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

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

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

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

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

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

kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-3

kb-under-the-sky-of-seoul-2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stroll through the Real Cities of Korea from Anywhere in the World with YouTube’s Seoul Walker

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/"></div>This is the second of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The first, on her collection I&#8217;m Waiting for You and Other Stories, is <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">here</a>.
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&#8220;Speculative fiction&#8221; is in some quarters used as little more than a euphemistic label for science fiction, by readers hoping to preempt association with a stigmatized genre. But interpreted literally, the term covers a vast imaginative field encompassing horror stories, fantasy sagas, alternate history, and much else besides. Many writers specialize in one or two such subcategories of speculative fiction; few if any could be said to write speculative fiction itself, with the width of narrative and intellectual range that would demand. But if any current writer of my acquaintance does approach that ideal, it&#8217;s Kim Bo-young, whose collection I&#8217;m Waiting for You and Other Stories <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">I covered last time here on the Korea Blog</a>. That book, published in April by HarperVoyager, was her very first in English translation. And just last month Los Angeles&#8217; Kaya Press put out another, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories.
&#8220;If we see a person in the distance and they seem to have breasts, we hastily assume that they must be a woman,&#8221; writes Kim in her introduction to the new collection. &#8220;Science seems to occupy a similar position in SF.&#8221; Though breasts may not in themselves make someone a woman, Kim — a woman — notes that her own body &#8220;came equipped with a set. I didn’t, for example, decide one day to install a pair myself. Similarly, many of the stories I’ve written came into being without me consciously trying to turn them into SF.&#8221; Still, they&#8217;ve been received and even acclaimed as such, though some of them include nothing that the casual reader of the genre would call science — or in any case, not the kind of science that manifests in pieces of advanced future technology like the spaceships flown in I&#8217;m Waiting for You.
The variety of science most consistently underlying On the Origin of Species is, unsurprisingly, biology, and evolutionary biology in particular. Several of its stories feature a humankind evolved, devolved, or obliterated only to evolve all over again. In &#8220;An Evolution Myth,&#8221; a fifteenth-century Korean crown prince undergoes a dramatic biological transformation by himself: as he flees the kingdom when a hostile cousin ascends to the throne, a process kicks in that aids his survival in isolated exile by granting him various animalistic features. Eventually the prince becomes a kind of all-powerful dragon, a type of creature that dominates the devastated future Seoul of the following tale, &#8220;Last of the Wolves.&#8221; Human beings still exist there, though they&#8217;ve taken on lupine characteristics and mostly been domesticated by dragon masters; the few who remain untamed squat in the &#8220;ancestral ruins&#8221; of Dongdaemun Station and forage for soybeans in the overgrown Gwanghwamun Square.
If you know Seoul as it is today, you know those are two well-trafficked places in the city, and if you don&#8217;t, the story&#8217;s footnotes do their bit to fill you in. Gwanghwamun Square, as one of them explains (at least to readers who missed <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/square-national-museum-modern-contemporary-arts-ambitious-review-120-years-korea/">my piece on The Square</a> at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), is &#8220;one of Seoul’s most famous public spaces and the site of a surviving gate to Gyeongbokgung, the main royal palace of the Joseon Dynasty.&#8221; The footnotes don&#8217;t offer the information that the period of the Joseon Dynasty lasted nearly five centuries, from 1392 until 1897 — containing the life of that long-suffering prince-turned-dragon —  and nor should they, since it would violate the text&#8217;s respectful assumption of a certain amount of familiarity on the reader&#8217;s part with Korea, if not with every detail of Korea&#8217;s history and mythology.
