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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/can-check-time-want-can-never-leave-first-korean-comfort-woman-novel-kim-sooms-one-left/"></div>When a 92-year-old woman by the name of Lee died at last year, all of South Korea took notice. Her passing reduced to eighteen the official count of surviving Korean &#8220;comfort women,&#8221; who as girls were kept in sexual servitude to the Japanese military during the Second World War. Six months later, University of Washington press published an English translation of a Korean novel that imagines the future, inevitable and surely not far off, when that number falls to one. But an official count is just that, as Kim Soom reminds us with the character of <a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/', 'One Lef');">One Lef</a><a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/', 't');">t</a>&#8216;s 93-year-old protagonist P’unggil, a former comfort woman who never registered herself as such with the government. The death of the second-to-last member of the acknowledged group plunges her into an extended recollection of her own experience, which constitutes this &#8220;first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women.&#8221;
Georgetown University Korean studies professor emerita Bonnie Oh emphasizes this distinction in her foreword to the English version of One Left (한 명), translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. (Previously on the Korea Blog, we&#8217;ve featured their translations of Kim Sagwa&#8217;s novel <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">Mina</a> and Yoon Tae-ho&#8217;s comic <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/moss-star-korean-comic-artists-suspenseful-tale-brought-english-literary-translators-serialized-free-online/">Moss</a>, as well as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/first-comprehensive-introduction-k-lit-past-present-youngmin-kwon-bruce-fultons-korean-literature/">What Is Korean Literature?</a>, a study co-written by Bruce Fulton.) The novel also, she adds, &#8220;rebuts denials of the validity of the comfort women&#8217;s claims by synthesizing an intense personal story with painstaking historical research.&#8221; The idea of a novel as a vehicle for rebuttal, or for argument of any kind, will give some Western readers pause, though it&#8217;s hardly unheard of in Korea. Cho Nam-joo&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/book-jiyoung-explosively-controversial-korean-feminist-novel-comes-english/">Kim Ji-young, Born 1982</a>, which appeared in English last year, was nothing if not a novel-shaped set of claims about the lousy lot of Korean women in the 21st century.
Like Cho&#8217;s book, One Left also comes with citations, and in parts fairly bristles with them. These superscript numerals accompany passages that recount events or provide character detail, functions that will strike most Western readers as having no obvious relationship to statistics, articles, studies, or any other kind of sources usually collected in endnotes:
<blockquote>People have no clue where she’s been or to what she’s been subjected.2
They can only assume that her marriageable years were spent drifting from one housemaid job to another. She never imposed on her family but could never bring herself to spill the truth even to her younger sisters, who considered her a burden and an eyesore: that she hated men; the mere sight of them made her shudder,3 made her wish she had a gun with a silencer so she could exterminate them.4
Any talk of marrying her off sent her ballistic.5</blockquote>
What Kim copiously cites is in fact the testimony given by former comfort women themselves, with whose elements she crafts the experience of P’unggil and the other girls she remembers from her seven years at the &#8220;comfort station.&#8221; During that time &#8220;thirty thousand Japanese soldiers came and went from her body,&#8221; which sounds agonizing enough even without the host of other gruesome details Kim incorporates into the narrative. Yet despite being as viscerally discomfiting as anything I&#8217;ve read, they&#8217;re somewhat blunted by the marks flagging the research that underlies them. This is an irony, given their ostensible emphasis of the fact that these atrocities belong not to imagined fiction but genuine history. Lines like &#8220;She was barely 13 and her underdeveloped genitalia wouldn’t admit him30&#8243; or &#8220;The rods came out with charred flesh stuck to them22&#8243; read as grotesque in more ways than Kim must have intended.
All these qualities made One Left a hard sell to English-language publishing houses, as the Fultons recount in their afterword: &#8220;&#8216;How are we to market this book?&#8217; they asked. As a historical study or as a work of literature?&#8221; Academic publishers suggested they take it to a non-academic publisher; non-academic publishers suggested they take it to an academic publisher. Another factor would have been the potential radioactivity of comfort women as a subject, which only a brave observer of Korea indeed approaches without first determining the currently acceptable frame. Within Korea, scholars of that grim chapter of history have even found themselves taken to court by comfort women or their advocates for publishing, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer', 'as Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen recently put it in The New Yorker');">as Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen recently put it in The New Yorker</a>, &#8220;anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint.&#8221;
The occasion for Gersen&#8217;s piece was the International Review of Law and Economics&#8216; publication of &#8220;Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,&#8221; an article by her colleague J. Mark Ramseyer. In it he claims, according to Gersen&#8217;s summary, that &#8220;Korean comfort women &#8216;chose prostitution&#8217; and entered &#8216;multi-year indenture&#8217; agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front &#8216;brothels&#8221; in China and Southeast Asia.&#8221; This is a far cry from the experiences included in One Left, with its daughters of the impoverished countryside falsely promised work in places like factories and hospitals — or simply snatched up while drawing water from a well or gathering snails on a riverbank. Not long thereafter, they find themselves hauled up to Manchuria (then &#8220;the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo,&#8221; as it&#8217;s almost invariably described today), confined to a small room with a filthy mattress, and ordered to &#8220;take soldiers&#8221; for the indefinite future.
At issue, clearly, is to what degree comfort women took up their role voluntarily, and the relevant arguments tend instinctively to be perceived as occupying one extreme or the other. Few could come away from One Left believing that any girl would actively sign up to work at a comfort station, no matter how dire her life back in the village. Indeed, Ramseyer&#8217;s article seems mostly to have been persuasive among Japanese ultra-nationalists — a group that needed no persuasion in the first place — many of whom surely encountered its argument at a degree or two of remove. Gersen identifies in its publication evidence of a deeper weakness in legal academia, where specialists &#8220;are often expected to review writing in areas on which they are far from expert, involving historical contexts they have not studied and languages they do not know.&#8221;
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15405" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="504" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2.jpg 900w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2-300x168.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2-768x430.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />
Yet if every piece of shoddy scholarship were to make the news, humanity could pay attention to nothing else. Whatever its flaws, Ramseyer&#8217;s paper touches a third rail, that of not just comfort women but Korean comfort women, the ones memorialized by the often-controversial <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Peace" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Peace', '&#8220;Statues of Peace&#8221;');">&#8220;Statues of Peace&#8221;</a> installed across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul and around the world (even, to high-profile local Japanese opposition, in Glendale, CA). Estimates of the total number of comfort women range from 20,000 to 400,000, and in One Left Kim makes multiple references to a figure of 200,000 taken from the then-Japanese colony of Korea alone. But history has recorded them as having come also from China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and even Japan itself — that last detail being one that puts the country in an even worse light, to my mind, but not one generally admitted into the conversation here.
There could be few entities less sympathetic than the Japanese military in World War II, whose brutality and incompetence (characteristics few Westerners associate with modern Japan) turned into a crazed, nihilistic desperation as defeat began to look inevitable. Most of its soldiers come off in One Left as less human than animal: what else would display such violent eagerness to be one of dozens each day to bed the same barely pubescent female, quite possibly diseased and — as Kim depicts them — almost certainly crawling with fleas? Yet the novel also offers occasional glimpses of relationships that suggest the soldiers and the comfort women have more in common than it may seem. One of P’unggil&#8217;s young compatriots passes on word from a favorite &#8220;regular&#8221;: &#8220;He said they were separated from their parents and siblings just like us and ended up here in Manchuria just to offer up their lives.&#8221;
Others have been legally roughed up for acknowledging this kind of thing. &#8220;In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers,&#8221; Gersen writes. And in their afterword to One Left, the Fultons stress that &#8220;those who fear that the novel is a case of Japan bashing should note that among the various characters responsible for coercing the Korean girls into sexual servitude, either through blandishments involving a &#8216;good job&#8217; in a factory or through threats, are Koreans themselves&#8221; — a fact demonstrated, they add with a punctiliousness echoing that of Kim&#8217;s main text, &#8220;through research conducted by Chunghee Sarah Soh for her pioneering study The Comfort Women.&#8221;
One Left was originally published in Korean in 2016. That the book took as long as it did to find a publisher in English perhaps turned out to its advantage, still new as it was when the &#8220;Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War&#8221; controversy erupted. The two works even have an odd complementarity, the unusual form of  rigor evident in Kim&#8217;s novel setting it as far apart from the literary mainstream as the apparent patchiness of Ramseyer&#8217;s article sets it from the scholarly mainstream. Gersen assesses her colleague&#8217;s argument and finds it wanting with a level-headedness as characteristic of her own writing as it has been absent from the reactions so far aired in the Korean media. A typical news broadcast here labeled Ramseyer, Harvard Law&#8217;s Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, as &#8220;the Harvard professor made by the &#8216;war-criminal corporation&#8217; Mitsubishi.&#8221;
Ramseyer&#8217;s paper has drawn so much attention not just because it questions the word of Korean comfort women, but also because of his association with Harvard, which as scholar of Japanese history Tessa Morris-Suzuki says to Gersen &#8220;gives it a degree of prominence and respectability.&#8221; It would be difficult to overstate the value of the Habeodeu brand here in Korea, where the United States&#8217; best-known university has an even greater cachet than it does in the United States; to witness the Ramseyer-versus-comfort-women story enter the South Korean zeitgeist is to witness two powerful currents of public instinct crash directly into one another. In the West, readers not directly invested in the issue (and already told of Japan&#8217;s wartime behavior by bestsellers like Iris Chang&#8217;s The Rape of Nanking, criticized though her scholarship has also been) seem to take the stories of comfort women at face value.
Having heard no credible reason to doubt the comfort women myself, I read One Left as more a historical account than not, accepting its depiction of conditions in the comfort station as not employment, indentured or otherwise, but imprisonment. (&#8220;You can check in any time you want,&#8221; as one girl there jarringly puts it, &#8220;but you can never leave.&#8221;) Though the book certainly fulfills Bonnie Oh&#8217;s claim of its being the first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women, the emphasis belongs on the word &#8220;exclusively.&#8221; Apart from some reflections on P’unggil&#8217;s mostly abandoned neighborhood and the urban redevelopment that may or may not come for it (a motif shared, coincidentally, with Kim Hyun-seok&#8217;s 2017 comfort-woman comedy <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-lessons-sex-slavery-koreas-new-comfort-woman-comedy-can-speak/">I Can Speak</a>), this narrative is about one thing, and all the way through it exudes a reluctance to depart for long from the horrors of wartime sex slavery.
What would have resulted if, dealing with these same themes, Kim had chosen to labor under a lighter burden of conveying the specific experiences remembered by real comfort women? An experienced and acclaimed novelist hardly unacquainted with the power of imagination, she first made her name in a realm well apart from realism. Only in recent years has she taken the turn toward direct confrontation with historical and political matters that has produced both One Left and L&#8217;s Sneakers (L의 운동화), a novel about the life of Lee Han-yeol, a Yonsei University student martyred in the pro-democracy demonstrations of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-cinema-looks-back-1987-students-died-democracy-born/">1987</a>. The 1980s and the 1940s both constitute relatively recent chapters in the history of Korea, and as such, subjects that require careful choice of words. An unconventional approach may still be necessary for writing about events in living memory, even those fast slipping out of it.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-lessons-sex-slavery-koreas-new-comfort-woman-comedy-can-speak/">From Language Lessons to Sex Slavery: Korea’s New Comfort-Woman Comedy I Can Speak</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/liberation-day-protest-raises-question-anti-japanese-korea-really/">A Liberation Day Protest Raises the Question: How Anti-Japanese Is Korea, Really?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/stoked-racist-ad-k-pop-sex-scandal-anti-communist-massacre-can-korean-demand-apology-ever-satiated/">Stoked by a Racist Ad, a K-Pop Sex Scandal, and an Anti-Communist Massacre, Can the Korean Demand for Apology Ever Be Satiated?</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/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>
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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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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You Can Check in Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Leave: The First Korean &#8220;Comfort Woman&#8221; Novel, Kim Soom&#8217;s One Left

You Can Check in Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Leave: The First Korean &#8220;Comfort Woman&#8221; Novel, Kim Soom&#8217;s One Left

