a psychopath. As they watch the deaths attributable to Yu-jin pile up, few readers could disagree with that framing. Or at least couldn&#8217;t until they consider the narrative proposed by Yu-jin himself, that of a promising if emotionally disengaged young swimmer flimsily suspected of insanity, then deceptively medicated and manipulated to the point of being, in effect, made a murderer. And though he does display a kind of heroism, at least insofar as he brazenly extricates himself from one hopeless-looking situation after another, he remains unambiguously the kind of individual most of us would rather see removed from society. So, perhaps, is Reseng, the 32-year-old protagonist of The Plotters — or he would be if he lived among normal people rather than the world of political contract killing into which he was practically born.
Found abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, Reseng was adopted by an organizer of assassinations, or &#8220;plotter,&#8221; known as Old Raccoon. Raised to kill, he came of age amid an industry in transition owing to the political transformation of South Korea. &#8220;Ironically, the overthrow of three decades of military dictatorship and the brisk advent of democratization had led to a major boom in the assassination industry,&#8221; Kim writes. &#8220;Under dictatorship, assassinations were clandestine operations carried out in secret by a small number of plotters, hitmen expertly trained by the government or the military, and highly experienced and trustworthy contractors.&#8221; But the new democratic administrations &#8220;sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like.&#8221;
The relatively genteel brutality of Old Raccoon, who maintains a government library as a front for his real operation, is falling into irrelevance. A younger plotter called Hanja, a &#8220;dandy with a Stanford MBA&#8221; who &#8220;secretly cultivated his own team of plotters and mercenaries under the cover of a perfectly legal security company,&#8221; represents the new guard. And it is the slick, Gangnam-style Hanja against whom the more rough-hewn Reseng (whose hobbies include binging on canned beers for a week at a time) eventually finds himself locked into mortal conflict. The elaborate series of events that leads to their showdown begins not with a killing, but with a hesitation to kill: the book opens with Reseng fixing the crosshairs of his rifle on just one of his many assigned targets, an old man living practically off the grid in a mountain cabin, but finding himself unable to pull the trigger.
When his dog spots Reseng, the old man takes him (or decides to take him) for a hunter and invites him to spend the night. Only the next morning can Reseng summon the will to carry out his orders, and only after that does he find out his target&#8217;s identity: a former North Korean general who defected and spent decades thereafter drawing up the kill lists for South Korea&#8217;s military government. Curiously, one of the editions of The Plotters&#8216; English translation I&#8217;ve seen excises the parts about his Northern provenance entirely; it also simplifies other instances of Korea-specific detail, reducing &#8220;banmal, the familiar form of speech,&#8221; for example, to &#8220;the informal register.&#8221; There is, I supposed, an argument to be made for this sort of thing: to wit, that in genre fiction in general and crime fiction in particular, nothing must be allowed to &#8220;slow down&#8221; the story.
Even in a crime novel, I lament missed opportunities for the reader to learn more about Korea, and especially the Korean language. So I appreciate that neither Kim Chi-young&#8217;s translation of The Good Son or Sora Kim-Russell&#8217;s of The Plotters read as if excessively universalized. Some Westerners will take Jeong&#8217;s references to a &#8220;Hakuna Matata&#8221; cellphone ringtone and a matinée screening of The Bucket List to be localized substitutions, when they&#8217;re just the kind of dubious artifacts of American popular culture often encountered in everyday Korean life. In the main, what The Good Son conveys about the society in which it takes place, it conveys between its scenes of throat-slashing and evidence concealment: depictions of educational structures, family dynamics, and living space, that last being the rare two-story apartment Yu-jin, his mother, and his adoptive brother occupy in a new town still incompletely built on the outskirts of Incheon.
Life in such a marginal place, the likes of which crime fiction has no end of use, is a kind of exile: the family once lived in Seoul, but since a darkly hinted-at incident years before, they&#8217;ve been tossed farther and farther from the center of things. Reseng of The Plotters, for his part, may live in the capital, but his work takes him to a host of unspecified run-down urban warrens and dingy provincial towns. Early in the book, he&#8217;s sent to a port city on the skids since the colonial period (<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/">Mokpo</a>, I strongly suspect) to take out a call girl said to have run afoul of men in power. His impulsive decision to grant her a painless death marks another departure from orders; similarly, Yu-jin enacts an at-first minor rebellion against the tight controls imposed on his own life by secretly going off his physically enfeebling medication.
Both Yu-jin and Reseng are already killers when their respective stories begin. But neither had much choice in the matter, the killer instinct having been identified in them in childhood by an adult: an adult who attempted to suppress it in the former case, and one who attempted to cultivate it in the latter. Yet both Yu-jin and Reseng also end up going rogue, wreaking planned-under-pressure havoc in differently self-annihilating ways. Set in a high-end department store, The Plotters&#8216; chaotic finale reads as if written expressly for conversion into an action-movie screenplay — as, unfortunately, does much else in the book, at least by comparison to the chillingly pitched interior monologue of The Good Son. But each novel&#8217;s ending does represent one of the two of the major possible fates for the crime-fiction protagonist: the blaze of glory, or a &#8220;disappearance&#8221; (with the possibility of reappearance in a sequel).
Violent criminals in the real Korea seldom seem to manage either, tending by their very nature toward impulsiveness and incompetence. Accounts of violent crime in Korean news bear this out, less frequent though they are than in American news. For Americans familiar with Korean society, that difference alone is enough to motivate a declaration of intent to move here. But for Koreans steeped in the tradition of condemning Korean society, a tradition of which all kinds of fiction heartily partake, the country&#8217;s relative absence of visible everyday crime belies a rotten core. They would surely agree with the ill-fated character in The Plotters who says that &#8220;you need more than freeways and skyscrapers to be a developed country. You have to develop the right mindset first, dammit!&#8221; They&#8217;d also agree when Kim writes that &#8220;power is all the same deep down&#8221; — adding only that, in Korea, it&#8217;s even worse.
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This is the first of a three-part series on Korean crime fiction. The second is <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-kim-young-diary-murderer-seo-mi-aes-child/">here</a>.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">The Making of a Korean Monster: Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High-School Novel Mina</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">We All Had a Hard Time Back Then: Lee Seung-U’s The Private Lives of Plants</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin’s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his website</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/"></div>

