In the queue.

I moved back to Canada about a year ago, hence the silence. A few Korean books made it home with me, though:

• Ku Sang. Wasteland Poems.
• Kim Seung-hee. Life Within an Egg.
  
• Ko Un. The Sound of My Waves. (Only tackled the first few sections.)
• Lee Sung-il. The Brush and the Sword: Kasa.
• Ko Won. Voices in Diversity: Poets from Postwar Korea.

I recently bought Chang Ha-joon’s newest, as well: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.

When I get around to reading them, you will see the evidence here. When? No idea.

Gi Hyeong-do :: 1960-1989

Yesterday I marched in the 11th LGBTQ Pride Parade in Seoul. It was by far the smallest, wettest (as in rain– mind the gutter) Pride Parade I’ve ever attended. It was also the bravest, since there are, as far as I know, no legal protections for queer folk in Korea. One misplaced photo could cost you your job. Hence, I have none to share.

And yet there weren’t so many masks. Countless gay high school students stomped around fearlessly, like they owned the place [which, indeed, they shall inherit]. Sopping rainbow flags were that much brighter. The dancing “Catwomen” were that much more provocative in their soaked black hot pants. The torrential downpour didn’t stop the march; weigh your struggles, and it’s a pretty inconsequential obstacle, when all’s said and done.

On the Facebook event page for the festival, someone posted a link to an article on the late Korean poet Gi Hyeong-do. Gi died of heart failure in a gay bar in Jongno sam-ga, not far from the location of yesterday’s Pride Parade:

His corpse was found in the early hours of a spring morning at the Pagoda Theater, a gay sex venue in Jongro 3-ga central Seoul, dead of a heart attack at the age of 29. The circumstances of Gi’s death and his homosexuality have been systematically covered up and/or ignored by mainstream scholars trying to “protect” his image from any association with sexual minorities.

I am saddened, yet not surprised, that Gi hasn’t been studied all that seriously since his premature death. At best (as the above excerpt describes), academic discussion carefully avoids the conditions of his life and circumstances of his death. Forget that academic tendency toward the death of the author– this selective, wilful ignorance extends to expunging Gi’s work of one of its most important contexts. And it denies Korean LGTBQ people an ally.

But don’t take my word for it; the article reproduces a number of poems in translation.

Oh Jung-Hee :: “Wayfarer”

I have a weak spot for mysteries that offer an answer and leave me puzzling over the question. The final pages become a source of relief, not just resolution. Oh Jung-Hee’s “Wayfarer” works like this– and it is all the more formidable for its extreme brevity and emotional thrust.

The desolation faced by Hye-Ja– at the hands of her family, former colleagues, the Korean justice system, and prevailing ideas of mental health/rehabilitation– reminds me of Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark.

Lessing’s protagonist finds herself with some free time during her summer holidays. She makes a series of un-ladylike decisions that are particularly unbecoming of a married, middle-aged parent of adult children. Yet her responses seem intuitive– almost imperative. And as a result, the expectations she’s up against are implicitly condemned.

In “Wayfarer,” individual agency is much more problematic. Hye-Ja displays precious little of it, and yet she is dismissed for that “precious little” by a specific and conflicting set of cultural mores which cannot be easily dismissed. For reasons beyond Hye-Ja’s control, both action and inaction work against her. From the final pages:

What she had seen then was not the man’s face but her own nearly naked body. It was pure terror [...]. (80-81)

I don’t want to reveal too much about the context of this passage. But nothing else does such an efficient job of conveying what Hye-Ja is up against. The moment she is exposed, she is already damned. An outside party invades her sphere, but the circumstances are of little consequence. Once she considers herself, the damage is irreparable. Her decision to independently defend her sphere is ultimately what destroys it.

Oh Jung-Hee :: “Chinatown”

I’ve lived in Korea for about 18 months, but I’ve only visited the city of Incheon once. The trip goes something like this: Line 1 to Guro. Wait a while. Line 1 to Incheon. Pray for a seat. It’s a frustrating trip because the city really isn’t that far away from my neighbourhood, as the crow flies. It is a place I really, really like, though– and one I intend to visit again, as soon as spring figures out whether it’s coming or going.