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/"></div>From time to time since the 1960s, South Korea and North Korea have blared propaganda at one another through hulking stacks of loudspeakers aimed into the Demilitarized Zone. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43958366" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43958366', 'These border blasters came down in 2018');">These border blasters came down in 2018</a>, during a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/interested-north-korea/">period of thaw</a> in North-South relations, but in the years leading up to that point the mutual sonic provocation had become unusually aggressive. This provided fodder to many an odd-news corner in the West, which seized especially upon the fact that the South had been mixing <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">K-pop</a> songs in with its denunciations of the Kim Jong Un regime. &#8220;Now, they haven’t said exactly what music they’ve been playing, but I hope it’s some of the better K-pop stuff,&#8221; said comedian-commentator John Oliver on a 2015 broadcast of his show Last Week Tonight. As examples he rattled off names surely unfamiliar to most HBO viewers at home: Uhm Jung-hwa, Jo Sung-mo, TVXQ, Neon Bunny.
How avidly Oliver really listens Korean music isn&#8217;t clear, though he did heap praise last year on a member of boy-band BTS, the highest-profile pop singers ever to come out of this country. &#8220;It’s frankly shame-inducing that K-pop has produced him, while American pop fans are stuck with Adam Levine,&#8221; said Oliver (undiminished though Korea&#8217;s own enthusiasm seems for the likes of Maroon 5). Just this month, BTS chalked up a couple more achievements that attest to their rise in the global zeitgeist: a performance at the Grammy Awards, followed by <a href="https://entertainment.theonion.com/bts-thanks-horrifyingly-exploitative-system-that-got-th-1846467567" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://entertainment.theonion.com/bts-thanks-horrifyingly-exploitative-system-that-got-th-1846467567', 'a report in the Onion');">a report in the Onion</a> in which they thank the &#8220;Horrifyingly Exploitative System That Got Them Where They Are Today.&#8221; The latter purports to quote one of the BTS boys expressing the group&#8217;s &#8220;heartfelt appreciation to the corporations and shareholders who never gave up on draining us of all personality and remaking us us into easily interchangeable commercial objects.&#8221;
BTS&#8217;s vast self-described &#8220;ARMY&#8221; of fans, a demographic not known for its sense of irony, took great exception to this bit of satire, and not wholly without cause. Among successful K-pop boy-bands and girl-groups, one could indeed find much clearer-cut examples of standardized industrial production. But the article nevertheless reflects a persistent distaste felt by many Western holdouts against the &#8220;Korean wave&#8221;: while the United States of America may have invented the pop star all but genetically engineered to meet consumer demand, Korea appears — as with other adopted foreign practices — to have taken it too far. And as has been argued elsewhere, Korea&#8217;s hit machine absorbs so great an amount of resources financial, cultural, and attentional within the country that other kinds of music, even other kinds of pop music, go begging. Or in the case of performers like Neon Bunny, one of Oliver&#8217;s picks, they go crowdfunding.
Neon Bunny (야광토끼) isn&#8217;t a band but a solo act, a 38-year-old singer-songwriter-producer named Lim Yoo-jin who&#8217;s put out three albums so far. Her most recent, Kosmos, came out last month, the fruit of labors that began with a campaign <a href="https://tumblbug.com/neonbunny" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://tumblbug.com/neonbunny', 'on the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform Tumblbug');">on the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform Tumblbug</a>. Its predecessors seem to have been more or less equally D.I.Y. productions, one quality that has endeared her to Western listeners, susceptible as we are to signals of artisanal &#8220;authenticity.&#8221; Over the past 15 years, in scenes all over the world, such small-scale production has converged with the lush, large-scale sounds made possible by consumer synthesizers and other electronic-music technologies. Neon Bunny stands squarely in that convergence; soon after releasing her debut album in 2011, she drew acclaim as a maker of &#8220;bedroom pop,&#8221; &#8220;synth-pop,&#8221; and/or &#8220;electro-pop&#8221; by Vice, Pitchfork, and other Western outlets invested in these trends.
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As Lim has explained, the title of that debut, Seoulight, is a double reference: to the light of Seoul, but also to the state of being a &#8220;Seoulite.&#8221; The city, she said during <a href="https://www.ebs.co.kr/space/broadcast/2825/player?lectId=3108834&amp;dno=3501" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.ebs.co.kr/space/broadcast/2825/player?lectId=3108834&amp;dno=3501', 'a 2012 performance on EBS television');">a 2012 performance on EBS television</a>, &#8220;feels like a warm man who&#8217;s always waiting for me.&#8221; But to appreciate his warmth, it seems she had to spend time away: the early 2000s, specifically, when she lived in Boston to study jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music. This strikes a somehow dispiriting note in her biography, as it does in those of the surprisingly many Korean cultural figures who undergo education abroad, and especially in the West, as not just a perk but a near-absolute requirement. (This isn&#8217;t so much the case in, for example, Japan, where music, film, architecture, and other cultures besides feel that much more homegrown as a result.)
But if not for her Berklee sojourn, Lim may never have become Neon Bunny. There she found her way into the East Coast D.I.Y. music scene and connected with fellow Korean musician Jo Hyu-il, an indie rocker who would go on to perform under the banner of The Black Skirts (검정치마). As The Black Skirts&#8217; keyboard player back in the homeland, Im also founded a Seoul arts collective called Doggyrich, showing the kind of self-motivation needed to launch a solo career outside the mainstream in Korea, and even more so to sustain it. Four years after following Seoulight up with the EP Happy Ending she released Stay Gold, an album even more deeply rooted in the South Korean capital — though it many not be nearby Tokyo, as she sings on the opener &#8220;Romance in Seoul,&#8221; nor splendid London, nor New York with its tall buildings.
This despite the fact that New York has fewer <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">tall buildings</a> than Seoul, which the following track&#8217;s title calls a &#8220;Forest of Skyscrapers.&#8221; That song comes with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KbvUmR6zkg" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KbvUmR6zkg', 'psychedlic cyberpunk music video');">psychedlic cyberpunk music video</a>, but its visuals are rendered superfluous by the enveloping sound world created on the album itself. (Not that I was displeased by the fragmentary views of Seoul in the video for <a href="https://youtu.be/Y-muW8zyaNc" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/Y-muW8zyaNc', '&#8220;It&#8217;s You,&#8221;');">&#8220;It&#8217;s You,&#8221;</a> including a glimpse of the now-vanished <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/looking-mexican-food-seoul-strange-case-hoover-taco/">KrissKo, home of the West Coast &#8220;Taco.&#8221;</a>) Seoulight and Happy Ending are more than competent records, to be sure, and they came as water in the desert to many Westerners with an ear on Korean pop music, but on them Stay Gold marks an astonishing sonic enrichment. This owes its many interwoven electronic layers, of course, but also to elements drawn from less likely sources, such as the gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument, heard on &#8220;Romance in Seoul.&#8221;
Stay Gold leaves no doubt as to where in the world it comes from. One instrumental, &#8220;Bugaksanlo&#8221; (북악산로), is named for a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVXkD7-bimY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVXkD7-bimY', 'winding mountain road');">winding mountain road</a> in the north of Seoul. (The closest Los Angeles equivalent would be Mulholland Drive.) Nearly all its lyrics are in Korean, apart from the occasional English chorus, which makes for a welcome contrast to the tendencies of K-pop today. Though I&#8217;ll never be a member of the BTS ARMY, I have nothing but respect for the group&#8217;s achievement of scoring stateside hits while singing in their own language. But &#8220;Dynamite,&#8221; the currently inescapable number <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp2vYwuH9-M" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp2vYwuH9-M', 'they performed at the Grammys');">they performed at the Grammys</a>, is 100 percent English, an unwelcome development to my ear however catchy the music. And not only was the song written without the band members&#8217; participation — unusual, in BTS&#8217; process — it was commissioned from a pair of English songwriters.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15352" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3.png" alt="" width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3-300x169.png 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
&#8220;Dynamite,&#8221; in other words, is placeless pop in just the way most of Neon Bunny&#8217;s oeuvre isn&#8217;t. If placefulness, so to speak, emerges as one of the defining qualities of an album like Stay Gold, so does its unreserved femininity. Early in her solo career Im spoke of writing songs with which women can sympathize, and whether or not she still considers that a priority, her musical persona remains unaffected by the insistent brashness now hardened into a trope among many female pop stars in the West. (Those who watched this year&#8217;s Grammys in full will have seen it on grotesque display.) Happy Ending&#8216;s kiss-off song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0STGIblwgU" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0STGIblwgU', '&#8220;Oh My Prince&#8221;');">&#8220;Oh My Prince&#8221;</a> (왕자님) went about as far as Neon Bunny could go in that direction: despite its amusing ridicule of raised-abroad rich kids — including the suggestion that they re-learn Korean — its attitude seemed a vaguely ill fit.
Neon Bunny&#8217;s new album <a href="https://neonbunny.bandcamp.com/album/kosmos" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://neonbunny.bandcamp.com/album/kosmos', 'Kosmos');">Kosmos</a> (also <a href="https://youtu.be/hmRJaAdkvT0" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/hmRJaAdkvT0', 'available for listening on Youtube');">available for listening on Youtube</a>) goes quite the other way. Devoid of any trace of sarcasm or petulance, its songs are instead heavy on breathy declarations of lifelong devotion. Some of these declarations Lim delivers in English, as when she sings, &#8220;Let me be the one for you / be the one that will love &#8217;til the end of time.&#8221; This invites the occasional such unwonted cliché into this album&#8217;s songs, two of which, by my count, are Neon Bunny&#8217;s first written entirely in English. Given the judgments I&#8217;ve aired already, this should perhaps disappoint me more than it does, but the usage here is just askew enough to bolster the album&#8217;s communiqué-from-a-distant-satellite aesthetic, other elements of which include elongated echo and reverb, smeary strings and choral voices, muted analog-sounding synthesizers, deliberately applied hiss and fuzz, and difficult-to-place samples from vintage soul records.
On the whole, Lim&#8217;s use of English remains relatively restrained, especially in light of the temptation it must present to an artist with a Western listenership at least as strong as her domestic one. But as a Westerner in her listenership myself — albeit one living in Korea, with a sense of what she means when she sings about Seoul&#8217;s sky as seen from her apartment — what interests me more is her new album&#8217;s inversion of intensity, its thoroughgoing sedateness where Stay Gold was driving. Not for nothing has &#8220;chillwave&#8221; begun to appear among the subgenres under which she gets filed, and it puts her in good company with a few of the non-Koreans alongside her in my heavy Spotify rotation — <a href="https://youtu.be/9rPOuZ4vY50" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/9rPOuZ4vY50', 'Toro y Moi');">Toro y Moi</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/BbbIBBVl_fI" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/BbbIBBVl_fI', 'Neon Indian');">Neon Indian</a>, and more similarly, fellow electronic bedroom-pop singer-songwriter-producer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITh8fBfejk" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITh8fBfejk', 'Jessy Lanza');">Jessy Lanza</a> — all of whom get critics casting about for labels: &#8220;glo-fi,&#8221; &#8220;vaporwave,&#8221; &#8220;hypnagogic pop.&#8221;
Like its predecessors, Kosmos only lasts about half an hour. But throughout that short runtime come a few surprises, including Neon Bunny&#8217;s first acoustic-guitar ballad, unadorned except (I suspect) for a bit of of processing to make it feel as if it was recorded in a literal bedroom. In its other, more elaborate songs, the sound now and again takes faint but perceptible turns toward the sinister, which complicates my conception of Kosmos&#8216; having been constructed as a brief galactic-romantic journey best taken in a state of altered consciousness. If present, such a design would primarily serve fans abroad, given the unavailability of consciousness-altering substances here. Last year <a href="https://www.nknews.org/2020/06/north-korea-brings-back-anti-south-propaganda-loudspeakers-to-border-report/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nknews.org/2020/06/north-korea-brings-back-anti-south-propaganda-loudspeakers-to-border-report/', 'North Korea began reinstalling its propaganda loudspeakers');">North Korea began reinstalling its propaganda loudspeakers</a> along the border, and if South Korea responds in kind, it should play the Northerners not BTS&#8217; latest album but Neon Bunny&#8217;s; I&#8217;ve heard cannabis is easier to come by up there.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<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="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="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/yoo-jae-k-pop-masterpiece-love-30-years-untimely-death/">Yoo Jae-ha’s K-Pop Masterpiece Because I Love You, 30 Years After His Untimely Death</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-punk-indie-rock-k-pop-world/">Korean Punk and Indie Rock in a K-Pop World</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">Why K-Pop is the Same as Classic Rock</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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/"></div>

From Seoul to the Stars: The Journey of Indie Synth-Electro-K-Pop Queen Neon Bunny

