- Kim Sowol, "Azaleas," translated by David R. McCann
I can still recall the early morning cab ride I took many years ago in Daegu, South Korea. I was in a hurry, as usual; too much soju and kimchi the night before. On my way to the hagwan for the morning portion of my day-night split shift to teach EFL to busy university-aged students cramming in some English idioms seemingly between classes. It was the loneliest cab ride I've ever taken. No English spoken; I pointed to a map. The interior a shrine of talismans lit by a black light, a weird Wurlitzer melody and a voice of sorrow coming from the tape player, like an oriental version of "In Heaven" from David Lynch's Eraserhead. Speaking of hung over idioms.
As you do in your travels anywhere, if you're quiet enough, you let the "strange" culture in osmotically, and get an algorithmic feel for it over time. We're 60% water from the culture we came from; by the time I left Daegu I was 60% Korean, by that measure. The rest I had to bring on board. People push and shove, masks worn everywhere, neon signs, musical language, sleepy Korean soldiers pouring from yellow buses, the sense of occupation. You remembered you were in a country still at war. And when you got tired of it, you found a way on to the American base, to buy Maxwell House coffee and Gallo wine at the PX, hit the gym and library, and have brunch before the big screen with American sleepy soldiers. 'Tired of it' - the f*cking moxie of my complaints!
It wasn't until years later, after I was out of South Korea, one day poring over photo albums full of snapshots, that I began to more fully appreciate the culture I'd left behind, and thought about all the photo albums, smuggled out, full of our frameworks, our M*A*S*H* up of yet another client culture we don't understand. I tried to keep this all in mind as I read Paek Nam-Nyong's Friend: A Novel from North Korea. You go at it thinking you'll be imparted some salving insight into the South's mean-girl sister to the North, sulky and envious, in lieu of material conspicuity. Some urge to be rescued by the West; a hunger for Micky D's. The bobbing bait of materialism on the surface of things.
But Korea for 500 years was culturally and socially unified under the Chos... n Dynasty. Though a so-called client state of China during that time, Korea was politically autonomous; China was laissez-faire. Then in 1910, Japan colonized Korea until 1945, meeting underground resistance. During that Japanese occupation Kim Il-Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, was a Soviet-trained guerrilla leader known as "Tiger," who led a series of effective tactical assaults. Japan had to cough up Korea at end of WW2, in a settlement involving the Soviets and Americans. When it became time to unify Korea, Kim Il-Sung held "free" elections that included no Southern representatives and proceeded to occupy all of the South, except the Pusan region. America/UN pushback ensued (see Korean War) and here we are.
Friend is an old book, first published in 1988 and previously translated into French and English. This edition, translated by Immanuel Kim for Columbia University Press, comes at a peculiar time in North Korean-American relations, and expresses a kind of hope that the Man Who Would Be King, Donald Trump, has counterintuitively created an atmosphere of negation with boy totalitarian Kim Jong-un. What wonderful times for global democracy, but we'll take what we can get.
Kim tells us that the author, Paek Nam-Nyong, once belonged to the April 15th Literary Production Unit, a central task of which was to produce historical novels - The Year 1932, being one - extolling the heroic virtues Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong Il. By doing so, Nam-Nyong helped prop up the almost-caricaturistic, larger-than-life Kim personality cult that uneasily reminds one of Jimmy Jones and his Kool-Aid gang in Guyana. Also, an important lens to keep handy is that Nam-Nyong's father was killed in an American bombardment of the North when he was a baby, and, growing up in poverty, he lost his mother to disease when he was 10 years old. He lives in Pyonyang today.
The Friend referred to, by the novel's title, is one Jeong Jin Wu, a judge who specializes in divorce cases, and the odd off-cut case that gets to the heart of the DPRK's social contract with astonishing clarity. Nam-Nyong opens the novel by suggesting to the reader that life is so calm and serene in a district of the city Kanggye in the 1970s that nobody really knows where the court is located. "Although the Superior Court handled unsavory civil and criminal cases," Nam-Nyong's 3rd person limited omniscient narrator tells us, "the monumental facade of the building gave an impression of both grandeur and quiet dignity." In this sense, Judge Jeong Jin Wu represents the Court-as-Friend - there to quietly restore a sense of Confucian balance.
It's a short novel, at about 200 pages, and yet Nam-Nyong manages to "say" the judge's name some 621 times (I counted). The effect of the three stressed syllables - Jeong Jin Wu - is to reinforce the importance of this protagonist, not only as a subject-in-himself but a central representative of the socialist community. He's a role player, and by the time we're done with book, we see a society of role players. It would border on allegorical, if not for the fact that people actually live like this. (Remember our American communes in the '60s and the roles we played, rapping and freely sharing our naked love with each other? I do; I was in a poetry commune and coupled often.) Buddhists dig it.
Well, how does a 'peaceable kingdom' work? To work at all, it has to be all about works, and trappings of materiality have to be stripped down, desire put on a paleo diet, and consciousness focussed on the old yin and yang - balance for the many; it's the way the emperor likes it. Sounds crazy and cartoonish, but you should hear what they say about capitalism. This is really a central theme of Friend. We don't need no Koyaanisqatsi in our community. And the judge is there, a gentle Lefty arbiter, to restore the balance. True, he's a little too Left, but the promise is that, in the end, like T.S. Eliot said at the end of Four Quartets, "All manner of things shall be well."
Friend has three parts, Their Love, Two Lives and Family, and works its way through the process of becoming and unbecoming in the lives of Lee Seok Chun and Sun Hee, a couple with a young child, Nam Ho, who are seeking a divorce from each other. The whole of Friend is equal to the sum of these parts. Judge Wu listens patiently when Sun Hee, a leading mezzo-soprano for the Provincial Performing Arts Company meets with him in his court chambers to plead her case for the divorce. Wu tries to surmise the underlying issue:
Why does she want a divorce? Do she and her husband not have a good sex life? Judge Jeong Jin Wu thought. Or perhaps her husband is impotent. No, it can't be that. She has a son.
Standard stuff everywhere.
It turns out to be a matter of irreconcilable differences. But it's a society of reconciliation, and such differences, at least as far as Wu is concerned, need to be fleshed out and understood - possibilities other than divorce imagined. Wu is a sensitive soul who loses sleep over the discord of his supplicants. "Much like a fisherman trying to untangle knots in a fishing line, Jeong Jin Wu was upset by the burden of having to deal with another family's misery," the narrator tells us. Oh, what tangled webs we weave when we go and self-deceive, he seems to believe, but then what does Wu know, as Nam-Nyong puts the judge through some serious changes of his own, when we discover Wu, too, has marital difficulties. Spicy dramatic tension.
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