A casual reader of the news from South Korea could be forgiven for wondering whether Koreans apologize more than other people do. Public expressions of contrition abound. Last year, President Park Geun-hye apologized for the government’s mishandling of the Sewol ferry disaster, and JoongAng Ilbo, one of the country’s major newspapers, ran a full-page apology for its sensationalist coverage of the tragedy. When, earlier this year, the MERS virus spread through Seoul’s Samsung Medical Center, the minister of health apologized “for causing concern and anxiety” by underestimating the disease’s contagiousness, and the heir apparent to the Samsung Group did the same, bowing deeply from the waist on national television. Then, there was last year’s “nut rage” incident, in which a Korean Air Lines executive went berserk after a flight attendant served her macadamia nuts in a bag rather than in a bowl. She demanded that he beg her forgiveness, only to apologize herself, later, as did her father, the company’s chairman, and her sister, who had threatened to seek vengeance on whistle-blowing employees. And Korean-Americans might recall that the country’s Ambassador to the United States called on them to “repent” after it was discovered that the gunman who carried out the Virginia Tech massacre was born in Korea, proposing a thirty-two-day fast, one day per victim, to prove that Koreans were a “worthwhile ethnic minority in America.”
Hierarchy—social, corporate, political—is the major organizing principle of Korean life, and apology is one of its crucial mechanisms. When those lower down the chain screw up, decorum demands that they apologize to those higher up; when those higher up wrong those lower down, apology functions as an affirmation of accountability, an expression of responsibility of the few toward the many. South Korea perennially demands apology from Japan, its former colonizer, which in 1993 acknowledged forcing women (many of them Korean) into sexual slavery during the Second World War. There are practical reasons for wanting such repeated reassurance; the rise of aggressive nationalism in a neighbor that has invaded you countless times across the centuries is certainly a distressing trend. But South Korea’s insistence on fresh acknowledgment of misdeeds long past, and its distress when such acknowledgment fails to come, also stem from the quintessentially Korean concept of han, a mélange of sadness, rage, and despair—a condition born of a sense of oppression and grievance, and impossible to assuage by apologies alone.
The Korean apology is satirized to harrowing effect in “At Least We Can Apologize,” a darkly comic 2009 novel by the South Korean writer Lee Ki-ho, published in this country by Dalkey Archive Press as part of its Library of Korean Literature series. The narrator, Jin-man, is equipped with a literal mind and a disconcerting lack of curiosity, and lives at “the institution,” a disreputable mental ward that doubles as a sock-packaging plant. Fluorescent lights burn around the clock, and the staff subdues residents with daily cocktails of pills. “When I first entered the institution I was beaten almost daily,” Jin-man recounts, in Christopher J. Dykas’s translation. “I was beaten in the morning, beaten at lunchtime, and beaten before bed.” As he goes through the menu of brutality, a certain giddiness sets in:
Falsely confessing to random wrongdoing—swearing at their superiors, throwing out medication—results in milder punishment, so Jin-man and Si-bong learn to game the system:
Jin-man and Si-bong are honest liars. They always make sure to commit their offenses after admitting to them, proving so adept at the racket that their caretakers put them in charge of collecting the apologies of the other inmates. This equilibrium is interrupted by the arrival of a new guy, “the man with the sideburns,” who despairs at his confinement and tosses messages over the institution’s fence in an attempt to reach the outside world. Jin-man and Si-bong start to copy him, packing their notes—“We are being held captive. If you find this note, please report this to the police. The man in our room said that you will be generously rewarded”—into sock crates. The messages hit their mark. The institution collapses in scandal, and Jin-man and Si-bong emerge to a media frenzy. Camping out at the dingy apartment of Si-bong’s sister and her pimp boyfriend, they fruitlessly hunt for jobs until they hit on the idea of marketing their sole indisputable skill: apologizing for someone else’s sins.
One of their first customers is a ten-year-old boy who has stolen money from his mother’s purse. Jin-man and Si-bong accompany him to his mother’s small food shop, where the irate woman threatens to “break this little bastard’s wrist.” Primed by their impeccable training at the institution, the newly minted businessmen spring into action, offering their own bodies up for abuse. As mother and son look on in horror, Si-bong takes a pipe and whacks Jin-man repeatedly on the wrist.
“An apology means that you say you’re not going to do the same thing that you did before,” Si-bong explains to another customer. “That’s all it is. There’s nothing we can do about your feelings, sir.” By outsourcing a gesture whose only value comes from the intent behind it, Jin-man and Si-bong turn the apology, that most civilized of interactions, into a mercenary performance, a backstreet Grand Guignol. It’s a lucrative one, too. “There are wrongs upon wrongs out there,” the pimp says, with growing excitement at the new business’s possibilities. “That means the apologies will just keep coming.”