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/"></div>Bae Myung-hoon&#8217;s Tower (타워) comprises six interlinked stories, which take place almost entirely within a single building inhabited by 500,000 people. To that setting I imagine Western readers reacting with the look of the stunned distaste I sometimes receive when, back in the United States, I describe the standard form of middle-class housing in Seoul: clusters of 10, 20, 30 buildings, rising to 20, 30, 40 stories each. That <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">verticality</a> alone signals dystopia to many Americans, but to no few English as well — most notably J.G. Ballard, whose 1975 novel High-Rise dramatizes the swift and total breakdown of society that occurs in, and is seemingly caused by, a luxury apartment complex of the titular form. No such fate befalls Beanstalk, the 674-story tower imagined by Bae, though it does experience a few close calls, subject as it seemingly is to constant threat from within and without.
Beanstalk isn&#8217;t just a building but a sovereign nation unto itself, locked in an ongoing Oceania-and-Eastasia-style geopolitical conflict with the distant country of Cosmomafia. This perhaps reflects the interests of the Seoul National University international-relations scholar Bae was when he began to build a readership as a writer of fiction. But in just over 250 pages, he also describes or alludes to aspects of Beanstalk and life within it in a range wide enough to reflect active fascinations with structural engineering, urban development, terrorism and antiterrorism, geographic information systems, literature, military strategy, Machiavellian politics, and Buddhism. The state of nirvana is invoked several times, once as a fighter pilot downed in a vast desert feels death&#8217;s approach (little knowing that the Beanstalkians have banded together to comb through satellite photos, facilitating his rescue), and again when an Indian elephant plunges from a 321st-story window.
The elephant is called Amitabh, a name borrowed (as Bae revealed in a recent podcast appearance) from Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Show business bears more directly on the life a celebrity dog known as Film Actor P, another of Tower&#8216;s non-human characters, who not only figures into several of its stories but turns up again in the last of its appendices to give an &#8220;interview.&#8221; You may at this point suspect the book of an unconventional structure, either by the standards of novels or those of short-story collections. Nor is it formally homogenous, with one epistolary story breaking up the omniscient third-person voice and two of the appendices constituting excerpts of texts referred to in the foregoing narratives: a sociological study of one of Beanstalk&#8217;s floors and a myth-like tale of a polar bear (who eventually does manage to attain nirvana) ostensibly by &#8220;Writer K,&#8221; star of the second story.
Writer K once accepted a bribe that provided him with not just a house in Málaga but a house in Málaga and a robot through which to survey the property remotely from Beanstalk. We thus know that Beanstalk isn&#8217;t in Spain, though where in the world it does stand Bae never makes explicit. That the pilot crashes in China&#8217;s Taklamakan Desert suggests east Asia, and many elements of Tower&#8216;s stories invite comparisons to Bae&#8217;s homeland of South Korea. Here the sort of politico-cultural palm-greasing in which K gets involved is barely concealed, and the kind of disengaged nature-appreciation he cranks out when the political heat turns up constitutes a time-honored literary tradition. Amitabh is brought into Beanstalk as a unit of its riot police, in an effort to contain increasingly forceful protests in front of city hall — <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/protest-korean-style/">the like of which I witnessed</a> not long after coming to Seoul.
As in Seoul, some of Beanstalk&#8217;s unrest erupts in response to large-scale redevelopment: here neighborhoods have been emptied out and scraped away to make room for the aforementioned high-rise apartment complexes, whereas in Beanstalk it happens to floors or sections of floors. Beanstalk&#8217;s countless elevators are subject to the same kind of controversies that attend the operation, maintenance, and extension of the Seoul Metro, and the building&#8217;s spatial nature has also given rise its to its own abstract and tendentious ideological labels: the &#8220;verticalists&#8221; prioritize the machinery and capital needed to move people and things from one floor to another, while the &#8220;horizontalists&#8221; prioritize the labor and muscle needed to traverse the floors themselves. The former seem more represented on the affluent, more recently built upper floors, while the latter tend to occupy the humbler, older ones below — a somewhat predictable objective correlative of having and having not.
However high or low their status within the structure, all Beanstalkians appear to be better off than the people of the poorer unnamed country that surrounds them. After more than six decades into their building-turned-country&#8217;s existence, some have developed &#8220;terraphobia,&#8221; a fear and loathing of descending to the first floor, let alone stepping outside. (This condition strikes me as opposite to that which afflicts a writer friend of mine in Los Angeles, who eschews high-rise life because &#8220;humans were meant to live on the ground.&#8221;) Whether they hail from Beanstalk or the land that enclaves it, most of Tower&#8216;s characters have Korean-sounding names: Professor Jung, Doctor Song, Kim Minso, Choi Sinhak. Does this mountainous building stand, then, for greater Seoul, which with half the population of South Korea (as well as most of its important institutions) often does indeed feel like a city-state within the country?
Bae includes one human character from farther afield: Şehriban. a Muslim (and given her name, presumably Turkish) agent of Cosmomafia resident in Beanstalk under the professional cover of working as an interpreter. Despite having warmed to the Beanstalkians in her years among them, she doesn&#8217;t hesitate to carry out the Cosmomafian orders she receives one day: purchase a series of properties within the building pre-rigged with bombs during its construction, and prime those bombs to detonate at the appointed hour. The passages on Şehriban&#8217;s background and motivations read as if somehow hollowed out on the way to the book&#8217;s English version, which does at least include the self-justifying sentiments of her predecessors in this elaborate long-term operation: &#8220;Watching Beanstalk add floor after floor, they had naturally associated it with the tower of Babel. Look how massive it is. It&#8217;s got human vanity written all over it. It&#8217;ll be another Babel.&#8221;
As with the movie-star dog, references to Babel arise throughout the book. But is the apter comparison between Beanstalk&#8217;s condition and the immoral disunion that befalls the city of the Bible (Bae has described himself as a Christian, his narrative use of Buddhism notwithstanding), or between Beanstalk&#8217;s construction and that of the Tower of Babel, whose heavenward rise causes humanity so much trouble? The punishment of hubris has in any case proven a reliable theme for Korean stories, from novels to major motion pictures: take by Kim Ji-hoon&#8217;s The Tower (also originally 타워), a visual effects-laden Korean update of The Towering Inferno set in a fictional 120-story complex on the Han River. That building&#8217;s conflagration is set off when a helicopter crashes into it in a windstorm, having been hired to sprinkle snow outside the windows for the delight of rich tenants gathered at an exclusive Christmas party.
Certain of Bae&#8217;s characters, too, sense the most severe threat in wealth and the isolation it encourages. An Intelligence Bureau officer believes that, whatever Cosmomafia gets up to with its bombs, &#8220;Beanstalk was already under attack, an attack mounted by those who did not see Beanstalk as a place where people lived but simply as a real estate market&#8221; — a demographic as powerful as it is insatiable, one whose demands have visited developmental grotesqueries (resulting in the occasional genuine disaster) on Seoul and other world capitals. On a smaller scale, one appendix, an &#8220;excerpt from the introduction to A Study on Level 520,&#8221; illustrates the processes by which a neighborhood loses its informal social institutions, in this case a <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coffee-life-korea/">coffee shop</a>, and thus ceases to be a neighborhood at all: &#8220;In just one year we had gone from being people of Level 520 to people of Beanstalk.&#8221;
Whatever such depredations affect the life of Seoul&#8217;s neighborhoods, they&#8217;ve had more than a decade to worsen since the book first came out. Originally published in 2009, it appeared in a new edition just last year, reaching the much larger readership Bae had cultivated in the meantime by prolifically mounting his own satirical social, political, and economic critiques within the parameters of science fiction. That genre hasn&#8217;t been abundantly served by Korean literature, much less by Korean literature in translation (though the effort on this book from translator <a href="https://sungryu.asuscomm.com/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://sungryu.asuscomm.com/', 'Sung Ryu');">Sung Ryu</a> and British press <a href="https://www.honfordstar.com/shop/tower-by-bae-myung-hoon" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.honfordstar.com/shop/tower-by-bae-myung-hoon', 'Honford Star');">Honford Star</a> may begin to change that). For this relative dearth I&#8217;ve often heard the same explanation given: South Koreans hardly need stories of high-tech dystopias when they already live in a real one. That reason may not be entirely plausible, but then neither is Beanstalk, and Tower certainly doesn&#8217;t suffer for it.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">Living the Vertical Life in Seoul</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/blade-runner-2049-los-angeles-korean-future/">Blade Runner 2049 and Los Angeles’ Korean Future</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-next-great-cyberpunk-city/">Could Seoul Be the Next Great Cyberpunk City?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ajossi-robot-korean-film-dramatizes-disaster/">An Ajeossi and His Robot (or, How Korean Film Dramatizes Disaster)</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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/"></div>

We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon&#8217;s Tower

We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon&#8217;s Tower

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www.nicolereed.photography

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/hotels-pyongyang-new-photo-book-showcases-magnificent-kitsch-north-korean-hospitality/"></div>Despite having dominated the Pyongyang skyline for three decades now, the Ryugyong Hotel has never opened for business. Topped out as the end of the Soviet Union plunged North Korea into economic crisis, the building stood for most of that period as an angularly mountainous 105-story concrete husk. With a motionless crane still perched on its peak, the seemingly abandoned hotel offered Western observers rather too convenient a symbol for the North Korean project as a whole: ostentatious, even menacing, but all too clearly struggling and ultimately doomed to catastrophic failure. Yet in the late 2000s the project finally resumed, taken over by an Egyptian construction firm, and soon thereafter the Ryugyong was at least decently covered in glass. In recent years that façade has been fitted with LEDs, which at night enable it to screen vivid nationalistic imagery and slogans at a colossal scale (if in an awkward shape).
Where once North Korean officialdom seemed to expect citizens to ignore the Ryugyong, now it presumably expects the opposite. But even as nothing more than a propagandistic billboard, it would have been a glaring admission had it not appeared in <a href="https://www.hotelsofnorthkorea.com/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.hotelsofnorthkorea.com/', 'Hotels of Pyongyang');">Hotels of Pyongyang</a>, a new photo book by James Scullin and Nicole Reed. Having yet to admit its first guest, the Ryugyong is shown only from the outside and at a distance, much less intimately than the ten other institutions of hospitality included here, most of them built in what contributing historian of socialist architecture Jelena Prokopljević calls &#8220;the golden decades of North Korean construction over the 1980s and 1990s.&#8221; To Westerners they&#8217;ll look considerably older, and surreally well-maintained at that, but &#8220;visitors from the former Communist Bloc,&#8221; adds North Korea scholar Leonid Petrov in his own short essay, &#8220;are amused by similitudes and feel very much at home.&#8221;
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15207" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-2.jpeg" alt="" width="1000" height="666" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-2.jpeg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-2-300x200.jpeg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-2-768x511.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Whatever the origins of the beholder, it isn&#8217;t hard to understand the fascination of these hotels. Reed, an Australian photographer experienced in the urban environments of Japan and Hong Kong, captures views of interiors for the most part free of human beings, all the better to highlight the distinctive elements of their décor. Often these include ersatz plant life, faux-Roman columns, approximate-looking leather upholstery, clashing geometric patterns, mirrored surfaces (or surfaces kept buffed to such a shine that they might as well be mirrored), elaborate antimacassars, and large-scale paintings of glorified North Korean landscapes and cityscapes. Numerous inexpensive forms of multicolored lighting introduce even more variety into color schemes not just heavy on grays and browns, as one would expect, but also greens and pinks similar to <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/colors-pyongyang-seouls-shadow-self/">those that coat the exteriors of Pyongyang&#8217;s many humbler buildings</a>.
These interior designs also display a noticeable penchant for semicircular lounge chairs and bar stools, the sight of which reminds me of the seating in an equally striking hotel on the other side of the world: John Portman&#8217;s Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Despite being relatively familiar to Westerners through its <a href="https://vimeo.com/140975476" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://vimeo.com/140975476', 'more than forty years of occasional but conspicuous appearances in movies');">more than forty years of occasional but conspicuous appearances in movies</a>, the Bonaventure retains the power to astonish, or at least to startle and bewilder. Though humbled by the Bunker Hill high-rises that have come to surround it, its quintet of cylindrical class towers still constitutes one of downtown&#8217;s few architectural icons. But the real achievement is its multi-level atrium lobby, Portman&#8217;s architectural signature and one that today may impress exceptionally well-traveled guests as a veritably North Korean combination of undeniable spatial ambition and datedness thorough enough to feel like time travel.
The day I first wandered inside the Bonaventure and beheld its atrium lobby — but didn&#8217;t even get up to its revolving lounge, a standard feature in both North Korean and Portmanian luxury-hotel design — remains one of the most memorable of my time in Los Angeles. For a first-time visitor to Pyongyang, checking into one&#8217;s lodgings surely has a comparable effect: from the surroundings one receives immediate, overwhelming confirmation that one has well and truly arrived somewhere else. One does not quote feel this in most other destinations, no matter how remote. &#8220;Hotels of Pyongyang are relics of a bygone era,&#8221; writes Petrov, &#8220;frozen in time and not touched by globalization.&#8221; In other words, they&#8217;ve held off the encroachment of what <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification', 'Kyle Chayka at The Verge');">Kyle Chayka at The Verge</a> labels &#8220;AirSpace,&#8221; with its homogenous international good taste: &#8220;Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet.&#8221;
Though the hotels of Pyongyang appear in most respects to be the polar opposite of AirSpace, some do boast modest equivalents of its millennial comforts. The Koryo and Yanggakdo hotels have their own microbreweries, Scullin informs us, and the Pyongyang Hotel lays claim to the city city&#8217;s best coffee: &#8220;Unlike other hotels that serve the powdered variety, the Pyongyang Hotel Coffee Shop uses actual ground beans with an espresso machine.&#8221; (Unimpressive though that may sound, it shows what strides North Korean coffee culture has made since <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/simon-winchesters-korea-30-years-classic-travelogue-cultural-offense/">Simon Winchester visited</a>. Having ordered a cappuccino at Pyongyang International Airport&#8217;s café, he received a cup of coffee whose foam &#8220;turned out to be egg white, beaten and cooked into a sort of greyish omelet.&#8221;) But as is by now well known, travelers in the Democratic People&#8217;s Republic of Korea can&#8217;t expect to access the internet, let alone fast internet.
<img class="size-full wp-image-15209 aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-4.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-4.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-4-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-4-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
&#8220;A near-total lack of mobile phone service or internet has a unique bonding effect,&#8221; writes another contributor to the book named Charles Kennedy. &#8220;In any other country, at the end of a hard day’s touring important sites, a typical group would scatter to their rooms, uploading images to social media and answering work emails.&#8221; In North Korea, however, &#8220;the entire group will migrate en masse to the bar or restaurant, uninterrupted by phones buzzing in pockets or on tables. The quality of the conversation is elevated, friendships for life are kindled.&#8221; This aspect of the travel experience on offer north of the border is, I admit, not entirely unappealing; the deeper we get into the 21st century, the more often I catch myself fantasizing about life in a time before constant connectivity,  usually the era broadly reflected by the look and feel of Pyongyang&#8217;s grand hotels.
As the &#8220;Aviation Ambassador and DPRK Tour Leader&#8221; at Juche Travel Services, a company named after North Korea&#8217;s putative ideology of self-reliance,  Kennedy has a professional incentive to put a positive spin on the unusual conditions that obtain there. So, for that matter, does Scullin, who&#8217;s also described as a &#8220;DPRK Tour Leader&#8221; and who early on clarifies that &#8220;Hotels of Pyongyang does not attempt to offer a complete account of DPRK life.&#8221; Notably unseen in any of its photographs are the standard portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, the country&#8217;s first and second presidents, that — as few foreign observers fail to mention — hang by law in all homes and many public places. Whether the result of an artistic choice, an official restriction, or a simple absence, it will surprise anyone who&#8217;s done a bit of reading about North Korea before.
This is to say nothing about what else goes unseen in these images of (by the relevant standards) well-appointed, internationally oriented hotels in the troubled country&#8217;s showcase capital. Scullin&#8217;s disclaimer will hardly satisfy those who see moral bankruptcy in any depiction of North Korea made without reference to the daily suffering of millions allegedly going on just behind the scenes, let alone the encouragement of tourism, which they they regard as the cash cow of a repressive, even murderous regime. Conducted in collaboration with Juche Travel Surfaces and the domestic Korean International Travel Company — indeed impossible without such collaboration, in a country so long concerned with restricting access to itself — a project like Hotels of Pyongyang, necessarily keeps on the kid gloves. Hence the emphasis on the Yanggakdo Hotel&#8217;s microbrewery rather than, say, its onetime accommodation of the ill-fated American college student Otto Warmbier.
<img class="size-full wp-image-15208 aligncenter" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-3.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="667" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-3.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-3-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-hotels-of-pyongyang-3-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Living in South Korea, my own fascination with the land north of the border has drifted less toward moral outrage than <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/interested-north-korea/">apathy</a>. That said, I know full well that seeing any one of the spaces depicted in this book for myself would render me delirious with excitement. Despite never having set foot in the DPRK, I&#8217;ve had similar spatial-cultural-aesthetic experiences elsewhere: not just at the Bonaventure, but at the decades-old and little-altered hotels, shopping centers, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops found all over northeast Asia. That includes certain spots here in South Korea, the country today held up as North Korea&#8217;s economic and political counterexample. But on the surface, the two societies once bore a much closer mutual resemblance — and well within living memory, as anyone who follows Hotels of Pyongyang with a South Korean film from the early 1990s (or a visit to a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korea-need-love-love-motel-least/">love motel</a>) will notice.
Embarrassing associations with their own poorer, kitschier past must count among the many reasons for the relative lack of South Korean interest in North Korean aesthetics. (Here, the faces of the hotel employees who pose for Reed&#8217;s camera would all bespeak rural origins.) But the recent trend among young Seoulites to view old things more charitably has gone hand-in-hand with a willingness to enjoy certain symbols of DPRK culture: the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/notes-camp-pyongyang-pub-seoulites-eat-drink-like-north-38th-parallel/">Pyongyang Pub</a> attempted to capitalize on that emerging taste, though last I saw the place it been remodeled with a domestic retro theme. South Koreans couldn&#8217;t visit the real Pyongyang if they wanted to, of course, which was true even before the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reading-albert-camus-plague-time-coronavirus/">coronavirus</a> curtailed all international travel. Characteristically, North Korea has implemented even stricter entry restrictions than before, with the result that the hotels of Pyongyang must now be as empty as Hotels of Pyongyang makes them look.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/interested-north-korea/">On Not Being Interested in North Korea</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/colors-pyongyang-seouls-shadow-self/">The Colors of Pyongyang, Seoul’s Shadow Self</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/notes-camp-pyongyang-pub-seoulites-eat-drink-like-north-38th-parallel/">Notes on the Camp of the Pyongyang Pub, Where Seoulites Eat and Drink Like It’s North of the 38th Parallel</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/python-goes-pyongyang-well-beyond-michael-palin-north-korea/">A Python Goes to Pyongyang (and Well Beyond): Michael Palin in North Korea</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/chris-marker-freely-photographed-briefly-fell-love-north-korea/">When Chris Marker Freely Photographed, and Briefly Fell in Love with, 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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/hotels-pyongyang-new-photo-book-showcases-magnificent-kitsch-north-korean-hospitality/"></div>