I have Oh Jung-Hee’s story “Chinatown” (the first of three, in a little book of the same name) to thank for a reminder of Incheon. When I visited the old downtown core in 2009, it struck me as a place left holding its breath for purposes unknown. “Chinatown” gave me much the same impression. A young girl and her family leave the countryside and take up residence in post-war Incheon, surrounded by the sea– its wealth and its foetidness– and the inexplicable (for a 9-year-old, at least) Chinese.

Incheon’s Chinese streets are today little more than a set of charming relics. But Oh’s protagonist gives me its ghosts:

[In] the evening the Chinese flocked there, creeping like dusk through interlocking alleys. The women had great thick ears and wore silver earrings. They tottered on bound feet, baskets over their arms, and their heads bobbed, the tight buns looking like cow dung. (23)

“Chinatown” is a coming-of-age story (for lack of a better term– more on that later), so it’s appropriate that this first descriptive passage is relatively unmediated. The protagonist is open to the Chinese, and takes them– paints them, even– as they are. On the following page, though, the culture she’s set to inherit seeps into her vignette:

Smugglers, opium addicts, coolies who squirreled away gold inside every panel of their ragged quilted clothing, mounted bandits who swept over the frozen earth to the beat of their horses’ hoofs, barbarians who sliced up the raw liver of a slaughtered enemy and ate it according to rank, outcaste butchers who made wonton out of human flesh, people whose turds had frozen upright on the northern Manchurian plain before they could pull up their pants [...]. (24)

I shared this passage with my fiancé. He was immediately struck by how different  these stereotypes are from the ones we include in our North American cultural baggage. Thieves and opium smokers, sure– plenty of common ground there. But cavalrymen and cannibals? The Chinese? My, how unexpectedly intimidating.

As for the coming-of-age bit: that’s how the back cover describes “Chinatown,” but the protagonist didn’t exactly leave me humming “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” I ached for her gradual loss of childhood, but an entrance into womanhood is only hinted at on the very last page. The women around her are cautionary, almost tragic beings– spectres, even– of the difficult life she will soon gain in exchange for the aesthetic, spontaneous priorities of children.

Chang Ha-joon :: Bad Samaritans

The purpose of this blog is to help me better understand a particular national literature: a country’s poetry, fiction and drama… and the writers behind it.

Today, after a long absence, I’m breaking my own rules for the sake of a very special book: Chang Ha-joon’s Bad Samaritans: the Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

I know, I know: the subtitle makes it sound like a conspiracy theory. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I wouldn’t have read a hairbrained conspiracy twice (and thoroughly, at that).

Dr. Chang is a Cambridge-trained Korean economist. He’s adamantly pro-development, and has a bone to pick with neo-liberal policies and their deleterious effect on the world’s poorest countries.

He uses the history of the world’s richest nations to show the benefits of graduated protectionism, lax copyright standards, public enterprise, regulated foreign investment, and– most surprising to me– moderate-to-high inflation.

I enjoy reading about economics, but when I picked up Dr. Chang’s book this spring, it was the first time I’d ever seen a highly respected, world-class economist make hamburger from the sacred cow of low inflation.

“Who,” I thought, “could possibly want to see their savings disappear overnight?” But Dr. Chang makes a compelling case that the people who have the most to lose from inflation aren’t salaried workers like him, me (and probably anyone reading this), but people who make a living on the profits of their investments.

Salaried workers, conversely, are more likely to lose out in the short term and benefit down the road from the opportunities that arise as the economy grows– which it will, and quickly, if inflation isn’t policed too strictly.

Is it just me, or are the implications of that absolutely huge? Inflation is the one matter on which I’ve always given neo-liberal economics the benefit of the doubt. I’d never before come across such a careful, reasoned “shade of grey” argument for abandoning our fixation with ultra-low inflation.

I really love this book. It’s the best piece of non-fiction I’ve read in a long time, and it just so happens to be written by an incredibly bright Korean.

So here it is, and here it’ll stay.