Clifford is the special guest at our February International Book Club, giving us a perspective on The Vegetarian by Han Kang. All books mentioned in this post are collected in the Community Curated Shelf at Staunton Books & Tea.
My first experience in Asia was my service in the United States Peace Corps in South Korea, which began shortly after my graduation from college.
After two months of in-country training in Korean language and culture, plus learning the basic techniques of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, I took up my position as an English teacher at Jeonbuk University in the city of Jeonju, about 120 miles south of South Korea’s capital, Seoul. During my two years in the country, I didn’t do much reading of Korean literature, although as a language-learning exercise I did do a translation into English of a Korean fairy tale from a volume I still have. (Much later, I used that translation as the starting point of a short story that appeared in my first book.)
After a year in Korea, I spent my school’s winter holiday in Japan, noticing the differences and similarities between that country and Korea. When I returned to the US after my second year, I had hoped to continue my Korean language studies while earning an MA in English literature, but in the mid-1970s, my university no longer offered Korean. Instead, I took Japanese because the two languages are grammatically similar, both use many Chinese loan-words, and both supplement their phonetic alphabets with Chinese characters. I went on to earn a law degree and took a job with a large law firm that eventually, because of my Asian experience, transferred me to its Singapore branch office. It was in Singapore that I began to learn Mandarin, starting from the base of the Chinese characters I had learned while studying Korean and Japanese.
Later, while working at the World Bank in Washington DC, I traveled often to various cities in China and also made frequent return visits to South Korea, occasionally stopping over in Japan. (My work took me to most of the other countries in East Asia, too, but China and Korea were my favorites.)
As exciting as all that travel was, more than two decades ago I decided to give up my job at the World Bank in order to devote my time to writing fiction, an interest I’d held—but never acted on—since high school. While looking for a place to settle that would be conducive to writing, I discovered Staunton and bought a house here. At the same time, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program, hoping to acquire the tools I would need as a fiction writer and also to discover a community of writers who would help me along the path to publication.
Unsurprisingly, much of the fiction that I have written over the past twenty years is either based on my own experience in Asia or inspired by it. My travels have also had an impact on my reading over the years, and I love to read works by Asian and Asian-American writers, especially when the focus is on North Asia--Korea, China, and Japan.
With all that as background, I’d like to recommend books from or about Korea, Japan, and China, starting with The Vegetarian by Han Kang, the subject of the discussion I’ll be leading in February for the International Book Club.
South Korea
The Vegetarian by Han Kang. This is the novel that brought Han Kang to my attention, and to many other readers as well. It has been described as “Kafka-esque” in the way it uses dark allegory to explore themes of power and obsession. It begins in the ordinary household of a young couple, but quickly spirals into madness as the result of a choice the main character makes.
Human Acts by Han Kang. After I read The Vegetarian, I wanted to read more of the author’s work and turned to this novel. In May 1980, a little over two years after I left South Korea, the authoritarian government that came to power in a 1979 coup cracked down on protesters in the city of Gwangju, just 60 miles from where I lived. Hundreds of people were killed (estimates are as high as 2000). This novel addresses the Gwangju conflict and its aftermath, which still resonates in Korea today.
The White Book by Han Kang is a semi-autobiographical work (titled simply “White” in the original Korean) about the death of her sister who died shortly after birth. It’s an odd little book divided into short chapters that are about, ostensibly, things that are white, but are in fact things that constantly bring the narrator’s thoughts back to her sister.
Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun is, on one level, a murder mystery told from several points of view. The brutal killing of a young woman is revisited by each of the narrators, who were all impacted by the woman’s death. Set in 2002, the novel exposes Korean class stratification and alienation among younger Koreans. My review of the book appeared in the New York Journal of Books.
Our Twisted Hero by Yi Mun-yeol is a short allegorical novel in which an elementary school classroom stands in for a national dictatorship. The novel was written in the 1980s and can be read as a companion to Han Kang’s Human Acts, because it is clearly a reaction to the authoritarian regime of the time.
Kim Ji-Yeong, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo offers few surprises to anyone familiar with South Korea. It has always been a male-dominated, if not sexist, society, and the country has been slow to embrace change. This novel is a litany of disappointments for the title character, who is constantly denied opportunities solely because she’s a woman.