Hotels of Pyongyang: A New Photo Book Showcases the Magnificent Kitsch of North Korean Hospitality

Hotels of Pyongyang: A New Photo Book Showcases the Magnificent Kitsch of North Korean Hospitality

kb-the-shower-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/beloved-childrens-story-turned-psychedelic-rural-reverie-go-yeong-nams-shower-1978/"></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" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvH6u_Qzn5RQdz9W198umDw', 'the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel');">the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel</a>. Previous selections include <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 The Shower <a href="https://youtu.be/Gsa0SR9IzcI" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/Gsa0SR9IzcI', 'here');">here</a>.
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Given the increasingly frequent attempts of late to overhaul the American Young Adult canon, I&#8217;m not sure how many kids read Bridge to Terabithia these days. But when I was a grade-schooler in the early 1990s, Katherine Paterson&#8217;s 1977 novel of a country boy and city girl who imagine their own fantasy kingdom apart from the adult world was still quite popular. Everyone seemed to have read it, for the very reason that everyone else seemed to have read it; not wanting to references to go over our head was one factor, though so was its appearance on school-issued summer reading lists, if not actual class syllabi. But the book does still figure, so I&#8217;ve read, into English curricula in lands from Ireland and Australia to Singapore and the Philippines — though it&#8217;s less well-known here in South Korea, at least compared to a Western novel like <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreans-love-herman-hesses-demian-western-novels/">Demian</a>.
One possible explanation is that this country already had its own Bridge to Terabithia, and one readable in a much shorter span of time: &#8220;The Shower&#8221; (소나기) by Hwang Sun-won. &#8220;No Korean short story is as beloved as this one, published while the Korean war was still in progress,&#8221; writes translator Brother Anthony of Taizé in a foreword to <a href="http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/Shower.htm" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/Shower.htm', 'his own English rendition');">his own English rendition</a>. &#8220;In part, the popularity comes from its great simplicity of language and content. It is a tale that school children can easily understand, and be touched by.&#8221; Its themes &#8220;include nostalgia for a lost innocence, the fragility of human life, the contrast between ancient rural ways and the difficulties of modern city life, and the simplicity of true joy.&#8221; Hwang expresses all of these through the brief encounter between a boy native to the countryside and a girl newly arrived from Seoul.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that everyone in Korea has read &#8220;The Shower.&#8221; Familiarity with the story runs deeper here than that with any piece of literature in the United States, Bridge to Terabithia included. But seeing as these works have been acclaimed long enough for the statute of limitations on &#8220;spoilers&#8221; to have expired, it will do no harm to either to say that, late in both stories, the girl dies. In Peterson&#8217;s novel, if memory serves, she drowns attempting to cross a stream on the way to her and the boy&#8217;s woodland hiding place; in Hwang&#8217;s story, she contracts an unspecified illness after getting caught in the titular rainstorm. The boy, in both cases, is left with a sense of responsibility for the girl&#8217;s death, a burden partially alleviated by the exhilaration of having drawn a step closer to the expanse of maturity.
It is, at least, in Go Yeong-nam&#8217;s 1978 cinematic adaptation of &#8220;The Shower,&#8221; whose expansions of Hwang&#8217;s spare tale include a final shot in which the boy, the morning after hearing of the girl&#8217;s death, suddenly lets out a joyous-sounding scream and tears off, arms wheeling, into the hills. It also gives him and the girl names, Seok-i and Yeon-i, and multiplies their frolics in the arcadian fields and forests of the Korean countryside before the fateful sunshower comes along. This is in keeping with the sensibility of the original story, though where Hwang&#8217;s narration never strays from the boy&#8217;s perspective, Go&#8217;s film adds scenes focused on Yeon-i, most of them emphasizing the obstacles she faces integrating into her new surroundings: the girls at school who instinctively accuse her of stuck-up cityfication, the boys by the river who head home when she overenthusiastically attempts to join them catching tadpoles.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15161" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-the-shower-2.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="784" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-the-shower-2.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-the-shower-2-300x235.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/kb-the-shower-2-768x602.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Yet most of the time Yeon-i keeps a smile on her face, one first seen as she rides the train into the village alongside her bespectacled, black-suited, smoking father. But from the station to the father&#8217;s family home they take an ox-drawn cart, a juxtaposition of modernizing Korea and agrarian Korea that brings to mind the photography of Jeon Min-jo, specifically his famous shot of a farmer and his beast of burden plowing a field in the foreground while the <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">high-rise apartment complexes</a> of Gangnam rise immediately behind him — a picture taken, incidentally, the very same year The Shower was released. Though characters in Korean literature had been making meaningful journeys from Seoul back to their rural hometowns well before Hwang&#8217;s day, the country&#8217;s period of intensely rapid industrialization and development in the 1960s and 70s turned them, effectively, into journeys back in time.
The Shower was shot in North Chungcheong Province, about 90 miles and, in certain respects, a hundred years out of Seoul. Seok-i&#8217;s parents and Yeon-i&#8217;s grandparents live in the same courtyard houses and wear the same traditional white clothing as did generation after generation of their ancestors. But while much of Hwang&#8217;s timeless story could be set centuries before he wrote it, the movie clearly takes place in the late 1970s. Many of the village schoolchildren look not entirely unlike young American students (or young Asian-American students) of those days; Seok-i&#8217;s finest outfit, worn for his outings with Yeon-i, consists of a wide-collared polyester shirt and a pair of brown flared trousers. Though lush by the Korean film industry&#8217;s standards at the time, the production, too, bears the marks of its era, including dialogue entirely dubbed in a recording studio (and in Yeon-i&#8217;s case, dubbed by an oddly mature-sounding voice).
But as in other Korean pictures of the 1970s like Kim Soo-yong&#8217;s <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/boring-heaven-exciting-hell-kim-soo-yongs-night-journey/">Night Journey</a> and Kim Ki-young&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">Iodo</a> (both of which involve Seoulites making psychologically difficult trips to much less developed parts of the country), this faint unnaturalness only enhances the creation of a cinematic dream state. As Seok-i&#8217;s feelings toward Yeon-i turn from irritation to affection, the greens, yellows, and purples of the fields around them gain a near-psychedelic richness. An uncommonly wide aspect ratio, as well as a dramatic strings-and-horns score, gives a classical sweep to the development of their relationship, which becomes increasingly playful — and then, when the rain prompts them to seek improvised shelter, intimate. This isn&#8217;t to say that these preteens engage in any act that could be called &#8220;love,&#8221; but then again, I&#8217;ve also heard lively arguments about whether or not, between the lines, Hwang implies a consummation of their relationship.
The Shower, the film, gets no more overt than in the dream sequences with which it fills out the story. In one, Seok-i finds his innocently exuberant revelry in nature interrupted by the appearance of a grass-skirted temptress. In another, Yeon-i sees Seok-i seduced by the &#8220;fox woman,&#8221; straight from a bedtime fable recounted by her grandmother, who entrances him by passing a glass bead from her mouth to his. Yet the most memorable is the last, which has nothing eroticized or bizarre about it. It comes after the ailing Yeon-i makes her way from bed to their usual meeting spot on a bridge to tell Seok-i that her family will soon be moving elsewhere, her father&#8217;s business failures having forced them out of not just Seoul but their ancestral home as well. Seok-i falls asleep that night resolving to see her one last time.
Yeon-i then appears in the daytime, wearing brightly colored ceremonial dress and bearing the news that she isn&#8217;t going away after all. There, in the course of about five minutes, follow the next two seasons, first the Chuseok harvest festival, complete with dancing, drumming, wrestling, and the townspeople waving torches at dusk. The realism of the fall then gives way, with an accelerated view of waves rolling before the setting sun, to a stark winter scene in which Yeon-i leads Seok-i from the seaside into the snow-covered hills. To a soundtrack of ghostly flutes, the light itself takes on the hues of those purple and yellow flowers. Seok-i stops and calls to Yeon-i, soundlessly; she keeps running, slowly but unreachably. The Shower has been accused of sexualizing its young characters, but its real power, evident in this premonition of loss, is its aestheticization — and of a suitably haunting kind.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/sex-please-korea-jang-sun-woos-road-race-track-1991/">No Sex Please, This Is Korea: Jang Sun-woo’s The Road to the Race Track</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/boring-heaven-exciting-hell-kim-soo-yongs-night-journey/">Between Boring Heaven and Exciting Hell: Kim Soo-yong’s Night Journey</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 “K-Lit” Past and Present: Youngmin Kwon and Bruce Fulton’s What Is Korean Literature?</a>
 
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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/beloved-childrens-story-turned-psychedelic-rural-reverie-go-yeong-nams-shower-1978/"></div>

A Beloved Children&#8217;s Story Turned Psychedelic Rural Reverie: Go Yeong-nam&#8217;s The Shower (1978)

A Beloved Children&#8217;s Story Turned Psychedelic Rural Reverie: Go Yeong-nam&#8217;s The Shower (1978)

