London Korean Links

Leonard Chang: Fruit ‘n’ Food
Black Heron Press, 1996

Leonard Chang’s first novel is proof that giving away key elements of the plot in advance need not ruin the enjoyment of a work of fiction. The book starts at the end, with the hero in hospital, blinded and incapacitated. You are told how the story ends. You are even told, in broad outline, how our subject gets there. But you feel compelled by the language to embark upon the journey, even before you get seized by the scenario of the plot.

A young Korean-American comes back to the place of his childhood - Queens, in New York City - because he has nothing left for him anywhere else. It’s a district where the ethnic balance is gradually shifting from Korean American to African American. Knowing about the race riots in San Francisco in 1992, and knowing how the novel ends, you know there’s going to be trouble. Every second in the Korean-run Fruit ‘n’ Food store where our hero works is laden with tension. Which customer is going to sneak a beer into his jacket? Which one is going to pull the gun? Or is the fear imaginary? More importantly, which is the most prejudiced, the most racist? The white? The black? The Gyopo? The native Korean?

This book is filled with tension, despite the fact that you know how it ends. There is, though, a big surprise in how it gets there.

Well worth searching out.

Robert A Kaiser: Project Yellow Sky — A Korean Conspiracy
(Authorhouse, November 2006)

Those who visit websites with Korea-related content may have come across advertisements for this book in the Google Ads panel. A topical thriller, about the North Koreans trying to steal nuclear secrets… it must be worth putting in the suitcase for a bit of light holiday reading, I thought.

Oh dear. Where to start? The identity of the author? No information is provided in the book itself, but the blurb at Amazon suggests it’s someone very like the star of the plot. I’m not so sure. Based on the leaden prose, a plot both clichéd and unlikely, and an ignorance or carelessness of certain details of the English language (the familiar it’s / its error, a general sloppiness with apostrophes and inverted commas, the confusion of homonyms such as illusion / allusion, an over-reliance on scare quotes… I could go on) I’d guess someone in their early teens, with an admittedly creative imagination.

The plot? Meet Fred Funtley, an unlikely hero. Seemingly modelled on Dilbert, a cubicle-dwelling no-hoper at the bottom of the office food chain in an engineering company, Fred’s speciality is giving status reports and powerpoint presentations. He moves to another anonymous engineering company to join the equally oddly-named Brad Blazer, and before he knows it he’s on a top secret project transferring nuclear technology to the Japanese. A lynchpin of the project because no-one can explain a process chart as well as Fred, he’s soon off to Tokyo and is immediately bedded by a curvaceous oriental lovely and then recruited by the CIA. The love interest is unceremoniously assassinated, but in her dying breath manages to finger the mole responsible for leaking the project’s details to the North Koreans.

Back home, Fred’s wife (”a good-looking, intelligent lady”) is struggling to work out what to do with a credit card bill, so the CIA charters a private jet to take him back to the States, where he is tasked with learning more about the troublesome organisation who’s leaking all those secrets. A couple of beers with the mole, a thirty-second whinge about how his boss never gives him enough credit, and he’s a card-carrying member of POOPI ^[1]

“Well Fred”, Marla purred softly, “you’ve certainly convinced me that you’re our type of guy”.

POOPI’s aim is to subvert the world order and replace it with something not very well-defined (though we learn later that one version of the plan is to install the Dear Leader as World Leader).

To cut to the chase, a somewhat arbitrary plot to kill the US ambassador to Seoul is foiled (success would have led to certain nuclear armageddon), POOPI is cleaned up, North Koreans with the unlikely names of Matt Fong and Tony Shu are left blustering in broad New York gangster dialect about how to respond to the setbacks, while the Dear Leader seeks comfort in his harem.

“Based on historical facts,” says Amazon.

This book demonstrates what can happen when technology ends up in the wrong hands. It’s clearly an argument for nuclear non-proliferation, and it also presents a compelling case for prohibiting the sale of word-processing software to unlicensed authors. While self-publishing is to be encouraged in the interests of freedom of speech, you are advised to proceed with extreme caution in this particular case.

Links

• Go on, ignore me. Buy this book at Amazon.com or amazon.co.uk and give it to a Dan Brown fan for Christmas. Amazon.com readers have given it 5 stars. De gustibus…

1. Power of our People Institute[back]

Soho Press, New York, 2005

Martin Limón’s fourth book in the series featuring George Sueño and Ernie Bascom continues some familiar themes. Our drink-sodden heroes, officers in the CID of the US 8th Army in Seoul in the 1970s, as usual demonstrate their physical strength in tackling villains and their iron constitutions as their bodies are pummelled by alcohol and fists, showing their inside knowledge of the vice dens of Itaewon, of the workings of the black market, and displaying the intolerance of authority which any good cop shows. The action is still as fast-paced as ever, and as before is spiced with the inevitable encounters with “business girls”, where Bascom seems always to have more success, to the envy of Sueño, the narrator. There’s also the requisite high body count, familiar to any reader or watcher of your average murder mystery. What is new this time is a slightly gentler outlook: we learn more of Sueño’s unhappy past, and this particular story being set at the time of Chuseok there’s an angle on Korean family values. All great fun, and the plot hums along nicely, with only one of the murders not terribly well resolved.

What is just a little puzzling is the confused mirror image sense of geography which somehow seems to have escaped the notice of the editors:

The City of Inchon sits on the coast of the Yellow Sea thirty kilometres due east of Seoul,

we read at the beginning of Chapter 2. A few paragraphs later the error is reinforced:

If you ventured out onto that green expanse [ie the Yellow Sea] and continued east, you’d eventually hit Shanghai and the teeming continent known as China.