Still, those who live here will find it at least a little funny to see something as common as ddeokppokki spelled out. &#8220;Spicy rice cakes sold by street vendors or at cheap restaurants,&#8221; says the footnote. &#8220;A popular snack among school-age Koreans.&#8221; That definition comes embedded in &#8220;Between Zero and One,&#8221; which has nothing to do with biology but much to do time travel, a more conventional sci-fi subject and one not often satisfyingly handled. But as in the title story of I&#8217;m Waiting for You, Kim refrains from getting as fantastical with it as so many writers fatally have, and again she anchors the concept in everyday, even mundane Korean reality. The setting is populated by nagging, academics-obsessed, socially competitive moms and their exhausted, cramming-addled children, some of whom protest against &#8220;<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reach-sky/">College Entrance Exam</a>-Centered Education&#8221; — in extreme cases, by taking their own lives.
In discussing I&#8217;m Waiting for You, I mentioned that modern South Koreans have experienced a kind of time travel, so rapidly and dramatically has their homeland changed compared to other developed countries over the past half-century. Here Kim offers another explanation for the consequent generation gaps. &#8220;I don’t want to go to school,&#8221; complains the story&#8217;s central teenager Soo-ae. &#8220;The teachers are like people from another time.&#8221; But she means it literally: &#8220;Some took refuge here during the Korean War. They still despise communism and North Korea, even though we reunified ages ago. Some teachers even came from the colonial era or from the Joseon era.&#8221; Soo-ae&#8217;s mother pushes her to <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-english-fever-english-cancer/">study English</a> even though &#8220;computerized translation today covers one hundred and sixty languages in real time,&#8221; and what&#8217;s more, &#8220;it’s already been a long time since the decline of the United States and the importance of its language.&#8221;
Clearly the US, whose bankruptcy and dissolution is similarly referenced as a historical detail in &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t have a place in Kim&#8217;s futures. But then, in the title story of On the Origin of Species, the longest and most ambitious in the book, human civilization itself has long since collapsed. The cause seems to have been a change in the climate: as manmade factories &#8220;pumped out more and more carbon dioxide, the earth’s temperature began to rise, resulting in an extreme greenhouse effect. At some point, this process must have crossed a certain threshold beyond which nothing could be done to reverse the trend.&#8221; After the extinction of nearly all living things, this still-thickening industrial cloud &#8220;blocked the sunlight and lowered the earth’s temperature back down to its current state. Any organisms that had survived to that point perished in this latest temperature fluctuation.&#8221;
In this frozen desert of a world, only robots have survived. In fact they&#8217;ve thrived, having not just taken over the factories but established cities, universities, and even their own versions of history, philosophy, and religion. It is within this self-sustaining mechanical-and-digital society that one robot, an undergraduate student, posits a theory of organic life. Though dismissed at the time as a crackpot notion, the possibility of entities that can grow and decompose as if by themselves — without the aid of a factory, somehow — gradually finds its adherents among robotkind. Over the subsequent decades, or perhaps centuries or millennia, their clandestine research and experimentation makes its complicated and dangerous way to reproducing organic life, first simply and then in the diversity of forms in which we know it today. For robots, who have existential reason to fear even drops of water, this is an alarming prospect indeed.
For those robots who pursue the development of so-called &#8220;organic biology&#8221; all the way, however, the result is quasi-religious ecstasy. That their newly evolved Homo sapiens inspires them to blind devotion, even worship, stands to a kind of reason: what have they done if not re-created their creator in their own image, having been created in that image themselves in the first place? Kim&#8217;s descriptions of these robots&#8217; components and means of interaction with their environment had me envisioning Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies, but in the end it came clear that they were meant to be close to humanoid. The protagonist is of a model series with a deluxe face covered by a soft skin-like material, &#8220;but that softness came with a price: the skin on Kay’s face, like that of all 1029s, was so fragile that it cracked upon exposure to the outside air.&#8221;