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/king-sejong-great-star-trek-writer-pays-novelistic-tribute-korean-alphabets-creator/"></div>Apart from the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">pop music</a>, television dramas, and <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">movies</a> that have made so many international fans in the 21st century, no aspect of Korean culture has fascinated Westerners as much as the Korean alphabet. In fact, if Westerners know only one thing about Korea, they tend to know that its language uses an alphabet, not a set of complex logographic characters of the kind seen in written Chinese and Japanese. If they know only two things about Korea, the second is often that this alphabet was invented by one man, a Korean king of centuries ago. This piques enough of a fascination in some Westerners to get them looking up who he was, when he lived, and what else he accomplished, knowledge that can inspire feelings of admiration. But only one such Westerner has been inspired enough to write a novel: Joe Menosky, author of <a href="http://www.hanbooks.com/kisegr.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://www.hanbooks.com/kisegr.html', 'King Sejong the Great');">King Sejong the Great</a>.
Here the book was published in both English and Korean translation last October 9th: Hangeul Day, the holiday in honor of the Korean alphabet whose name literally means &#8220;Korean writing.&#8221; This as opposed to classical Chinese writing, which until the invention of hangul in the 1440s all Koreans used — or rather, all literate Koreans used, literacy having been limited to a small upper class consisting mainly of aristocratic scholars and government officials. History remembers King Sejong the Great (whom a Korean in a language-exchange group cautioned me years ago never to refer to as simply &#8220;King Sejong&#8221; in Korean, lest I give offense) as the quintessential benevolent monarch, overseer of a host of scientific, military, economic, and cultural advances of which hangul is the best-known and most enduring. For nearly all their reading and writing today, Koreans use an only slightly reduced version of the same alphabet Sejong invented.
Whether or not the king invented hangul by himself remains a matter of debate. Some sources describe him has having led a kind of committee to its creation, while others frame it as a practically individual accomplishment. In the novel&#8217;s prologue, Menosky writes that he deliberately opted to tell the latter version of the hangul story: surely the one with greater potential dramatic intensity, but also the one that would more closely have aligned with his own feelings about Sejong, which by his own admission approach &#8220;hero worship.&#8221; This alongside his disbelief that &#8220;this story was not universally known. If a European ruler had invented an alphabet for his or her people, everybody in the world would have heard about it.&#8221; Indeed, such an equivalent is difficult even to imagine: &#8220;Leonardo da Vinci as rule of Florence? Isaac Newton as the King of England?&#8221;
Korea has drawn many national heroes from the past millennium, and especially from the Joseon dynasty of 1392 to 1897. Not all of their heroic credentials have gone unquestioned, but however vague or contradictory the records of his time, King Sejong seems to have been the real deal — to use a modern expression, and one that finds its way into the text of King Sejong the Great. Rather than opting for any kind of medievally inflected narrative voice, Menosky makes full use of 21st-century English, often of a strikingly casual variety. &#8220;With its emphasis on reason over mysticism and reality over world-as-illusion,&#8221; he writes, the 15th-century state religion of neo-Confucianism had become &#8220;specifically identified with the Joseon dynasty &#8216;brand.'&#8221; Later he describes a Japanese pirate ship, its bilge &#8220;lit by one of the ballast weights — a heavy stone lamp that had been boosted from a Buddhist temple somewhere.&#8221;
An editor at an American publishing house would doubtless have sent those lines back, but the novel wasn&#8217;t published in the United States, and even its English edition comes from a small Korean outfit called Fitbook. There the manuscript seems not to have benefited from the kind of non-authorial attention that native English readers take for granted in long-form fiction: its nearly 400 pages are dogged by missing words, awkward line breaks, drifting tenses, sentence fragments, unfortunate repetitions, and even apparent typos. To some degree this must be a result of its unconventional path to publication. But as anyone who has paid much attention to English-language materials in Korea knows, while this society may <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-english-fever-english-cancer/">obsess over English as a status language</a> — occupying as it does something like the place of Chinese in the Joseon dynasty — scant attention remains for the quality and polish of actual English prose.
The publisher will have taken much greater care with the Korean edition of King Sejong the Great, a translation that entails a certain rearrangement of the book&#8217;s premises. &#8220;I wanted to retell the story of his alphabet myself, in English, for anybody who had not heard it,&#8221; Menosky writes in the foreword, &#8220;which pretty much meant anybody outside Korea.&#8221; Hence the embedded explanations: &#8220;Are we not or are we not a Confucian society,&#8221; asks Sejong&#8217;s &#8216;longtime advisor, &#8220;whose stability — indeed very existence — requires fidelity to proper relationships? Ruler to Subject; Father to Son; Husband to Wife; Elder to Younger; Friend to Friend?&#8221; Hence, as well, Sejong&#8217;s running a &#8220;15th-century Korean equivalent of a think-tank,&#8221; commissioning the construction of a water clock resembling &#8220;the 15th-century Korean equivalent of a Rube Goldberg contraption,&#8221; and thinking his way through &#8220;the 15th-century Korean equivalent of splitting the atom.&#8221;
That last analogy refers to the acts of intellectual synthesis that culminate in Sejong&#8217;s creation of hangul. Menosky dramatizes the realization of this long-dreamed Korean alphabet&#8217;s form with a scene that places the king, for some time ailing and sensing mortality&#8217;s approach, in a hot bath. &#8220;A look of &#8216;Eureka&#8217; appeared on his face. The same expression Albert Einstein might have had upon deriving E=mc2.&#8221; Given the setting established and exclamation referenced, surely Archimedes would&#8217;ve made for a more suitable comparison. But the most memorable qualities of this sequence are visual: not just the steam from the water, but the elemental reverie that subsequently plays out in Sejong&#8217;s head. The novel also opens with such a vision, one of falling green leaves: &#8220;The bright sun behind the leaves refracts through the moisture beaded on their surfaces,&#8221; producing an effect &#8220;both gentle and dazzling. Like fragments of something sacred.&#8221;
And then &#8220;King Sejong — late 40s, face generous, handsome, and kind — opened his eyes.&#8221; Anyone familiar with the conventions of screenwriting will recognize language of this kind, and having spent his career so far as a television writer, Menosky must know those conventions better than most. His résumé includes no fewer than four different Star Trek series (as well as Seth MacFarlane&#8217;s Star Trek sendup The Orville), and it&#8217;s hardly a stretch to imagine a co-creator of that universe being drawn to an enlightened monarch&#8217;s efforts to advance his people in the face of both treachery at home and threats of invasion from abroad. In Menosky&#8217;s telling, Sejong&#8217;s worries include not only his own ill health, but increasingly burdensome demands by the suzerain in Beijing, the approach of Japanese pirates off the coast, and the newly reunited Mongol tribes&#8217; ambition to retake most of northeast Asia.
Even Sejong&#8217;s closest advisor Choe Malli turns against him as soon as he hears of the king&#8217;s hitherto clandestine hangul project. As Choe publicly opposes the introduction of an alphabet for the uneducated commoner, his voice speaks &#8220;for all the aristocracy; all the bureaucracy: the voice of the Confucianists who dominated this government, this culture, even this century.&#8221; Seeing in hangul &#8220;the means to vomit every trivial thought into potentially permanent existence&#8221; at best and a catalyst for popular revolt at worst, he nevertheless takes comfort in &#8220;the certainty that a few frantic scribbles of &#8216;meet me in the kitchen&#8217; and &#8216;did you hear about so-and-so?&#8217; scrawled on the equivalent of toilet paper in comparison with the immeasurable extent of knowledge and culture captured by the ideographs of the Chinese writing system was like a candle held up to the blazing sun.&#8221;
This is an unfashionable attitude in the 2020s, one Choe is ultimately made to pay for holding in opposition to Sejong&#8217;s &#8220;shockingly contemporary ideals of meritocracy.&#8221; Menosky follows the king&#8217;s official presentation of hangul, &#8220;the Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People,&#8221; with scenes of the palace help quickly taking it up and using it excitedly to pass notes to one another. Even Lady Hwang, Sejong&#8217;s most simpleminded consort, finds she can use it to express the animal noises and birdsong the king had been trying to teach her to imitate — a clever gesture on the author&#8217;s part toward the uncommon richness of onomatopoeia in written as well as spoken Korean. With these themes, and with the many scenes of tense action of sudden violence it includes, this story could probably play well today in the East or West as, say, a television miniseries.
And indeed, a television miniseries was the original intent: in interviews, Menosky has told of first writing King Sejong the Great as a four-hour teleplay. Then his Korean management company made the connection to Fitbook, who asked him to convert it into a novel — one that, at least in its English version, bears traces of Menosky&#8217;s métier. What few screenplays I&#8217;ve seen have all amounted to carefully engineered exchanges of dialogue connected by broad descriptions of images and their intended effects. Stretches of this book read similarly: &#8220;The moment the knife pierced its flesh was the same moment the golden filigreed ritual headdress was lowered on to the head of the King,&#8221; Menosky writes of preparations for a royal ceremony occurring simultaneously in different parts of the palace. &#8220;As if, synchronistically, symbolically, at this moment, in this world and the next, they were one and the same.&#8221;
In a later scene, the King locks eyes with the Queen after experiencing a hangul-related epiphany. &#8220;The look on her face of both question and answer made it seem as if she knew exactly what he had been fixated on a few seconds ago. As if they shared a single heart/mind.&#8221; That curious slashed compound, which appears throughout the text in both narration and dialogue, is a presumably a reference to the Korean maeum, which carries connotation of the concepts of both &#8220;heart&#8221; and &#8220;mind&#8221; as we know them in English. Every translator of Korean literature deals with such culturally deep-rooted terms differently, and as a reader I tend to prefer them left untranslated, explained only by their context. The same goes for the much more widely heard han, an ostensibly complex mixture of bitterness, regret, and frustration that Menosky calls &#8220;the heart/mind soul/sickness of the Korean people.&#8221;
King Sejong the Great&#8216;s uneasy inhabitation of its medium results in at least one major missed opportunity: for a book written in tribute to hangul and aimed at a non-Korean readership, it doesn&#8217;t offer much of an opportunity to learn the alphabet. A work of fiction is not a textbook, granted, and the internet has made truer than ever Sejong&#8217;s pronouncement that a smart man can master his creation in a day and a stupid man in a week. But if Helen DeWitt could integrate lessons in the ancient Greek alphabet and Japanese syllabaries so naturally and effectively into The Last Samurai, a novel set in modern-day London, surely the same could be done with the story of hangul itself. But then, DeWitt&#8217;s project is as thoroughly textual as Menosky&#8217;s — composed at a coffee shop in view of the King Sejong statue in Seoul&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/square-national-museum-modern-contemporary-arts-ambitious-review-120-years-korea/">Gwanghwamun Plaza</a> — is visual.
In fact, I remember King Sejong the Great as if it had actually been a television series: nonexistent shots replay in my head of the water clock&#8217;s mechanisms turning, the Mongol arrows flying, the king sneaking out for street food in commoner garb, those falling leaves resolving into hangul letters &#8220;cascading in monochromatic green down a computer screen.&#8221; This despite the fact that I&#8217;ve seen almost nothing of the Joseon dynasty-set dramas popular on Korean television, and of which Menosky describes himself as an avid viewer. In recent years these series have depicted Sejong with some frequency, as have films like The King&#8217;s Letters (나랏말싸미), which flopped in 2019 despite starring Song Kang-ho (Korea&#8217;s favorite actor even before <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/parasite-bong-joon-ho-comes-back-attack-homeland-wins-palme-dor/">Parasite</a>). Korean viewers&#8217; desire for the beloved king on screen hasn&#8217;t yet been sated — to say nothing of the heart/minds he may yet win abroad.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-hard/">Why Is Korean So Hard?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/agony-ecstasy-learning-korean-expressed-memes/">Korea’s Greatest Living Novelist Never Published in English: Introducing Kim Hoon and His War on Abstraction</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/square-national-museum-modern-contemporary-arts-ambitious-review-120-years-korea/">The Square: The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Ambitious Review of 120 Years in Korea</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/agony-ecstasy-learning-korean-expressed-memes/">The Agony and Ecstasy of Learning Korean, Expressed by Memes</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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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King Sejong the Great: A Star Trek Writer Pays Novelistic Tribute to the Korean Alphabet&#8217;s Creator

King Sejong the Great: A Star Trek Writer Pays Novelistic Tribute to the Korean Alphabet&#8217;s Creator