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/stroll-real-cities-korea-anywhere-world-youtubes-seoul-walker/"></div>In recent weeks, Seoul looked about to get back to how it used to be. Or at least it looked about to resemble how it used to be, with an impending relaxation of certain restrictions — on the size of gatherings, on the hours of bars and restaurants — implemented at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Alas, a new &#8220;surge&#8221; in the number of COVID cases has pushed back even this small step toward normality. Despite having once been <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reading-albert-camus-plague-time-coronavirus/">the second-most-threatened country in the world by the pandemic</a>, South Korea hasn&#8217;t had life disrupted anywhere near as severely as many other countries. The streets of Seoul never really emptied out — at least not before 10:00, by which hour most businesses are now ordered to close. In response, no few Seoulites simply begin their evenings earlier, some of them now managing to get smashed while it&#8217;s practically light out.
Still, it&#8217;s not quite the same. I feel the difference even in my own neighborhood of Sinchon, especially when I compare it to <a href="https://youtu.be/5wqKJDP33K8">a video from two years ago</a>. Shot from a first-person perspective, its unbroken 15-minute shot captures a walk along streets that look both familiar (I&#8217;ve never spent as much of my adult life in any other neighborhood) and strange. Some of that strangeness comes from the absence of masks and some from the presence of Westerners — not in great numbers, but certainly greater than one sees today. Whatever their origins, nearly everyone who passes through the frame is young. With no fewer than three major universities in the vicinity, Sinchon has long been a youth-oriented part of town. That manifests even amid its now somewhat diminished liveliness, but it did so much more vividly, so I&#8217;m reminded, in the summer of 2019.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15641" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-2.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-2.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-2-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-2-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
This video&#8217;s YouTube channel, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/SeoulWalker/featured">Seoul Walker</a>, launched just a few months earlier. Its creator, who calls himself Nathan and seems to be Korean, describes it as &#8220;a channel where you can experience as if you&#8217;re walking in the cities, including Seoul.&#8221; Of course, when it comes to Korean cities, the capital — with its metropolitan area home to half the population of the entire country — is dominant, never just included. The bulk of Seoul Walker&#8217;s most-viewed videos depict Seoul, and most of those focus on one part in particular: Gangnam, the only neighborhood someone who doesn&#8217;t know the city, or indeed Korea, is guaranteed have heard of. Of course, as those familiar with Seoul understand, Gangnam isn&#8217;t actually a neighborhood but rather a variously defined area south of the Han River, one home to new buildings, new cars, and — as virally satirized by PSY — new money.
The scale of the area comes through in Seoul Walker&#8217;s most-seen videos. He emerges from Gangnam Station into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqj7l0Xk0Ho">typical Friday evening</a> aboveground; he walks along <a href="https://youtu.be/YXgdtAoizFo">Teheran-ro</a>, whose formidable width makes it almost as inhospitable to such an activity as La Cienaga Boulevard; he visits <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfp0pyxKIAU">Apgujeong</a> (still at least a fairly fashionable area, as I understand it) in the snow. He makes his way, in a video that has racked up 1.3 million views so far, <a href="https://youtu.be/0UlOohkMZnI">through Gangnam in the rain</a> — a frequent weather phenomenon this time of year, and one that enhances Seoul&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-next-great-cyberpunk-city/">cyberpunk aesthetic potential</a>. But as my <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/five-years-seoulite-looking-back-korea-blogs-first-half-decade/">five years</a> of residence in Sinchon implies, I&#8217;m less Gangnam style than Gangbuk (that is, &#8220;north of the river&#8221;) style. It thus pleases me to find among Seoul Walker&#8217;s hits such places in that half of the city as <a href="https://youtu.be/7Y3v2FN8nuA">Myeongdong</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/YH7WYbD2uiU">Bukchon Hanok Village</a>, and the central palace of <a href="https://youtu.be/fG5f1rmgN1c">Gyeongbokgung</a>.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15642" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-3.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-3.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-3-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-3-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