And so, &#8220;needless to say, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-seeing-korean-plastic-surgery/">cosmetic surgery</a> was a booming industry among the 1029s, who had taken to covering their faces with gold plating that resembled that of the 700s.&#8221; Kim takes all the opportunities presented by this robot society and the various different models that constitute it to satirize aspects of human society, especially as instantiated in 21st-century South Korea. &#8220;Despite the claim of having abolished modelism, there was a limit to how quickly society could change,&#8221; she writes, &#8220;so it was exceedingly rare for 2000s to receive a higher education.&#8221; While most models communicate only through speech, their faces presumably remaining as static as a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/secret-koreanness-sticky-monster-lab-character-brand-struggle-resist/">Sticky Monster</a>&#8216;s, the 2000s were designed to use facial expressions as well, and the resulting obviousness of their feelings puts them at a serious disadvantage in their personal and professional dealings.
This condition of inborn separation from the mainstream takes a variety of forms throughout On the Origin of Species. &#8220;Perhaps foremost among Kim’s thematic concerns,&#8221; as USC associate professor of Korean Studies and Gender Studies Sunyoung Park puts it in an afterword, &#8220;is the consideration of marginality, alterity, and radical difference.&#8221; That may sound stiltedly academic, but Kim executes these considerations with a playfulness as well as a comic instinct for reversal and recontextualization. &#8220;I have no desire to start treatment,&#8221; a woman writes to her brother in &#8220;Stars Shine in the Earth&#8217;s Sky.&#8221; &#8220;What chance of cure it promises is of no consequence to me.&#8221; In due time Kim reveals that this character suffers not from a terminal illness, but from her society&#8217;s inability to accept her daily need to &#8220;plummet into a state of total oblivion for a minimum of five to six hours.&#8221;
She has to sleep, in other words, but in her world most don&#8217;t. The majority insist that the minority &#8220;beat&#8221; their unorthodox habit, but &#8220;from where I stand, &#8216;beating&#8217; what we have looks a lot like turning ourselves into someone we’re not.&#8221; Remaining conscious at all times &#8220;would mean abandoning myself. Throwing away every thing that is truly me.&#8221; Kim at first seems to be constructing an uncharacteristically blunt allegory for the angered incomprehension with which certain people or ways of life meet in reality. But then the real speculation begins: maybe on the distant planet of Earth, the narrator imagines, the sky isn&#8217;t always bright. If Earth moves like she thinks it does, &#8220;the light shining down on the planet would change with each hour.&#8221; Just imagine — &#8220;a world that alternates regularly between light and dark. A world where warmth and cold, activity and rest, change places every day.&#8221;
The fruit of labor by three different translation teams, mainly Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell but also Eunhae Jo and Melissa Mei-Lin Chan (&#8220;Between Zero and One&#8221;) and Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar (&#8220;An Evolutionary Myth&#8221;), The Origin of Species provides what Park describes as a representative selection of Kim&#8217;s earliest and most successful work published in Korea. To the uninitiated reader, the jarringly breast-themed disclaimer at the beginning also gives a sense of Kim&#8217;s attitude: her attitude as a writer and thinker, yes, but also toward the genre in which she has made her name, to an extent inadvertently or even reluctantly. Yet in English or Korean, most of the stories collected here do, neatly and at once, fulfill both of the broad goals of science fiction: the inferior, making us reconsider the nature of our society; and the superior, making us reconsider the nature of our reality.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">When “I” Becomes “We”: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young’s I’m Waiting for You</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower</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>
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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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Where Evolution Meets Creation: the Uncommonly Speculative Fiction of Kim Bo Young&#8217;s On the Origin of Species