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/agony-ecstasy-learning-korean-expressed-memes/"></div>Worldwide interest in the Korean language has grown to enormous proportions — enormous, at any rate, compared to twenty years ago, when it might as well have had no proportions at all. Even I felt little desire to learn Korean back then, despite my having given precious megabytes on my Diamond Rio over to several <a href="https://youtu.be/J8-kyjf9uSg" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/J8-kyjf9uSg', 'Korean');">Korean</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/v3wjTlawmfE" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/v3wjTlawmfE', 'pop');">pop</a> songs I&#8217;d downloaded through Napster. Now, culturally phenomenized in with the West as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">&#8220;K-pop,&#8221;</a> this music and its performers constitute a hugely popular motivator to study the language — second only, perhaps, to the more verbally intensive if not necessarily more complex form of the Korean television drama. That both K-pop and K-drama have accrued international fan bases of such striking avidity owes something to the concurrent development of social media. And it is there, on what <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords/">Konglish</a> calls &#8220;SNS,&#8221; that Korean-learners express their collective frustration.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15078" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-2.jpg" alt="" width="497" height="497" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-2.jpg 497w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-2-300x300.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 497px) 100vw, 497px" />
It always starts so easily. Unlike Chinese, written modern Korean uses not logographic characters but a phonetic alphabet, a fact I&#8217;d picked up even when I was listening uncomprehendingly to Baby V.O.X. back in high school. (Until not so long ago it mixed Chinese characters with the phonetic alphabet in the manner of Japanese, and now I&#8217;ve come around to wishing it still did, but that&#8217;s a subject for another day.) King Sejong the Great, the fifteenth-century ruler celebrated for having commissioned the creation of hangul, literally &#8220;Korean writing,&#8221; is recorded has having described it as learnable by a smart man in a day and a stupid man in a week. That claim seems to be true as far as it goes, made though it was without consideration of the far thornier difficulties for those who have yet to understand the language itself — a subject since addressed by memes.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15079" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-3.jpg" alt="" width="459" height="512" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-3.jpg 459w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-korean-learning-memes-3-269x300.jpg 269w" sizes="(max-width: 459px) 100vw, 459px" />
With their easily legible found imagery and simple text, internet memes are practically tailor-made for circulation in a group like students of Korean, who apart from a debased <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/down-with-the-english-language/">&#8220;global English&#8221;</a> may not have much language in common to begin with. But surely all of them can recognize the exhilaration of first learning hangul — which, smart or stupid, one can learn alone on the internet — and the immediate deflation of trying to read &#8220;real&#8221; Korean texts thereafter, let alone to make sense of overheard Korean speech. I can certainly recall the trepidatious thrill of early forays at using words and phrases of a newly acquired language on a native speaker. Indeed I should be able to, considering I felt it most recently when I went to Ethiopian restaurant here in Seoul earlier this month, on the day that country observes Christmas, and offered a memorized holiday greeting in Amharic.
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I&#8217;ve made only the most preliminary strikes on the formidable-looking Amharic alphabet, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geʽez_script" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geʽez_script', 'or Ge&#8217;ez script');">or Ge&#8217;ez script</a>. If I go further, my experience with Korean has primed me to treat the study of the written and spoken languages as two almost wholly distinct enterprises — or rather, as distinct but interdependent ones. As the late Kevin O&#8217;Rourke <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-late-kevin-orourkes-korea-curious-memoir-land-gets-blood/">wrote in his memoir of his decades in Korea</a>, a foreigner who doesn&#8217;t read widely in Korean can&#8217;t hope to master the language. But I can also tell you that the years of book-based self-study I undertook at first did little for my ability to actually speak Korean, or more importantly my ability to understand when spoken to in Korean. With little previous language-learning experience, I assumed I could get a handle on the mechanics of Korean grammar and syntax first, then fill in my vocabulary later, a plan few teachers would presumably endorse.
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Yet this backward-sounding approach seems, in the long term, to have eased my own experience with certain of the most meme-rued elements of the Korean language. I speak, as Korean-learners will have guessed, of the markers eun/neun (은/는) and i/ga (이/가), which get attached to the end of nouns, though how and why remains shrouded in mystery to most Westerners for a time, and to some degree quite possibly forever. (In English, one is called the &#8220;subject marker&#8221; and the other the &#8220;topic marker,&#8221; names that, like many of Korean language pedagogy&#8217;s established practices, are of no help whatsoever.) Native Japanese-speakers have it easier, since they can adapt their language&#8217;s broadly similar markers wa and ga, but with yet to even start learning Japanese, I simply resigned myself to never fully understanding when to use eun/neun and when to use i/ga.
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Nevertheless, more than a dozen years later, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/five-years-seoulite-looking-back-korea-blogs-first-half-decade/">the last five of them spent in Korea</a>, I now find myself — apart from isolated misplacements of emphasis — commanding the markers credibly enough. This doubtless owes less to any theoretical knowledge than to simply having heard and read them used correctly many times (though I remind myself daily that I could be getting more linguistic input than I do). Despite being at a Korean-learning disadvantage against the Japanese, familiar as they are with markers, and the Chinese, from whose language the bulk of the Korean vocabulary derives, most of us Westerners have enough experience with European languages not to get too intimidated by the comparatively straightforward and non-memorization-intensive verb conjugation in Korean. (And I&#8217;ve heard that if you&#8217;re looking for real trouble in that arena, you start studying not Spanish or French but Finnish or Magyar.)
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More destabilizing to native speakers of such ostensibly egalitarian languages as English are Korean honorifics, the use of which, though not intellectually difficult, must be made into a reflex. Those who insist on the value of binge-watching Korean dramas as a language-learning practice are here on solid ground, turn as so many of those shows do on hierarchical family and corporate dynamics. (This makes the chattery, low-production-value &#8220;morning dramas&#8221; targeted toward stay-at-home mothers prime educational material, what with all their scenes set around the dinner table, in the boardroom, or at the hospital.) Though the levels of politeness used in everyday Korean life don&#8217;t reach the dizzying heights of, say, Japanese — where even competent speakers can be thrown by the elaborate verbal deference of a convenience-store clerk — this remains a society in which one can inadvertently deal a serious insult by failing to pronounce a single syllable.
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But you first have to distinguish one syllable from another, a task at which we all have our good days and bad. Occasionally I meet expatriates here of years&#8217; or even decades&#8217; standing who complain that they still can&#8217;t hear the difference between the plain &#8220;K&#8221; sound (ㄱ), the tense &#8220;K&#8221; sound (ㄲ) , and the aspirated &#8220;K&#8221; sound (ㅋ), the kind of fine but unignorable distinction that provides ideal meme fodder — and makes some hopeful Korean-learners quit no sooner than they&#8217;ve started. Others press on, developing feelings about the language complex enough to be expressible only by combinations of basic fonts, sitcom quotes, cartoon screen-captures, and animal photos. <a href="https://www.easy-korean.com/korean-books/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.easy-korean.com/korean-books/', 'Easy-Korean.com');">Easy-Korean.com</a> has even published Korean Grammar with Cat Memes, Korean Words with Cat Memes, and Korean Phrases with Cat Memes, a series of textbooks books that, if nothing else, demonstrates a thorough understanding of its readership.
 
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-hard/">Why Is Korean So Hard?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/learning-korean-duolingo-mercilessly-addictive-language-app/">Learning Korean with Duolingo, the Mercilessly Addictive Language App</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-battle-koreas-surprisingly-addictive-game-show-vocabulary-expressions-proper-spacing/">Our Language Battle: Korea’s Surprisingly Addictive Game Show of Vocabulary, Expressions, and Proper Spacing</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords/">The Know-How of Korean Netizens in a High-Spec New Paradigm of Synergy: or, Korea’s Dilbert-Era Loanwords</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/talk-like-busanian-master-ever-trendier-dialect-koreas-brash-second-city/">Talk Like a Busanian: How to Master the Ever-Trendier Dialect of Korea’s Brash Second City</a>
 
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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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The Agony and Ecstasy of Learning Korean, Expressed by Memes

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-provocateur-harrowing-films-kim-ki-duk-1960-2020/"></div>Kim Ki-duk died last month, and not for the first time. The coronavirus caused his death in reality, whereas his cinematic death occurred nearly a decade ago. It happened in Arirang (아리랑), a film Kim shot alone in a spartan countryside cabin to which he&#8217;d exiled himself for the previous three years. In it the filmmaker takes himself to task for his failure to maintain the productive momentum under which he&#8217;d directed internationally acclaimed pictures like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter&#8230; and Spring (봄 여름 가을 겨울 그리고 봄) and 3-Iron (빈집). He attempts to explain his retreat — an actress was nearly killed on the set of 2008&#8217;s Dream (비몽), certain collaborators defected to the mainstream — but finally resorts to annihilation. Armed with a revolver crafted using his own machine tools, he drives into Seoul and apparently executes those who betrayed him before turning the homemade gun on himself.
This portrait of the artist as a self-pitying outcast does offer Kim the chance to tell a remarkable life story. Having never reached middle school in a society known for denying futures to those without prestigious tertiary education, he worked in junkyards and factories at a young age. After serving in the Marines, he studied theology for a time before redirecting his autodidactic energies to art, going so far as to spend a few years painting on the streets of Paris. There, in his 30s, he first set foot in a cinema, and would later credit screenings of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Leos Carax&#8217;s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf with inspiring his dedication to film. Back in Korea he began writing a screenplay (having yet to attain full literacy, so the story goes) that would win an open contest held by the Korean Film Council in 1995.
Kim&#8217;s debut feature Crocodile (악어) came out the following year. Its scenes of destitution, prostitution, rape, murder, and suicide prefigured themes of his later work, and its eponymous character marks the first appearance of a recurring type: societally marginal, nearly mute, and subject to uncontrollable outbursts of violent rage. Despite not actually a being crocodile, Crocodile&#8217;s behavior is often indistinguishable from that of a dangerous wild animal. The same holds for the title figure in 2001&#8217;s Bad Guy (나쁜 남자), portrayed, like Crocodile, by Cho Jae-hyun, a frequent enough collaborator to be regarded as Kim&#8217;s onscreen avatar. This sexually frustrated small-time thug impulsively kisses a college girl he spots in a park, earning a righteous beating from a pack of soldiers drawn over by the ensuing commotion. In retaliation, he soon thereafter orchestrates her capture and effective sale to a brothel.
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This is hardly the grimmest Kim&#8217;s cinematic vision gets. Address Unknown (수취인불명) takes place in the scraggly settlements around the United States Army base in remote Pyongtaek. Its milieu includes a schoolgirl with one clouded-over eye, a young man (Kim&#8217;s real-life childhood best friend) ostracized for his half-black parentage, dealers in kidnapped local dogs destined for the stewpot, and a G.I. who can&#8217;t get through the day without popping a few tabs of LSD. I do sense some measure of humor in that odd choice of drug (serving a narrative purpose though it does in this land of precious few non-alcoholic mind-altering substances), as well as in some of the events Kim stages in this bleak setting, as when a main character ends up thrown from his motorcycle head-first into a paddy, his legs left sticking out aboveground like a grave marker.
Nearly 20 years have passed since Address Unknown and Bad Guy, of course, and twenty years of change at a Korean pace. While the absolute amount of prostitution in Seoul probably hasn&#8217;t fallen by much, the city&#8217;s most visible red-light districts have been redeveloped; no longer do girls call out to passerby from open storefronts. Though the U.S. Army remains in Pyongtaek, it&#8217;s surely also changed the place&#8217;s character over the past couple of decades, having greatly expanded its facilities there while reducing its presence in the capital. Making his pictures of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kim captured a palpably different Korea from the one in which I arrived half a decade ago, a country somehow both drab and garish at once and utterly awash with sin — a depiction with which Kim no doubt took his liberties, though fewer, I suspect, than it may seem today.
Yet in some sense I do live in Kim&#8217;s Korea, his films having done much to form my mental image of the country and its society years before I arrived. The Korean Film Council brought Kim out of obscurity with its screenwriting prize, and it also brought him to my attention with the DVDs it distributed to such foreign institutions as my university&#8217;s media library. There I happened upon 3-Iron, a film that deepened my fascination with the many ways, both subtle and unsubtle, in which the cultural image projected by Korea differed from not just that of the United States, but even more strikingly from those of the other Asian countries of my cinematic acquaintance. Its Korean title (which I could barely read at the time) means &#8220;empty house,&#8221; and it was through those empty houses that the distinctiveness of Korea so memorably presented itself to me.
3-Iron&#8216;s protagonist Tae-suk is a young laborer tasked with riding his motorcycle around Seoul and sticking restaurant delivery menus onto every front door he can approach (a fixture of daily life to which I&#8217;ve grown accustomed in my years here). Though presumably not well-compensated, the job suits his lifestyle: taking notice of which fliers fail to disappear from their doors, he breaks into each unoccupied home and lives there for a few days, helping himself to a home-cooked meal or two and washing the residents&#8217; clothes in seeming compensation. These passages of the film constitute a kind of record of the various environments in which Seoulites lived in the early 2000s, most of them modest, some fairly luxurious, and all of them new to me: never before had I seen hanok, for example, the kind of traditional wooden courtyard houses today owned almost exclusively by the well-off.
Nor was I familiar with the standard middle-class Korean home and its accoutrements: the enclosed balcony and laundry rack, the child&#8217;s &#8220;study desk&#8221; with its shelves full of workbooks, the oversized studio portrait of the family, images of a beatific, light-skinned Jesus. After one such residence Tae-suk moves up a socioeconomic rung or two, finding his way somewhere grander and more secluded, practically a mansion by comparison, its grounds outfitted (bizarrely, as I first saw it) with Italianate sculptures and a miniature driving range. This one turns out not to be empty: by the time this least talkative of Kim&#8217;s heroes comes face-to-face with Sun-hwa, the equally silent lady of the house, she&#8217;s been watching him make himself at home for some time. With her black eye and split lip — presumably inflicted by her volatile, polo-shirted husband — she resembles a ghost, and indeed may be one.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15024" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-kim-ki-duk-3.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-kim-ki-duk-3.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-kim-ki-duk-3-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kb-kim-ki-duk-3-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Kim acknowledged an interpretation of 3-Iron that casts Sun-hwa as a figment of Tae-suk&#8217;s imagination, as well as one that casts Tae-suk as a figment of Sun-hwa&#8217;s imagination. Either way, or neither, Tae-suk masters a discipline Kim called &#8220;ghost practice,&#8221; which allows him to escape his eventual imprisonment and re-enter Sun-hwa&#8217;s daily life while remaining entirely unseen by her husband. The movie won Kim the Venice Film Festival&#8217;s Silver Lion for Best Direction in 2004, a period in which the director departed from his initial realism, grotesque and occasionally comical through it was, for for more conceptual scenarios in which some viewers saw a spiritual dimension. This was especially true of European viewers, who earlier that same year had enthusiastically received Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter&#8230; and Spring, the spare story of a Buddhist monk and his young disciple resident in a small temple floating in the middle of a lake.
Brazenly placid in comparison to Kim&#8217;s previous films (as well as many of his later ones), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter&#8230; and Spring includes no prostitutes, drug use, or dog stew. It does manage to incorporate suicide, albeit ritual suicide, as well as sex and murder — though unlike its immediate predecessor The Coast Guard (해안선), not simultaneously. Watched in the context of Kim&#8217;s entire filmography, which I&#8217;ve been revisiting since his death, it plays in its relative gentleness almost like an atonement for 2000&#8217;s The Isle (섬), which is also set amid otherworldly floating buildings. In that film Kim creates another character of few words and many bestial acts: a woman, unusually, the owner of a fishing resort who delivers working girls to her customers but makes intimate demands of her own on a criminal who comes to hide out from the law.
The Isle makes for viewing as harrowing today as it seems to have been in its early screenings, which produced reports of fainting and vomiting in the audiences. Whether those reactions were provoked by the scenes of real violence (the live skinning of a frog, for example) or simulated violence (more than one attempted suicide by fish hook) I&#8217;m not sure, but the picture in any case did more than its part to forge an association between Korean cinema and the idea of &#8220;extreme Asia&#8221; abroad in those days. Looking back, one might wonder about the possibility of Kim&#8217;s having actively played into Western notions of east Asian film, despite his studied self-presentation as an aesthetic and intellectual outsider. From the appearance of Buddhistic rigor and serenity he moved on to a series of pictures dealing with societal alienation, often involving sexual relationships of a strange or brutal nature.
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Up until the crisis of confidence induced by Dream, the last of those pictures, Kim arguably remained the face of Korean cinema in the West. Despite the prizes and acclaim lavished on his films at foreign festivals, however, he never found a wide audience in his homeland. The irony was not lost on him: in Arirang he mentions being rewarded by the state for ostensibly representing Korea, but &#8220;if you look closely at my films,&#8221; he adds in a considerable understatement, &#8220;there could be things that embarrass the country.&#8221; Nevertheless, he also expresses a desire to make the first Korean picture to win a grand prize at a major film festival (&#8220;I&#8217;m human, after all&#8221;) which he would do with the following year with Pietà (피에타), a religiously charged psychosexual nightmare — and for Kim, a cinematic rebirth — that took the Golden Lion at Venice.
European film festivals know an auteur when they see one. Venice has also proven a friendly venue for the films of Hong Sangsoo, another Korean filmmaker more popular abroad than at home. So have Cannes and Berlin, where Hong won the Silver Bear for Best Director for last year&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">The Woman Who Ran</a>. Bong Joon-ho got the Palme d&#8217;Or for <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/parasite-bong-joon-ho-comes-back-attack-homeland-wins-palme-dor/">Parasite</a>, of course, muted though that news was by the picture&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">subsequent dominance of the Academy Awards</a>. This marks a definite changing of the guard; the era when the likes of Kim Ki-duk could stand for Korea in world film culture has well and truly come to an end. A country could do worse than to produce a director like Bong, possessed as he is of the rare combination of crowd-pleasing instincts and superhuman attention to detail. But that&#8217;s something quite different than an obsessive, near-savage drive to create.
Pietà would be Kim&#8217;s final victory as a filmmaker. Apparently seeing no option but to exercise his proven tendencies more intensely, he followed it up with the dialogue-free Moebius (뫼비우스), which features an incestuous castration scene daring even by the standards of incestuous castration scenes. The film played a part in his eventual undoing, though not because of its content: some time later, an actress involved early in its shooting publicly claimed that Kim physically struck her and pressured her into an unplanned sex scene. These and other accusations made during what&#8217;s been called <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/metoo-ing-ko-un-koreas-best-hope-nobel-prize/">&#8220;Korea&#8217;s #MeToo moment&#8221;</a> brought Kim (as well as his &#8220;persona&#8221; Cho Jae-hyun) low, though cinephiles had been remarking for several years on his apparent artistic decline. His last few films mostly failed even to gain wide distribution — a mercy, perhaps, given their thematic heavy-handedness and often shockingly low production values.
And yet. &#8220;My dream is to live in various countries and make films there,&#8221; Kim declares in Arirang, and whatever the ignominies of his late period, it saw him beginning to live that dream. Having returned to Paris for two different shoots, he made films in Japan and Kazakhstan in the years before he died in Latvia, not an entirely unsuitable resting place for an artist respected primarily in Europe. And despite the recent scramble to strip him of whatever &#8220;genius&#8221; status he had — the declarations of <a href="https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1080553563271585792" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1080553563271585792', '&#8220;I never cared for his work&#8221;');">&#8220;I never cared for his work&#8221;</a>  begun anew with his obituaries — he was indeed an artist, at least to those of us who don&#8217;t reject art by taking offense at its subject matter or the conduct of its creators. Among those who do, few must be sorry to see Kim Ki-duk gone, but they can never wish his films away.
 