North Korea
Friend by Paek Nam Nyong is a rarity—a novel by a North Korean about life in Pyongyang. This is another book I reviewed for the New York Journal of Books, and I found it fascinating, and far more realistic than Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, also set in North Korea. There’s nothing subversive about the book, as the author was approved
by the writers’ union and, in fact, it doesn’t deal with anything overtly political. In my review of the book, I contrasted it with the book by Cho Nam-joo, mentioned above, because it suggests that North Korea is, on its face, more egalitarian than the South, with men and women striving side by side for the betterment of the country. And yet there is still an expectation that women bear the traditional burdens of homemaking and child-rearing.
Korean American
I am including two books by Korean-Americans because their work deals with the Korean diaspora. Both Min Jin Lee and Angie Kim were born in Korea but emigrated to the US with their families as children. They write in English.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a historical narrative about Koreans living under the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula who eventually find success operating pachinko parlors in Japan. The plight of Koreans as a minority in Japan is well known in Korea and among those who study Korea, but perhaps not as well-known to most Americans, which might explain why this novel has been such a success in the West.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction in 2023 and is set in Northern Virginia during the pandemic. The narrator is a graduate student, the daughter of a white American man and his Korean wife, who is home from school because of COVID. The Korean mother is a linguistics scholar and often uses a linguistic analysis to assess what the family is encountering, including the difficulty of communicating with her non-verbal autistic son. When the father disappears, the family is thrown into turmoil.
China
Red Sorghum by Mo Yan is one of this Nobel Prize-winner’s best-known novels, a compilation of five novellas, two of which were made into a terrific film by acclaimed director Zhang Yimou. The work tells the story of a family in Shandong Province of China and spans five decades.
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian is probably this Nobel Prize-winning author’s best-known work in English. It is loosely autobiographical, based on Gao’s false diagnosis of terminal lung cancer and his subsequent trek into rural China. Gao is also a translator of the works of Beckett and Ionesco, and this work, as well as his plays, shows their influence.
Happy Dreams by Jia Pingwa is a novel that explores poverty in China through the eyes of a trash picker. Jia is not as well-known as some other Chinese writers, but when I was asked to review the book for the Washington Independent Review of Books, I jumped at the chance. The Chinese version of the novel is simply entitled Happy. The English title,
though, suits the novel well. The main character’s dreams, while happy, may be somewhat unrealistic. Is the author making a prediction about China’s future? Could it be that the rapid economic development that has left so many behind is doomed to create a permanently disaffected class? If Liu fails in his dream of becoming a Xi’an man, is there any hope for the rest of China’s migrants? The China depicted in Happy Dreams is not one that will be familiar to Western tourists who are typically shielded from the country’s underside. Xi’an is known for its terracotta warriors, after all, not for the small army of men and women who scavenge trash from every corner of the city. Those with more than a superficial knowledge of the country, however, will recognize the novel’s brutal honesty.
Japan
The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami is the writer’s most recent novel. I reviewed it for the Washington Independent Review of Books and found it delightfully puzzling. It is about a man who, as a teenager, courts a girl about his age. The girl asserts that she is merely a shadow of her real self, who lives in a distant town behind high walls. Between the two of them, they conjure the details of that town, and he says he would like to visit her real self if he could go there. When the girl disappears, he pines for her and eventually finds a way to get to the town and meet the girl’s real self. The reader is left wondering which girl is real and which is the shadow. This is Murakami’s brand of Magical Realism, and even includes a conversation that the man has with another woman about the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Sea of Fertility (tetralogy) by Yukio Mishima. I first began reading Mishima when I lived in Korea in the 1970s, and I probably read the third volume of this four-part series, The Temple of Dawn, in Bangkok, where it is set, in 1978. Mishima had a fascinating history, was deeply enmeshed in militaristic conservatism in Japan, and his writing is extremely dark and often disturbing.
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. Possibly the best known of this Nobel Prize-winner’s novels, it follows the narrator “Bird” as he faces a personal crisis after his son is born with a brain herniation requiring immediate surgery. The novel explores the conflict of a man unsure whether to let the child die or to coexist with it, thus giving up his dreams of an exotic life. The novel is clearly autobiographical, as Oe’s own son was born with a brain injury.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata was published before the author won the Nobel Prize in 1968 and is considered one of his greatest works. It tells the story of a love affair between a sophisticated Tokyo gentleman and a geisha in a remote resort town.
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