Where Evolution Meets Creation: the Uncommonly Speculative Fiction of Kim Bo Young&#8217;s On the Origin of Species

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/"></div>This is the first of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The second, on her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, is <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/">here</a>.
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South Korea has one of the first populations who can claim to have collectively traveled through time. In a trivial sense, of course, we all travel through time, forward at a rate of one hour per hour, one day per day, one year per year. But this country, as no introduction fails to mention, underwent in the second half of the 20th century a transformation already seen in other societies — &#8220;development,&#8221; &#8220;modernization,&#8221; &#8220;Westernization,&#8221; call it what you like — but at an unprecedented speed. Aggressive industrialization compressed a century of history into just a few decades, and the aftereffects of that process account for much of the good, the bad, and the weird in Korean life today. Among other traces, it has left tragi-comically wide generation gaps: for many Koreans, interactions with their parents feel like Westerners&#8217; interactions with their disoriented great-grandparents.
&#8220;My dad lived his whole life in his hometown,&#8221; says the narrator of the story &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You.&#8221; But &#8220;by the time he passed away our hometown was a completely different place from where he was born. Buildings had been put up and roads laid, mountains flattened, and the courses of rivers diverted. Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?&#8221; The reflection comes in one of a series of letters to this narrator&#8217;s fiancée, whom he won&#8217;t be able to see for nearly five years. Both are aboard separate spaceships, she to emigrate to a distant solar system with her family, and he expressly — by way of light-speed travel&#8217;s dilation of time for the traveler — more quickly to pass the years her trip will require before they reunite for their wedding on Earth.
For his fiancée doesn&#8217;t intend to stay with her family, of whose meddling in her life she&#8217;s had enough. She wouldn&#8217;t be the first Korean to go to great lengths to get away from relatives, nor the first to engage in instrumental immigration: &#8220;anyone who travels to another solar system gets an outer planets residency permit,&#8221; she explains, and &#8220;there are loads of advantages when it comes to taxes and things like that.&#8221; The more things change, as many a literary vision of the future has meant to show us, the more they stay the same. But change is precisely what the narrator&#8217;s fellow emigrants in time went into the &#8220;Orbit of Waiting&#8221; hoping for: &#8220;Some people are traveling to the year their pension plan matures, others hope real estate taxes will come down while they’re away. There are artists too, who believe they were born in the wrong era.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You&#8221; is the title piece of the collection that marks the English-language debut of Kim Bo-young, who has been a respected and prolific science-fiction writer in Korea since the mid-2000s. Rather than presenting an assortment of short stories each of which imagines a different future, the book instead comprises what initially feel like two complex novellas, one split in half so as to bookend the other. While Kim tells &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; the opener, entirely through the man&#8217;s letters to the woman, the closer &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; consists only of the woman&#8217;s letters to the man. Upon first reading, the two seem to have been composed of a piece; only in a post-script essay does Kim reveal that she wrote &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; years after &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; which was itself the fulfillment of a one-off commission.
The request came from an unusual client: a man looking for a distinctive means of proposing to his girlfriend. It just so happened that he was an old friend of Kim&#8217;s, and his girlfriend counted Kim among her favorite writers. To that point Kim, who got her start plotting video games in the late 1990s, had &#8220;never once written a story where two people get together, let alone a romance,&#8221; but she took on the challenge anyway. The result drives this unwonted scenario toward what, if the rest of the material in I&#8217;m Waiting for You is anything to go by, must be one of the author&#8217;s themes of choice: things not going according to plan. A series of uncontrollable mishaps on both ends keeps delaying the fictional couple&#8217;s reunion by years at a time — and ultimately, back on a repeatedly devastated Earth, centuries or even millennia.
&#8220;The Prophet of Corruption,&#8221; which follows &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; presents what seems like starkly different setting, and even conception of reality. The early appearance of the word bardo, recently popularized (to an extent) in the English-reading world by George Saunders&#8217; novel Lincoln in the Bardo, tells us we must be in the world of Buddhist myth, and specifically in the liminal space it places between death and rebirth. Those who don&#8217;t recall exactly what a bardo is can turn to the glossary at the back of the book, which explains that &#8220;disciples gather at their teacher’s bardo to discuss their previous life and plan their next one before they descend to the Lower Realm again.&#8221; The Lower Realm is Earth as we know it, occupied by humans, animals, and everything else; the teachers of these disciples include Prophets, entities &#8220;born from the division of the primordial universe.&#8221;
Most of the important characters in this long middle section are Prophets. Getting across to the reader the nature of their existence and the laws they must obey demands even more from Kim&#8217;s skills as a storyteller than conveying the mechanics of the spacefaring civilization in the first and last sections. Frequently and in many ways she stresses that none of these characters, nor the objects that surround them, are truly separate from one another, spun off as they all originally were from the single being that encompassed all existence. But division turns out to bring pleasures of its own: &#8220;By severing the connections between our minds, we gained the pleasure of devising new tools for communication. We preoccupied ourselves with making thousands of signs and symbols each day&#8221; — in other words, creating language itself. &#8220;Who knew limitations and inconveniences could be so joyful and fun?&#8221;