Later we get:

From where we sat we could see out to the Port of Inchon, and beyond to the rippling waters of the Huang Hei, as the Koreans call it — the Yellow Sea.

So here I’m getting really pedantic. The Koreans, I’m reliably informed, call it Hwang Hae, (yes, the Yellow Sea). And they also call it the West Sea. Using this moniker would have pointed out Limón’s earlier error.

It doesn’t really matter though. This is great pulp fiction for holiday reading.

Links:

• Martin Limon’s first three books

(University of Hawaii Press, 1995)

A collection of well-translated novellas / short stories about colonial Korea. Written by a Japanese author born in Seoul in 1930, where he remained until he was repatriated to Japan following Korea’s 1945 liberation, these stories portray colonial Korea from a sympathetic Japanese perspective.

Three of the stories stand out for their sympathy towards vanishing Korean culture and the plight of Koreans trying to retain their nationality and dignity under Japanese occupation. Possibly the best known of these is the title work, The Clan Records, which tells the story of the scheme to force Koreans to adopt Japanese names, from the perspective of a pro-Korean Japanese official whose job it is to enforce the “voluntary” name changes, and the pro-Japanese yangban and clan elder who holds out against the pressure because of his obligations to his clan. The plot forms the basis of Im Kwon-taek’s Genealogy, and additional input into Im’s classic film is another story from the same book, When the hibiscus blooms, which tells of a Japanese artist who “discovers” Koryo dynasty celadon — almost a fictionalisation of Yanagi Soetsu’s life.

The weakest and shortest of the stories is A crane on a dunghill, about a kisaeng who dupes a Japanese into helping her nationalist brother escape to Manchuria, while those who have been following the debate about Japanese history textbooks will be interested in reading The remembered shadow of the Yi dynasty. This again tells the story, set in the 1930s, of a Japanese artist sympathetic to Korean culture. Captivated by the beauty and elegance of a kisaeng he wins her trust and creates an award-winning painting of her Yi dynasty courtly dance. The kisaeng abruptly disowns him when she sees a photograph of the painter’s father, an ex-military man. This leads the artist to research his father’s past. The painter had always been taught at school that Korea and Japan had lived harmoniously together, and that the Japanese had always been welcome in Korea. The artist finds out about the March 1st movement (the mansei incident) and his father’s part in a Japanese atrocity soon thereafter. The discovery, in a secret military account of the event, is seen as subversive and revolutionary by the Japanese police in Korea.

The story which most seems to strike home, and which could almost be autobiographical, is Seeking life amidst death, a first person account of the experiences of a teenage Japanese schoolboy in Seoul at the time of Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War. In a way, this story gives what must be the most pure Japanese viewpoint, and the viewpoint is summed up as follows:

We Japanese children brought up in colonial Korea knew a very convenient expression: “Being Korean, how dare you…?” This cruel question possessed an unopposable power until almost the very end of the Pacific War. In spite of all the propaganda about the “unification” of Korea and Japan or about the equality of the two countries, the scornful attitude of the Japanese toward the Koreans had been nurtured in us since childhoods was not easy to change, even if Korean names … were changed into Japanese versions. Besides, we Japanese had been brought up without knowing how cruelly and severely Japan had attacked, exploited and suppressed the Koreans: discrimination against them had been practiced in every area, including education and employment.

The stories are enjoyable in their own right, but are more valuable for the perspective they provide on Korean-Japanese relations during the colonial period. Packed with interesting little details, some of the more disturbing historical realities are mentioned only in passing - for example the post-liberation lynchings of pro-Japanese Koreans. What shines through most, though, is the author’s affection for Korea and his nostalgia for its past.

Well worth searching out.

(Soho 1992 / Serpents Tail 1998) (Bantam 1997 / Serpents Tail 1999) (Bantam 1998 / Serpents Tail 2000)

Fun detective thrillers set in 1970s Seoul, with two maverick US military policeman on the trail of some pretty gruesome criminals, hanging out in the bars of Itaewon, trawling the murky depths of the Korean underworld and generally stirring things up. The author is a retired member of the US military and spent some time in Korea. A fourth novel, The Door to Bitterness, was published in late 2005 (not yet available in paperback). Highly recommended holiday reading.

Links:

• Martin Limon’s fourth, The Door to Bitterness

(Cassell, 2004)(Originally published in 1968)

Fun, easy-to-read stories about the army surgical hospitals in the Korean War. Each of the chapters feels as if it’s tailor-made for an episode of a TV series (funny, that). As a Brit, I sometimes find I need a dictionary to translate some of the Americanisms (and I start skim-reading when they’re talking in any detail about American football) but overall I guess this is a must-read piece of Korean-related literature.

(Flamingo, 1997)

Absorbing and very moving book in which the narrator pursues her family history through turbulent twentieth-century Korea. Quite a good introduction to modern Korean history if you’ve never read a history book, but this novel’s much more than that.

(Penguin, 2005)

Inspired by the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong. The first half is a re-telling of the original story with the benefit of an additional 200 years’ hindsight; the second half is set in modern times, in a story which echoes some of the themes of the original. The only part which stretches the credulity is that on arriving at her posh downtown Seoul hotel and discovering she has left her suitcase on the baggage carousel at Incheon, our heroine immediately leaps into a cab (just after lunch) for a quick round trip to the airport (and is back in town in time for tea). Maybe just about feasible, but I thought that was what the concierge was for. A gripping first half, but (maybe I’m missing something) a strangely aimless second half.