All those are prime tourist destinations, one asset in which Gangbuk is richer than Gangnam (despite the efforts of the &#8220;Korean wave&#8221;-riding place-promoters studied in <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">Youjeong Oh&#8217;s Pop City</a>). Or rather, they were prime tourist destinations. Undeterred by the pandemic, Seoul Walker has continued his production apace, visiting these places even in the era of masks and quasi-curfews that has ground on for about a year and a half now. Nearly all the tourists he catches on camera are Korean: here as in parts of the United States, many locals have rediscovered the pleasures of domestic tourism, the international variety having become impractical. In fact, I myself write these words on the train back from a trip to Incheon, home of not just <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQDUMnpLbIY">Korea&#8217;s main international airport</a> but a well-known <a href="https://youtu.be/4T_inY1EzL0">Chinatown</a> and the industrial fun-fair island of <a href="https://youtu.be/kPGNJbhVBqY">Wolmi-do</a> — all of which have starred in Seoul Walker&#8217;s videos.
Though not, as far as I can tell, employed by the Korea Tourism Organization, Seoul Walker has surely done more to make foreigners want to visit the country than many officially charged with the task. I first learned about his channel not because of his reputation here in Korea, but because my dad back in the United States got hooked on it after the almighty algorithm sent its videos his way. For a foreign viewer who&#8217;s had some experience in Korea&#8217;s cities but lately been discouraged from returning by the country&#8217;s two-week quarantine requirement, the appeal is clear. But I&#8217;ve also found myself enjoying Seoul Walker&#8217;s videos, even as I live in the real Seoul. I could step right out the door and take these same walks myself, but his videos remind me of how often I don&#8217;t — as well as what I could experience if I did.
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When first I visited Korea, almost exactly seven years ago, I came on a mission. Actually, I came on more than one mission, traveling while not only recording <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?page_id=2914">a series of podcast interviews</a>, but also writing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/14/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-a-glimpse-into-the-future-of-world-cities">a few pieces for the Guardian</a> on the cities of South Korea. For the latter I sought out recently developed downtown showpieces like the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/15/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-from-alien-spaceship-to-discount-socks">Dongdaemun Design Plaza</a> and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/25/story-cities-reclaimed-stream-heart-seoul-cheonggyecheon">Cheonggyecheon</a>, Seoul&#8217;s famous freeway overpass turned urban stream, both of which Seoul Waker<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOAlTNfMV6Y"> brings together in a single stroll</a>. I even crossed the country to explore places like the brightly colored Gamcheon Culture Village on a hillside in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/18/busan-south-korea-city-of-tomorrow-interesting-past-urbanist-tour">the city of Busan</a>, which happens to be the setting of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLuUJ6kQU_c">Seoul Walker&#8217;s latest video</a>. Shot over more than an hour at dusk, it contains many a &#8220;very narrow dark alley,&#8221; in the words of its title, but nary a living soul.
That video showcases the purity of form Seoul Walker has attained. Most of his work follows a simple formula: a single walk, stringing together multiple sites of visual interest, with no cuts and no commentary besides text added afterward. He used to write in both Korean and English, but of late only the latter, suggesting a prioritization of foreign viewers; at the same time, he&#8217;s also begun to emphasize his videos&#8217; relaxing properties by labeling some &#8220;ASMR,&#8221; a phenomenon with enthusiasts everywhere, but <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/everything-turns-asmr-korea-even-cultural-heritage/">especially in Korea</a>. There&#8217;s no unsteady cellphone camera, no inarticulate grasping for meaninglessly superlative expressions of enthusiasm, no &#8220;Hey, guys&#8221; at the beginning or &#8220;Like and subscribe&#8221; at the end: this, it seems to me, is a way forward for the stunted art of travel vlogging, a conclusion confirmed by my prolonged exposure to various other Youtube channels in preparation for a repeatedly pandemic-delayed American road trip.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15644" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-5.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-5.