It&#8217;s not hard to understand the appeal such ideas hold out to a translator — nor, for anyone with a little knowledge of the Korean, what challenges a story like this poses to a translator. When not descended to the Lower Realm in human form, the denizens of the &#8220;Dark Realm&#8221; have no human attributes, and especially not gender. Once could argue for the superiority of the Korean language when it comes to dealing with figures possessed (like <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pengsoo-genderless-shameless-giant-penguin-antihero-winning-korean-hearts-minds/">Pengsoo</a>) of neither maleness nor femaleness, since even where human beings are concerned it doesn&#8217;t force its speakers to make a choice between the two with every pronoun. In her own accompanying notes, co-translator Sophie Bowman writes of sending Kim &#8220;a list of minor characters and asking her which gender each of them was,&#8221; apologizing all the while for what she optimistically calls &#8220;current expectations in the English language.&#8221;
In &#8220;The Prophet of Corruption&#8221; and its companion piece &#8220;The Other Me,&#8221; Bowman&#8217;s translation partner Sung Ryu (she of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">Tower</a> by Bae Myung-hoon, a writer often mentioned alongside Kim) opts to use the plural pronoun &#8220;they&#8221; in reference to groups and individuals alike. Though this never quite comes to feel natural (I kept losing track of whether I was supposed to be picturing one or many, another distinction the Korean language doesn&#8217;t always make clear to begin with), that&#8217;s surely part of the idea, reminding us as it constantly does that these characters we see conversing, interacting, and even attacking one another could easily merge back together again or divide up further still. Not that it would occur without controversy, Kim&#8217;s idea for this Dark Realm being, as she explains it, that of &#8220;a world in which &#8216;division versus merging&#8217; was hotly debated.&#8221;
Because nobody in the Dark Realm is human, nobody in the Dark Realm can be Korean. Still, in Kim&#8217;s depiction their attitudes are at times reminiscent of the old jokes about Koreans&#8217; readiness to draw hard ideological dividing lines among themselves no matter the circumstances. &#8220;The hardliners prepared for war; the moderates prepared gifts and a diplomatic delegation,&#8221; the narrator of &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; writes of her shipmates during the days of preparation for meeting another spacecraft. &#8220;By the time we were ready to land, it was so bad that they had almost gone ahead and formed political parties.&#8221; In this story Kim does make the characters explicitly Korean. When they speak of going home, in the larger sense, they speak of returning to Earth; but whenever they do return to Earth, they never touch down anywhere but Korea, unrecognizable though time and trouble may have rendered it.
&#8220;The Other Me&#8221; also sends its narrator-Prophet Naban into a Seoul of the future, abandoned and overgrown: &#8220;I considered visiting the Underwater Tomb of King Munmu or Seokguram Grotto, but decided on Lotte World Tower for the irony.&#8221; That building, at the moment the tallest in South Korea, has become an Ozymandian ruin, albeit a moist one, containing as its submerged basement does &#8220;three types of mushrooms and five new species of fish.&#8221; The name Naban comes from Korean mythology, the glossary notes, as does much else in Kim&#8217;s tales of the Dark and Lower Realms. Ryu and Bowman are to be praised for simply transliterating these and other concepts in the main text; not every Western reader will know a dopo from a dokkaebi, but better to gather a mental image from the context than to rely on misleadingly familiar approximations like &#8220;cloak&#8221; or &#8220;goblin.&#8221;
At the same time, other of these stories&#8217; roots run to Western antiquity: Kim writes of beginning with the proposition that &#8220;the world of the living was a school for enlightenment and the world of the dead a forum where various schools of thought debated teaching methods, in a similar fashion to the agoras of ancient Athens.&#8221; She pulls off the subsequent coalescence of science, technology, religion, and myth with a rare assurance; as Ryu writes, &#8220;I doubt I’ll ever translate another book singlehandedly leading me down rabbit holes of general relativity, genetics, Buddhist philosophy, and world mythology&#8221; — as well as superstring and evolutionary theory, not to mention space-based maritime law. Korean science fiction, even the small sample of which has so far been published in English translation, has demonstrated an intellectual capaciousness, and Kim&#8217;s imagination clearly has an even greater such capacity than most.
As represented in I&#8217;m Waiting for You, Kim&#8217;s work also expresses an emotion seldom popularly associated with science fiction: longing. The title story and &#8220;On My Way to You,&#8221; with their lovers separated by ever more difficult-to-conceive distances over an ever more difficult-to-conceive span of time, hardly obscure the source of that emotion. Division occurs and reunion must follow, a tension that also animates much of &#8220;The Prophet of Corruption&#8221; and &#8220;The Other Me.&#8221; There another variety of longing emerges among Prophets and disciples who grow corrupted: that is, too attached to the fragile and disordered human life they&#8217;ve allowed to come into being. Though the book&#8217;s halves never converge in any obvious way, some readers will speculate about the Prophets to which the man-and-wife-to-be must belong. Other readers, those accustomed to a more conventional kind of sci-fi, will at least be pleased to hear that both narratives feature spaceships.
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This is the first of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The second, on her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, will appear here on the Korea Blog on June 20th.
 