“At Least We Can Apologize” is divided into three sections, whose titles—“Finding Wrong,” “Creating Wrong,” and “Cultivating Wrong”—describe a surefire, if unmistakably cynical, business strategy. What started, at the institution, as a simple means of survival becomes, in the outside world, an industry with the promise of limitless growth.
For American readers, literary evocations of Korea have come, for the most part, in the form of dystopian novels written by people without any direct connection to the country. Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” is set in the harsh confines of North Korea; at the other extreme, David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” features a futuristic South Korea-inspired “corpocracy,” a hotbed of clones, plastic surgery (“facescaping”), and insurrection. With few exceptions, novels by actual Koreans have not registered here. Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom” briefly appeared on the Times best-seller list in 2011. (She made headlines this year amid charges that she once plagiarized passages from a Yukio Mishima story, for which—yes—she later apologized.) Kim Young-ha’s “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” (2007) and Hwang Sok-yong’s “The Old Garden” (2009) both received a trickle of reviews, and Yi Mun-yol’s story “An Anonymous Island” appeared in these pages in 2011. That’s about it. Happily, Dalkey Archive’s series, launched in 2013, in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, provides a panoramic view of Korean fiction, in all its strangeness and variety, from the nineteen-thirties to the present.
That’s a significant span in the life of any country, but all the more so in the case of Korea. Two decades ago, when I spent a year in Seoul, the city my parents came from, after I graduated from college, I couldn’t have fathomed that South Korea would become an epicenter of state-of-the-art anything; there was hardly any evidence that a new, high-tech, high-speed civilization was on the way. Things changed after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As Euny Hong detailed last year, in her book “The Birth of Korean Cool,” the South Korean government, reeling from the recession, decided to invest in pop culture as a prime export, resulting in the wildly popular boy bands and girl bands and soap operas that went on to make up hallyu, the wave of Korean culture that has swept over Asia, and, increasingly, the rest of the world. These days, South Korea is famous for being among the most wired countries in the world, with whip-fast Internet speeds and a smartphone in every hand. Thousands fill stadiums to watch video-game tournaments, and plastic surgery seems as common as hair dye. It sounds like science fiction.
Such breakneck change can’t help but come at a price. The titular mother in “Please Look After Mom,” for instance, travels from the countryside to Seoul to visit her grown children, only to get lost in the subway. The novel captures the unsettling dislocation of the country’s rapid rural-to-urban transformation, and the transition from an elder-venerating Confucian hierarchy to a youth-focussed culture obsessed with physical beauty. This degree of change has left a deadly legacy: as Kim Young-ha noted in a Times Op-Ed last year, South Korea’s suicide rate has been the highest in the industrialized world for eight years running.
The novels in the Library of Korean Literature series are populated with the broken and the dispossessed, young drifters, like Jin-man and Si-bong, looking to carve out a place for themselves in an ungraspable, shifting world. Another such character introduces himself in the first sentence of Jang Jung-il’s novel “When Adam Opens His Eyes,” translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges: “I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch’s paintings and a turntable for playing records.” The nameless narrator (he’s called Adam by a lover, in honor of his being her first man) hasn’t scored high enough on the standardized exam to get into the university of his choice, so he plans to spend a year cramming.
Naturally, he doesn’t lift a finger to accomplish that goal—which isn’t to say that he does nothing. A hundred pages later, he buys a typewriter, and with it the promise of a different, differently programmed life. “If I write a novel, I will begin by depicting the portrait of my 19th year this way,” he says, and then quotes the book’s first paragraph nearly verbatim. This seems an optimistic conclusion—the narrator has made something of himself, and we’ve just finished reading the evidence—but, on the next page, Jang violently drops us into the novel’s wildly discordant final section, “The Seventh Day.” If the book’s first stretch was a study in passivity, “The Seventh Day” is all action: sex, lots of it, between an unnamed man and woman, graphically described and mixed with literary chat. “No virgin finds climaxing easy in her first experience,” Jang deadpans. “Except that this is a porno novel.” (The transgressive 1999 film “Lies,” which might be retitled “Fifty Thousand Shades of Grey,” was based on another of Jang’s novels.) Like the coda to Don DeLillo’s “The Names” or Wong Kar-wai’s “Days of Being Wild,” the end of “When Adam Opens His Eyes” seems spliced in from a different work. Who are these nameless, insatiable characters? Maybe they are yet another product—concentrated, unbearably intense—of the narrator’s typewriter, the vision that comes with Adam’s newly gained knowledge of the world.