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977)</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-301-302-park-chul-soos-stylish-film-food-sex-horrors/">Revisiting 301, 302, Park Chul-soo’s Stylish Film About Food, Sex, and Other Horrors</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/metoo-ing-ko-un-koreas-best-hope-nobel-prize/">The #MeToo-ing of Ko Un, Korea’s Best Hope for a Nobel Prize</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">The Woman Who Ran: The Cinematic-Romantic Collaboration of Hong Sangsoo and Kim Min-Hee Evolves</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>
 
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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-provocateur-harrowing-films-kim-ki-duk-1960-2020/"></div>

Korean Provocateur: the Harrowing Films of Kim Ki-duk (1960-2020)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/"></div>Last month my girlfriend and I visited Mokpo, a somewhat down-at-the-heels port town on Korea&#8217;s southwest coast, hoping to have a look at its Japanese colonial architecture and a taste of its tangtangi, a local specialty involving raw beef and still-twitching squid. Though Mokpo lacks Seoul&#8217;s density of <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/society-screens-korea-world-envisioned-nam-june-paik/">screens</a>, it has just enough of them to make us notice the same music video playing all over the city — and that its hot pink-suited dancers were cavorting through the very places we&#8217;d put on our itinerary. The production was, of course, part of a campaign to promote Korean tourism; more surprisingly, it had racked up well over 30 million views on YouTube since that campaign launched last summer. Driving the phenomenon was less the video itself, however picturesque and amusing its imagery, than the music, the work of an overnight sensation called <a href="https://leenalchi.bandcamp.com/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://leenalchi.bandcamp.com/', 'Leenalchi');">Leenalchi</a> (이날치).
Like all overnight sensations, Leenalchi&#8217;s roots run deeper than they appear to; this holds true even in the notoriously capricious popular culture of 21st-century Korea. Some run all the way to 17th-century Korea, where the traditional form of musical storytelling known as pansori has its origins. Though an unlikely source of inspiration for dance music popularized through YouTube, pansori has enjoyed its moments of modern-day popularity, the most notable having occurred after Im Kwon-taek&#8217;s <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seopyeonje-surprise-art-house-megahit-showed-korea-forgotten-culture/">Seopyeonje</a> (서편제) in 1993. That film takes its title from a regional form of pansori; Leenalchi, in turn, take their name from 19th-century pansori master credited with developing it, Lee Nal-chi. Most of the band&#8217;s members have studied under pansori masters themselves, but their music has none of the rigorous purism of government-funded gugak, or &#8220;national music&#8221;: they&#8217;re pop artists first, creators of songs to be enjoyed in the moment.
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This, at any rate, is the line taken by Jang Young-gyu, one of Leenalchi&#8217;s masterminds. Long established as a film composer, Jang&#8217;s body of work includes the score for Na Hong-jin&#8217;s The Wailing (곡성), which in 2016 unsettled audiences the world over by repurposing Korean shamanism into the material for modern-day horror. He also played bass in Ssingssing, a cross-dressing &#8220;gugak fuion&#8221; rock band whose style also partook from shamanistic tradition. This seemingly niche act turned out to have global appeal: it was after Ssingssing receiving a hugely positive response to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLRxO9AmNNo" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLRxO9AmNNo', 'a 2017 show for NPR&#8217;s Tiny Desk Concert series');">a 2017 show for NPR&#8217;s Tiny Desk Concert series</a>, of all venues, that Jang came to understand the potential they&#8217;d tapped. The next year he and Ssingssing drummer Lee Cheol-hee played in Dragon King, a pansori-based musical production that put them alongside the skilled vocalists who would become their bandmates in Leenalchi.
The known pansori canon consists of only five stories: Simcheongga, Heungbuga, Jeokbyeokga, Chunhyangga, Sugungga, the last of which provides the title and lyrics for Leenalchi&#8217;s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWhehPKFbDg" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWhehPKFbDg', 'debut album');">debut album</a> (수궁가), released last spring. With its all-animal cast, Sugungga makes for a more rollicking narrative than the others, and Leenalchi&#8217;s songs set passages from it — sung with the strength and control for which Western pansori viewers can usually find no better adjective than &#8220;operatic&#8221; — to music that wouldn&#8217;t have sounded wholly out of place in a Western disco in the mid-1970s. Performed by only one singer and one drummer, genuine pansori uses minimal instrumentation, to put it mildly. Leenalchi honor this in the sense that their music is driven by rhythm and voice with no involvement of specifically rock-associated instruments like the electric guitar, though their sound&#8217;s underlying distinctiveness owes much to the presence of dual bassists.
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Pansori singing has been called an artistic expression of han, a kind of psychic pain visited on the individual by the history of the nation. I&#8217;ve long since grown weary of trying to describe han in any great detail, but often when it comes up, so does another supposedly Korean emotion: the spontaneous expression of collective joy known as heung. This concept is invoked in the appreciation of Leenalchi&#8217;s music, and as one explanation of why it has so rapidly found a such an enthusiastic listenership. Beset by a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reading-albert-camus-plague-time-coronavirus/">pandemic</a> in response to which governments have severely restricted social interaction, humanity this year has needed nothing so much — apart from a vaccine — as a shot of heung. So, too, went the thinking of the Korea Tourism Organization, whose latest campaign has carried out its declared mission to &#8220;cheer up the world&#8221; to a soundtrack by Leenalchi.
This past summer the KTO commenced their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Lb93R1nd7ctttoHCmCXxEZcGy_KUYpY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Lb93R1nd7ctttoHCmCXxEZcGy_KUYpY', '&#8220;Feel the Rhythm of Korea&#8221; series');">&#8220;Feel the Rhythm of Korea&#8221; series</a> with three music videos: one shot in <a href="https://youtu.be/3P1CnWI62Ik" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/3P1CnWI62Ik', 'Seoul');">Seoul</a>; one in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLD8oWRmlAE" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLD8oWRmlAE', 'Busan');">Busan</a>, the second city down on the southeastern cost; and one in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ_lCmB2hfk" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ_lCmB2hfk', 'Jeonju');">Jeonju</a>, a modestly sized city known for its traditional hanok houses. The second wave, released in the fall, show off the less internationally known towns of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CitIMlaa8To" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CitIMlaa8To', 'Mokpo');">Mokpo</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2GeUF_xm1Y" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2GeUF_xm1Y', 'Andong');">Andong</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdzvyvGcOYQ" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdzvyvGcOYQ', 'Gangneung');">Gangneung</a> (real capital though it was, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/letter-gangneung-real-capital-2018-winter-olympics/">as I wrote here on the Korea Blog</a>, of the 2018 Winter Olympics). In each video, flamboyantly attired members of the Ambiguous Dance Company dance to a different Leenalchi song in a series of popular tourist spots: Busan&#8217;s Gwangalli Beach, Jeonju&#8217;s Hanok Village, Andong&#8217;s Byeongsanseowon Confucian Academy. The series has proven popular enough to inspire a variety of derivative works, including locally produced &#8220;parodies&#8221; (which are really more like straightforward homages) in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WvsCxWLLU" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WvsCxWLLU', 'Gangneung');">Gangneung</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpAg39Z0JUo" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpAg39Z0JUo', 'Mokpo');">Mokpo</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBufp9CnxPg" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBufp9CnxPg', 'Jeonju');">Jeonju</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxAkroYnSA" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxAkroYnSA', 'Gwangju');">Gwangju</a>, and elsewhere.
But it is the original Seoul video, with its moves busted at the presidential Blue House, the Samsung Museum of Art, and Zaha Hadid&#8217;s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/15/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-from-alien-spaceship-to-discount-socks" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/15/an-urbanists-tour-of-south-korea-from-alien-spaceship-to-discount-socks', 'Dongdaemun Design Plaza');">Dongdaemun Design Plaza</a>, that has gone the most viral of all. The relative recognizability of the capital must have something to do with this, but so must the catchiness of the song: &#8220;범 내려온다,&#8221; or &#8220;The Tiger Is Coming,&#8221; which first wormed its way into many an ear through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmTRaSg2fTQ" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmTRaSg2fTQ', 'a video performance with the Ambiguous Dance Company');">a video performance with the Ambiguous Dance Company</a> in the fall of last year. No other work is more responsible for Leenalchi&#8217;s fame, and with fame comes endorsement opportunities, extended not just by tourism boards but major conglomerates. Hence the band&#8217;s advertisement last month for Samsung&#8217;s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlQLhYE9WQY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlQLhYE9WQY', 'Galaxy Z Flip 5G X');">Galaxy Z Flip 5G X</a>, in which the hook of their signature song becomes &#8220;the phone is coming&#8221; — a groaner of a pun in Korean.
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14999" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kb-lee-nalchi-2.png" alt="" width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kb-lee-nalchi-2.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kb-lee-nalchi-2-300x169.png 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kb-lee-nalchi-2-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
There has also been smaller-scale work, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxJoRsK1M6o" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxJoRsK1M6o', 'traffic-safety announcements for the Busan Police Department');">traffic-safety announcements for the Busan Police Department</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b51fE9DaBPw" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b51fE9DaBPw', 'psychedelic spots for the chain Pizza Alvolo');">psychedelic spots for the chain Pizza Alvolo</a>. You could take this as a sad commentary on the circumstances of even successful musicians and dancers in 2020, robbed by the coronavirus of their ability to perform live. (A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTjGlotBz4o" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTjGlotBz4o', 'recent SBS special');">recent SBS special</a> showed Leenalchi and the Ambiguous Dance Company playing a socially distanced, somewhat heung-impaired outdoor show, and being glad to do it.) But in Korea, endorsing cellphones and pizza isn&#8217;t a celebrity&#8217;s last resort; on the contrary, only appearing in commercials proves definitively that a performer has &#8220;made it.&#8221; Even Psy, Mr. &#8220;Gangnam Style&#8221; himself, put in time hawking <a href="https://youtu.be/y001QGz-AUs" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/y001QGz-AUs', 'instant ramen');">instant ramen</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi1j2K6LYxc" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi1j2K6LYxc', 'packaged dumplings');">packaged dumplings</a>, and <a href="https://youtu.be/tn58qpFkruc" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/tn58qpFkruc', 'printer paper');">printer paper</a> — to say nothing of BTS, the boy band-turned-global-phenomenon who do so many commercials that their fans collect them into <a href="https://youtu.be/2EYIu-caZFQ" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/2EYIu-caZFQ', 'yearly compilations');">yearly compilations</a>.
These acts have demonstrated that, despite the considerable successes abroad of its <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coronavirus-breaks-itaewon-gays-foreigners-seoul-neighborhood-celebrated-hit-netflix-drama/">television dramas</a> and <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">films</a>, nothing in Korean popular culture travels like its music, especially in video form. &#8220;Official Korea,&#8221; as I call it, has come a long way in using this knowledge over the past couple of years. Dedicated readers of the Korea Blog will remember the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/travelers-video-seoul-astonishes-official-promotion-korea-embarrasses/">KTO&#8217;s previous attempt to enlist pop-star talent</a> into the service of growing Korea&#8217;s tourism industry, whose result had members of the boy band EXO asking, in poorly dubbed voices, whether the viewers had ever been to a restaurant, &#8220;taken a rest,&#8221; or slept. This collaboration with Leenalchi and the Ambiguous Dance Company has proven rather more compelling — ironically, at a uniquely inopportune time for international travel, now that the coronavirus has made domestic tourists of us all. But then, if it hadn&#8217;t, when would I have made it to Mokpo?
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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="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seopyeonje-surprise-art-house-megahit-showed-korea-forgotten-culture/">Seopyeonje: How a Surprise Art-House Megahit Showed Korea its Own Forgotten Culture</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/learned-stop-worrying-love-seoul-u/">How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love I.Seoul.U</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">Why K-Pop is the Same as Classic Rock</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/letter-gangneung-real-capital-2018-winter-olympics/">Letter from Gangneung, the Real Capital of the 2018 Winter Olympics</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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/"></div>