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower</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/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/">From Seoul to the Stars: The Journey of Indie Synth-Electro-K-Pop Queen Neon Bunny</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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When &#8220;I&#8221; Becomes &#8220;We&#8221;: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young&#8217;s I&#8217;m Waiting for You

When &#8220;I&#8221; Becomes &#8220;We&#8221;: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young&#8217;s I&#8217;m Waiting for You

kb-k-pop-evolution-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-evolution-youtube-original-docuseries-traces-origins-koreas-prime-cultural-export/"></div>Certain Western observers of Korea wear their aversion to K-pop, or at least their pointed disinterest in it, as a badge of honor. From them I&#8217;ve heard the rise of K-pop credited with destroying Korean culture, or — somewhat more positively — with turning the Korean mainstream bland enough to give rise to a counterculture of correspondingly extreme marginality and transgression. But at this point the music itself is, at least here in Korea, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">never wholly ignorable</a>, and as the country&#8217;s third-largest export (a position held fifty years ago by wigs) unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. Even those Western Seoulites who walk around with headphones lest they pass through one of the many public spaces soundtracked by K-pop must now have moments of curiosity about how and why it&#8217;s become quite so prominent. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjq6DwYksrzxsfMkXHOU0sN6RVemYByW_" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjq6DwYksrzxsfMkXHOU0sN6RVemYByW_', 'K-Pop Evolution');">K-Pop Evolution</a> is the first documentary series to attempt an explanation.
Distributed under the banner of Youtube Originals, K-Pop Evolution recently finished making free to view on that site the last of its seven episodes. Together these tell of how Korean pop music has cultivated enthusiastic and often large fan bases around the world, a story not necessarily well understood by many of those fans themselves. Anyone living outside Asia could almost be forgiven for assuming that Korea didn&#8217;t make pop music at all until 2012, the year Psy&#8217;s &#8220;Gangnam Style&#8221; went unprecedentedly viral. Though few of Psy&#8217;s countrymen would have elected him as K-pop&#8217;s emissary to the West, his surprise breakthrough aligned with the priorities laid down fifteen years earlier, at the time of the Asian Financial Crisis. Known locally as &#8220;IMF,&#8221; that economic disruption weakened the domestic market enough to force many Korean industries, music included, to create product expressly designed for foreign consumption.
&#8220;At the time, there was a general sense of inferiority in Korea&#8217;s mainstream culture, that we weren&#8217;t as good as Japan,&#8221; says music critic Kim Zakka, one of K-Pop Evolution&#8216;s more knowledgable interviewees. But there was also a willingness and ability to cater to Japanese consumers, the continuing capitalization on which has meant that &#8220;the K-pop we know today wasn&#8217;t made for domestic audiences, but created to sell on the international market.&#8221; Also among the series&#8217; taking heads is Kwon Bo-ah, better known as BoA, whose great success in Japan almost two decades ago did much to earn her the title &#8220;Queen of K-pop.&#8221; Coinciding with a period of increased cultural exchange across what Korea calls the East Sea, this endeavor necessitated on her part the cultivation of not just singing and dancing but Japanese language skills as well.
This strategy has expanded along with K-pop&#8217;s geographic reach, first across east Asia and now into the West: BTS, the golden tip of the boy-band spear, released their second English-language single just last week. Nowadays, in addition to training Korean singers in other languages, group members have been brought in from Taiwan, Thailand, and other countries increasingly hooked on Korean popular culture; K-Pop Evolution shows such foreign inductees struggling to fit their Korean language studies in with their years of nearly round-the-clock singing and dancing practice. This expectation of linguistic proficiency is admirable, on some level, but the series takes a less neutral point of view on other pressures applied to a K-pop performer-in-training: the strict diets seemingly adhered to by most of the girl-group hopefuls living in shared company dormitories, or the tacit prohibition on dating that applies even (or especially) to established stars.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15561" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2.png" alt="" width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2-300x169.png 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