“When Adam Opens His Eyes” was published in 1990, before South Korea’s great pop boom; the narrator’s typewriter and cassette player are practical necessities, not ironic totems of a bygone age. But a number of more recent novels betray a certain nostalgia for an earlier, less technological time, when life didn’t have to be constantly mediated by a screen. No computers show up in “At Least We Can Apologize,” and when Jin-man and Si-bong make calls they do it strictly via pay phone. A similar analog atmosphere can be found in “No One Writes Back,” by Jang Eun-jin, also published in 2009, and translated by Jung Yewon. “I left home with an MP3 player and a novel in an old backpack,” the novel begins. The speaker is Jihun, who for three years has moved from motel to motel with his late grandfather’s faithful, though blind, guide dog. He spends his time looking for places to stay, carrying on a one-sided correspondence with the people he meets on his rambles, and skirting his own vast, withheld sorrow. “I write letters because I want to convey to someone the stories of these people,” he explains, “but also because I want to let someone know that a day had existed for me as well.” One gets the sense that the immediacy of text messaging and e-mail would be too much for Jihun to handle; he wants to make contact with other people, but not at the expense of keeping his distance.
“No One Writes Back” is composed of short, numbered chapters, its progression echoing Jihun’s own peripatetic existence. As if to avoid the complications that could come from any budding intimacy, Jihun assigns numbers rather than names to the people he writes to. “My name is . . . ,” one of the people he encounters, a writer selling her novel on the subway, starts to tell him. He cuts her short: “ ‘I don’t want to know,’ I say, because I fear that we really will have to get to know each other once we start calling each other by name.”
The book’s centerpiece is Jihun’s letter to his sister, who has become a cosmetic-surgery addict. “With scissors in hand, you cut up all the photos with your face in them, and even burned up the photos of your hundredth day celebration and your first birthday party,” he writes. The letter is a heartbroken critique of a society gone insane with images. Seen through Jihun’s eyes, the Korean craze for such facescaping starts to seem a sort of unconscious sacrifice: in order to be properly absorbed, the dramatic changes visited on the nation need to be visited on the body as well.
The most appealing novels in the Library of Korean Literature capture the existential turbulence of han while keeping a sense of humor about it. The didactic moments in Yi Kwang-su’s “The Soil,” a social-realist tome originally serialized in 1932 and 1933, are balanced with wry observations of customs and people, such as the modern man who has internalized Japanese values and looks down his nose at his country’s educational system: “Yes, there’s the Department of Korean Literature. I really don’t know what students learn there. I think literature is useless anyway. And to study Korean literature? Even worse.” (Yi, the most famous writer in the series, was one of the country’s first modernists and a leader of the Korean independence movement, though he was later tarred as a Japanese collaborator.)
More recently, Park Min-gyu’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” set in the late nineteen-eighties and translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, tracks the doomed romance of its handsome narrator, a valet at a fancy shopping mall, and his co-worker, a shy, intelligent woman who is mocked for being homely—“the world’s ugliest woman.” Though she had the best grades at her vocational school, she’s never promoted; Park is blunt about the unfairness of a society wrapped up in surfaces, in which the unlovely are confined to a kind of permanent underclass, at least until they go under the knife. “Pavane” is a bildungsroman that veers into metafiction, bristling with footnotes and multiple endings. There’s also plenty of comic relief, such as this sterling career advice for a new valet, turning the impulse to apologize on its head:
When you do something wrong, flee the scene: this would be bad business for Jin-man and Si-bong, inverting the bleak social order that they aim to exploit. Later in “At Least We Can Apologize,” Jin-man and Si-bong are recaptured by the sinister caretakers of the institution; the only way for Jin-man to escape is to sacrifice his friend. “I had committed a wrong against him, but I missed him very much,” Jin-man thinks. “That was all.” Apologies are only a partial salve for wrongdoing; they acknowledge, but do not reverse, the harm that’s been done. Jin-man, it turns out, has a conscience. This discovery recalls a line from the start of the novel, the attempt by the man with the sideburns to open Jin-man and Si-bong’s eyes: “ ‘Look at you! You guys are fine and you’re locked up in here!’ ” Maybe Jin-man and Si-bong were never crazy to begin with—no crazier, in any case, than the country awaiting them outside the gates. ♦