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-5-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/kb-seoul-walker-5-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Moving to Korea, I hoped eventually to see my native United States as fascinating, even exotic; I wanted, in other words, to one day travel to America with the same attitude that motivated me to go someplace new, camera in hand, every single day of my first visit to Korea. Naturally, I know Seoul — to say nothing of the rest of this country — far better now than I did then. But given how many of my days are currently spent at the same few Sinchon coffee shops, I can&#8217;t deny that much remains for me to discover. Seoul Walker shows me places I&#8217;ve never been: to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLiXll4BQkE">the &#8220;food alleys&#8221; of Bangi-dong</a>; to the <a href="https://youtu.be/cZgeGBr55ek">slopes of wealthy Seongbuk-dong</a> (namesake of one of my favorite eateries in Los Angeles&#8217; Koreatown) where Bong Joon-ho shot scenes of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/parasite-bong-joon-ho-comes-back-attack-homeland-wins-palme-dor/">Parasite</a>; to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM-0IchkmE4">Hannam the Hill</a>, home to members of BTS and other celebrities besides.
I&#8217;ve also come to appreciate Seoul Walker&#8217;s views of places I have been, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-NYfEust4U">Gongdeok</a>, where I meet my Korean language teacher, or the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhstBBaIDP8">Starfield Mall</a>, which gets no more intuitively navigable no matter how often you go. There&#8217;s also an exploration of my favorite structure in Seoul: <a href="https://youtu.be/PQ4zct_uZxY">Sewoon Sangga</a>, famed architect Kim Swoo-geun&#8217;s 1960s electronics market and apartment complex, which I&#8217;ve written about <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/walking-deep-seoul-expert-korean-built-environment/">more</a> <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/finding-new-seoul-old-buildings-kim-swoo-geun-architect-modern-korea/">than</a> <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-looking-kim-swoo-geun-koreas-poet-brick-concrete-much-else-besides/">once</a>. Such spaces benefit from being not simply regarded, but experienced in motion. So does the Gyeongui Line Forest Park, which Seoul Walker has <a href="https://youtu.be/jnP0LQg2nAw">visited</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/tRpUnQBm5hY">revisited</a>, and along which I walk almost daily. I did so on a pleasant afternoon a few weeks ago, surrounded by families, couples, dog-walkers, and picnickers of every generation, none disturbed by the forms of supposedly &#8220;urban&#8221; disorder too often accepted elsewhere. In how many of the world&#8217;s cities, I wondered, could any amount of money buy this?
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/travelers-video-seoul-astonishes-official-promotion-korea-embarrasses/">A Traveler’s Video of Seoul Astonishes, while Official Promotion of Korea Embarrasses</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/los-angeles-seoul-tale-two-ugly-cities/">Los Angeles and Seoul, a Tale of Two Ugly Cities</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/real-life-seoul-seen-street-photographer-michael-hurt/">The Real Life of Seoul, as Seen by Street Photographer Michael Hurt</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/">Pansori at the Disco: Leenalchi, the New-Old Korean Musical Phenomenon of 2020, Gets Frustrated Tourists Dancing</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">Living the Vertical Life in Seoul</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.
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Stroll through the Real Cities of Korea from Anywhere in the World with YouTube’s Seoul Walker

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin's Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his website</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.

Colin Marshall

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— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Babel

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Memoir &amp; Essay

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

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How Words Make Things Happen

From the Age of Persuasion to the Age of Offense

Education

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Politics

The Useless French Language and Why We Learn It

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Forget English!

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Absolutely on Music

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Nonfiction

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

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Ametora

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"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin's Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his website</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.