The rigors of K-pop training and fandom alike invite comparisons to athletics, and some of the figures interviewed draw such comparisons themselves. Metaphors of soldier-like regimentation and mobilization are more common (BTS&#8217; followers call themselves the &#8220;ARMY&#8221;), and as for the final product of a live concert, Korean-American music executive Bernie Cho likens it to a megachurch. (These resonances with sports, the military, and Christianity hint at K-pop&#8217;s vast untapped potential in the American heartland.) I found Cho&#8217;s presence an especially welcome one, since he was <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=2498" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=2498', 'one of my own interviewees');">one of my own interviewees</a> when I first visited Korea seven years ago to record a series of podcasts. His ability to speak about K-pop as both a Korean and a Westerner — and as the rare music-industry professional not evidently high on his own supply — makes him even more of an asset to K-Pop Evolution than he was to my show.
The series&#8217; interviewees also include some of the performers who became stars as K-pop assumed the form it broadly retains today. Quite a few of that generation were raised in the United States, and several seen here grew up in the greater Los Angeles area, like Tony Ahn of 1990s boy-band H.O.T. and Joon Park of the slightly later g.o.d. (speak though he does with vaguely east-coast bray). Both recall the indignities of K-pop stardom in that era, from being arranged into ginned-up rivalries (reminiscent of the mendacious framing of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by the media of the mid-1960s) to — in Park&#8217;s specific case — tearfully confessing in a press conference, at the age of 31, to having a girlfriend. Even the rise could be humiliating, as when g.o.d. signed on to a reality show that had them collectively and incompetently parenting a borrowed infant.
Without H.O.T. and g.o.d., there would surely be no BTS. But even those earliest three-letter K-pop groups owe a good deal to their predecessors, albeit ones overseas: the New Kids on the Block, whom the entertainment companies involved used as a model (or in the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords/">Konglish</a>, &#8220;benchmarked&#8221;) to create Korean boy bands. Parallels appear even between the New Kids and current K-pop acts like Kang Daniel (born Kang Eui-geon), K-Pop Evolution&#8216;s biggest &#8220;get.&#8221; Glimpses of the limitless variety of merchandise that sends his fans into a frenzy bring to mind a moment in the New Kids on the Block&#8217;s E! True Hollywood Story in which one New Kid recalls seeing his and his bandmates&#8217; face embedded in marbles: &#8220;It felt weird. Wrong.&#8221; A scene of girls lined up at video-call simulation installed in a Kang Daniel-dedicated exhibition is reminiscent of nothing so much as Lisa Simpson dialing the <a href="https://youtu.be/hqJ5gKZNkuY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/hqJ5gKZNkuY', 'Corey Hotline');">Corey Hotline</a>.
So unexpectedly powerful has K-pop proven as a commercial and even geopolitical force, one can easily forget that the music itself is made for adolescents. A friend of mine here has a teenage daughter who went through a BTS phase not long ago: one day her desk shelves filled up with the band&#8217;s CD box sets, photo books, and official light sticks (for synchronized waving at concerts), and within a matter of months the girl had made all the products vanish without a trace. But Western K-pop fans seem able to maintain their enthusiasm, even to gain it in the first place, at startlingly advanced ages. In K-Pop Evolution one Canadian woman remembers the first K-pop concert she attended, breaking up as she recalls both the freebies and the feeling of communion she received there: &#8220;As someone who didn&#8217;t really love themselves in high school, that really connected with me.&#8221;
It would hardly be an exaggeration to describe the K-pop fan&#8217;s experience as one of spiritual devotion. Nor would it be too much to see K-pop performers as striving for almost holy perfection, through self-denial and other means of removal from the everyday human realm. Not for nothing are they called &#8220;idol singers,&#8221; uneasily though the concept may sit with other aspects of modern Korean culture. (&#8220;I grew up in the church,&#8221; says a Diamond Bar-raised member of boy band 1TYM. &#8220;Idol is something you&#8217;re not supposed to have.&#8221;) Despite the frivolity of K-pop products, music and otherwise, a deadly seriousness attends both their consumption and their production. Suicide occurs among stars with a chilling but unsurprising frequency, given the intensity of public scrutiny fixed upon the brightest. The fans&#8217; expectations only add tinder to the box; surely a Mark David Chapman-style incident is only matter of time.