Pansori at the Disco: Leenalchi, the New-Old Korean Musical Phenomenon of 2020, Gets Frustrated Tourists Dancing

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/five-years-seoulite-looking-back-korea-blogs-first-half-decade/"></div>I haven&#8217;t lived in Korea long — just long enough to forget that I live in Korea. This presents something of a professional danger, given the supposed subject of so much of my work. But like writing about Los Angeles when I lived there, writing about Korea guarantees me frequent reminders that I do indeed live here. This, in part, inspired me to pitch the idea of a Korea Blog to the LARB just before <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/left-los-angeles-seoul/">making the move</a> five years ago: having regularly to consider different topics pertaining to Korea would, in theory, prevent me from retreating into an ersatz West — stocked with Western media, Western food, Western languages, Western friends — of the kind known to entrap Westerners here. It would also record a moment in Korean life, culture, and current events as perceived by one foreigner (and <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/stefano-young/">occasionally</a> <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/charles-montgomery/">others</a>) with a persistent interest in the place.
As any workaday foreign correspondent would confirm, these past five years constitute a particularly interesting time to have been in Korea. When I arrived, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/protest-korean-style/">President Park Geun-hye was being protested</a>, but not at the scale — nor for the reasons — <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/anti-trump-protests-anti-park-protests-koreanization-american-politics/">that would ultimately see her deposed</a>. The sinking of the M.V. Sewol in the spring of 2014 remained bitterly fresh in public memory, not least due to the release of documentaries like <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/america-school-shootings-korea-sinking-ships/">Cruel State</a> (나쁜 나라); the feature <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/birthday-first-tearjerker-ferry-disaster-killed-250-high-school-students/">Birthday</a> (생일) would come later. And though Korean cinema already commanded a not inconsiderable fan base around the world, nobody could have imagined the unprecedented breakthrough it would make just a few years later, when Bong Joon-ho&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/parasite-bong-joon-ho-comes-back-attack-homeland-wins-palme-dor/">Parasite</a> (기생층) would win the Palme d&#8217;Or and then <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">four Academy Awards</a>, Best Picture included.
Then again, I&#8217;d can&#8217;t say it wouldn&#8217;t have pleased me had the work of Lee Chang-dong, whose <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/burning-acclaimed-korean-auteurs-explosive-haruki-murakami-adapting-indictment-inequality/">Burning</a> (버닝) also contended at Cannes, enjoyed that victory; or even more so, that of Hong Sangsoo. Having put out eight pictures in the time I&#8217;ve been living in Korea, the latest being this year&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">The Woman Who Ran</a> (도망친 여자), Hong offers me one way of marking my time here, but he also did more than his part to inspire me to dig into Korean cinema, and consequently the Korean language, in the first place. And yes, even after five years of life in Korea and more than a dozen years of study, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-hard/">Korean is still hard</a>. It&#8217;s actually become harder, in that every day here reveals more of my own linguistic ignorance — which, to my mind, is half the fun of expatriation.
Nothing I&#8217;ve experienced here permits me to countenance the idea of coming without the language. Not that it hasn&#8217;t been done: when first I visited Korea, my only culture shock came upon realizing how many long-term Western residents haven&#8217;t bothered to learn it. I&#8217;ve been thinking through the reasons for that ever since, but all I know for sure is that <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-english-fever-english-cancer/">the prevalence of English in Korea</a> isn&#8217;t one of them. Luckily for any foreigner wanting to live here, starting on the Korean language has become easier than ever. The popular language-learning app Duolingo, for instance, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/learning-korean-duolingo-mercilessly-addictive-language-app/">added a Korean course</a> in 2017, and the enormous amount of Korean media online offers a wealth of material for reading and listening practice. Despite its questionable English obsession, Korea doesn&#8217;t ignore its own language, as institutions like KBS&#8217; quiz show <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-battle-koreas-surprisingly-addictive-game-show-vocabulary-expressions-proper-spacing/">Our Language Battle</a> (우리말 겨루기) attest.
Few incentives to learn Korean could be as compelling as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/first-comprehensive-introduction-k-lit-past-present-youngmin-kwon-bruce-fultons-korean-literature/">its literature</a>, which in translation has also come to prominence over the past half-decade as never before. The main event has doubtlessly been the 2016 Man Booker International Prize going to Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian (채식주의자), and the book&#8217;s English translator <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-translation/">Deborah Smith</a>. But more notable literary-cultural developments have followed, such as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-government-turned-bestselling-feminist-novel-controversial-pr-campaign/">the controversy over Cho Nam-joo&#8217;s everywoman novel Kim Ji-young Born 1982</a> (82년생 김지영), published this year in <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/book-jiyoung-explosively-controversial-korean-feminist-novel-comes-english/">Jamie Chang&#8217;s English translation</a>, as well as the increasing, and by readers like me appreciated, prominence of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/clarice-lispector-reborn-david-lynchs-seoul-introduction-outsider-novelist-essayist-bae-suah/">outsider novelist-essayist Bae Suah</a> (also translated most often by Smith). <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-greatest-living-novelist-never-published-english-introducing-kim-hoon-war-abstraction/">Kim Hoon</a>, alas, remains virtually unpublished in English translation, though his body of work does thus constitute sufficient reason to learn Korean by itself.
Whatever its artistic value, none of this, of course, has done as much to shore up Korea&#8217;s &#8220;soft power&#8221; — especially across the rest of Asia — as its <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">pop music</a> and television dramas. These massively popular cultural forms have never sustained my interest, admittedly, though I do appreciate <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/listen-seoul-1980s-real-imagined-streaming-mixes-korean-city-pop/">K-pop from the decades before it was K-pop</a>. And I often wonder whether I shouldn&#8217;t be making more of an effort to seek out the dramas that have something to say, even if inadvertently, about Korean society. Itaewon Class (이태원 클라쓰), a hit this year for Netflix and local network JTBC, was one such series, and after its run it stayed relevant due to a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coronavirus-breaks-itaewon-gays-foreigners-seoul-neighborhood-celebrated-hit-netflix-drama/">coronavirus outbreak</a> in the titular Seoul neighborhood it celebrates — another episode of the ongoing pandemic that sent me, as well as more than a few Koreans, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reading-albert-camus-plague-time-coronavirus/">back to Camus</a>.
Early this year, Korea looked to the world like a very bad place indeed to be, second only to COVID-19-originating Wuhan. But since the spring, when the virus began making serious inroads into the United States, life here has by comparison felt practically uninterrupted. In recent weeks, however, spiking coronavirus cases across the Seoul metropolitan area have prompted the imposition of more severe of social-distancing restrictions, felt nowhere more acutely than in its drinking establishments. Seoul hasn&#8217;t been historically known for its café culture, but <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coffee-life-korea/">the latter&#8217;s hyperabundant manifestation in the 21st-century city</a> is one of the biggest draws for my MacBook-toting like. Now, with the capital region&#8217;s countless many coffee shops serving only take-out orders into the foreseeable future, I&#8217;ve had to find other places to tote it. And those out for an evening drink had better imbibe all they can by the mandated closing hour of nine o&#8217;clock.
This has only gone on for a few weeks, but the longer it continues, the more Seoulites will wonder whether their favorite hangouts will make it to 2021. Not that such thoughts are unique to this historical moment: businesses appear in and vanish from this city with such frequency and suddenness that it no longer surprises me to arrive at a place where I&#8217;d been a regular only to find a hollow storefront. Without exception, every coffee shop I frequented in my first year here has closed. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/stuffed-animals-dust-masks-pet-food-sex-toys-side-side-koreas-new-shopping-paradigm/">Pierrot Shopping</a>, Korea&#8217;s &#8220;New Shopping Paradigm,&#8221; has come and gone, and the Haruki Murakami-themed <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/haruki-murakami-books-korean-ever-will-english/">Peter Cat</a> has moved to another neighborhood (from an original location that was, alas, practically next-door to my home). But the rapid and constant changes in Seoul have been remarked upon often enough to have long since passed into the realm of cliché, right alongside &#8220;Korea, land of contrasts.&#8221;
The better class of English-language writing on Korea, which I&#8217;ve tried to feature here whenever possible, doesn&#8217;t traffic in such shopworn observations. As unrecognizable as the surface of Korea today would be to 19th-century Western travelers like <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/asian-adventures-percival-lowell-famed-astronomer-early-writer-korea/">Percival Lowell</a> and <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/isabella-bird-bishop-pioneering-female-traveler-prototypical-westerner-korea/">Isabella Bird Bishop</a>, their descriptions still resonate on some with my experiences here. To Westerners now living in and writing about Korea (or anywhere in Asia), there is value in all accounts by those who have come before, whether they were <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lost-seoul-new-york-poets-memoir-marrying-transforming-korea/">visiting family</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/simon-winchesters-korea-30-years-classic-travelogue-cultural-offense/">walking the length of the country</a>, journeying through its <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/proper-travel-island-hopping-englishman-michael-gibbs-korean-odyssey/">islands</a> and <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/eating-korea-anthony-bourdain-approved-search-culinary-soul-ever-changing-country/">eateries</a>, or working as an <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/hagwon-horror-stories-kevin-m-mahers-english-teaching-expat-novel-couches-korea/">after-school academy English teacher</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/dropping-america-bomb-hyundai-frank-ahrenss-life-korea-memoir-seoul-man/">conglomerate car-company PR man</a>, or <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-late-kevin-orourkes-korea-curious-memoir-land-gets-blood/">Catholic priest</a>.  (To Spanish-language readers I recommend novelist Andrés Felipe Solano&#8217;s <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=5036" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=5036', 'Corea: apuntes desde la cuerda floja');">Corea: apuntes desde la cuerda floja</a>.) Any attempt to navigate a foreign society, sufficiently well-recorded, conveys the nature of that society in a way few other subjects do.
All that changes in Korea throws into contrast all that refuses to change. Take the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reach-sky/">College Scholastic Ability Test</a>, or &#8220;Suneung&#8221;: though delayed a few weeks, this once-per-year, much more dire equivalent of the SAT was held last Thursday — even, per government promise, for students currently hospitalized. Nor has the pandemic slowed the advance of the Christmas season, signs of which always remind me that I&#8217;ve been Korea Blogging for another year. Whatever festivities Seoul can manage as 2020 ends will be more than welcome, as will the festive beverages attending them. As anyone living in a language not their own can tell you, a slightly altered state of mind does wonders for your speaking proficiency. And as long-term expatriates know, only after a few drinks do you once again seriously consider what you&#8217;re doing here and why — as well as what you intend to do here next.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/left-los-angeles-seoul/">Why I Left Los Angeles for Seoul</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/plastic-surgery-pressure-succeed-presidential-turmoil-selections-larb-korea-blogs-first-year/">Plastic Surgery, Pressure to Succeed, and Presidential Turmoil: Selections from the LARB Korea Blog’s First Year</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korea-world-world-korea-selections-larb-korea-blogs-second-year/">Korea in the World and the World in Korea: Selections from the LARB Korea Blog’s Second Year</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-late-kevin-orourkes-korea-curious-memoir-land-gets-blood/">Revisiting the Late Kevin O’Rourke’s My Korea, a Curious Memoir of a Land that Gets in the Blood</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/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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Five Years a Seoulite: Looking Back at the Korea Blog&#8217;s First Half-Decade

Lingo

Babel

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 web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.

Colin Marshall

What Do They Know of English, Who Only English Know? On Gaston Dorren’s “Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages” and “Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

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

Cultural Studies

London Review of Books: An Incomplete History

Something New: The “LRB” Turns 40

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

How Words Make Things Happen

From the Age of Persuasion to the Age of Offense

Education

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

The Useless French Language and Why We Learn It

Will We Ever Talk Pretty?: David Sedaris and the American Struggle with Foreign Languages

The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Forget English!

Down with the English Language!

Absolutely on Music

Music Meets Writing: On Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

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

Fiction

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

Ways of Seeing Japan: Roland Barthes’s Tokyo, 50 Years Later

Ametora

How Japan Invented Los Angeles — and Reinvented American Style

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

History

The Inland Sea

In Search of the “Real” Japan

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at&nbsp;The New Yorker&nbsp;and the author of two collections of poems, Honey and Junk and The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard. Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture, a work of nonfiction, came out in 2013. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and she has twice won the James Beard Foundation Award for journalism. She lives in Venice, California.&nbsp;

Dana Goodyear

Bonnie McFarlane, is a Canadian-American stand-up comedian, writer, and co-host of the podcast My Wife Hates Me. Her memoir is called You're Better Than Me, published by ECCO/Anthony Bourdain Books in 2016.

Bonnie McFarlane

Andy Bowers, the creator and executive producer of Slate podcasts, is the co-founder and chief content officer of Panoply.

Andy Bowers

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.

Seth Greenland

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a longtime journalist who has been on staff at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.