Perhaps it&#8217;s thus in the best interest of K-pop acts to reference current concepts of mental health, as a growing number have done in songs as well as other forms of media. Today&#8217;s adolescents certainly face psychological challenges unknown to older generations, not least coming of age in the social-media-rich environment of which K-pop itself has made such relentless use. The subject matter of the songs they listen to has to that extent grown more complicated, at least compared to that which H.O.T., g.o.d., BoA dealt with. But even at the beginning of the 1990s, the seeds were being planted by Seo Taiji and the Boys, who introduced Western sounds (particularly those of new jack swing, big at the time) into their music and social criticism into their lyrics with a competency that had eluded many of the the singing groups who flashed in the pan throughout the 1980s.
K-Pop Evolution could do well to dedicate another season to Seo Taiji and the Boys alone, though their aggressive adherence to passing trends — Seo&#8217;s orange-dreadlocks period alone — may give it the feel of a mockumentary. And though the series as it exists does more than any other English-language documentary to draw a line between K-pop as the world knows it today and the wholly domestic popular music enjoyed here in the mid-20th century, a richer story remains to be told. The impressive first episode does manage to situate the major currents of South Korean popular music within those of the country&#8217;s still-short history. Incorporating an interview with the guitarist of the Key Boys, who were probably the first rock band in the country, it recounts how President Park Chung Hee cracked down on the youth-oriented music that had only just begun to flourish after the war.
In the 1970s emerged the genre now called &#8220;psych folk,&#8221; whose leading lights like Shin Joong-hyeon and Kim Jung Mi pulled off what one DJ calls the distinctive musical &#8220;combination of imitation and reinterpretation.&#8221; Alas, these artists get only a minute&#8217;s focus, which is still more than the episode pays to &#8220;trot,&#8221; the often-sorrowful Korean balladry that emerged in the colonial period — having more than a little in common with the similarly sentimental Japanese style of enka — and in recent years has enjoyed something of a new fashionability. (And <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/yoo-jae-k-pop-masterpiece-love-30-years-untimely-death/">Yoo Jae-ha</a>, known as the &#8220;father of the Korean ballad,&#8221; apparently merits not even a mention.) Much is said about how the most successful Korean popular music, both domestically and internationally, interweaves Western musical elements with distinctively Korean ones, but never are those elements and their characteristics, complementary or otherwise, broken down on a seriously musicological level.
Other than the language in which most of its lyrics are written, what makes K-pop Korean? Many answers are possible, even valid, but it may be more illuminating to ask a different question. Even the scant attention K-Pop Evolution pays to the musical movements of the 1960s and 70s suggests an abundance of roads other than the one taken, down which an enormous amount of time, money, and energy flow into the development of acts that — let&#8217;s face it — sound and look to the uninitiated mostly indistinguishable from one another. (And as Youjeong Oh notes in <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">Pop City</a>, less than ten percent of agency-accepted trainees make their debut; of the 82 girl groups who did debut between 2013 and 2015, &#8220;fewer than ten achieved substantial public recognition.&#8221;) Here we have a plausible and entertaining account of how K-pop became what it is. But what might K-pop have been?
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<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/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="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh’s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-punk-indie-rock-k-pop-world/">Korean Punk and Indie Rock in a K-Pop World</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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K-Pop Evolution: A Youtube Original Docuseries Traces the Origins of Korea&#8217;s Prime Cultural Export

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

Colin Marshall

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

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"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 Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Radio Hour: Podcast Mogul Andy Bowers and Comedian Bonnie McFarlane

PODCAST #90: David L. Ulin

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