Church, sex and 'American Hagwon'
Courtesy of David Tizzard
I thought "Pachinko" was a fantastic book, particularly the first two-thirds. The narrative, the culture, the characters and, most importantly, the continuing sense of claustrophobia. I was there. Trapped. I was a young woman carrying a child, living among strangers, frightened for my future but clinging to hope.
That is the power of Lee Min Jin's writing. She takes you there. She makes you feel it. She reminds you not only what it is to be human, but also what it is to be someone else — which is, when you think about it, a rather extraordinary thing for a book to achieve. You sit in a comfortable chair, a cup of coffee somewhere nearby, and voluntarily spend several hundred pages experiencing the suffering of people who lived in circumstances you will never fully understand. You emerge feeling that you've learned something about the human condition. Perhaps you have. Perhaps you've just enjoyed the experience of feeling that you have.
That also comes across in the way Lee carries herself in interviews. The empathy. The intelligence. The compassion for others. I have shown her conversation with Dua Lipa more than once to my university students here in Korea, pointing them towards how pop stars and authors can understand the world and speak their truth when not under the all-encompassing eye of a Korean entertainment company.
I went into "American Hagwon" with great anticipation. I ordered it immediately and carefully avoided all the interviews, reviews and everything else that was happening online. It’s the same when I watch movies like Na Hong-jin’s “Hope,” Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” and Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love.” I love these directors so much that I want my first experience to be mine and mine alone, untainted by YouTube comments or critical analysis.
Five days later, I had finished the 600+ pages of Lee Min Jin’s latest multigenerational novel. Her latest work is set against the backdrop of the Asian Financial Crisis, moving between Seoul and California. The prose, as always, is very good. The chapters are a near-perfect length to keep you interested but also short enough so that every time you finish one you think to yourself, “Just one more.”
Some things immediately made sense to me, having lived and worked here in Korea for the last 21 years. First, the extended family all living together — brothers, cousins, relatives. There’s eight of us in my family out in Gangwon Province and, although we sometimes feel like we’re getting under each other’s feet, it’s brilliant for the socialization of our children. You also learn, among other things, that your own preferences are not necessarily the most important preferences in the building. This is an uncomfortable lesson, particularly for academics who are professionally trained to believe that their preferences are worth discussing at length.
And then there’s the other way the families grow in the novel. My father-in-law adopted a young girl in Busan many many decades ago and she has become part of our family. It’s sometimes difficult to explain to others, but while family is blood, it’s also many other things. Korean society knows that very well when you peer under the veneer of the pure Confucian single blood line that the grand narrative posits.
The first 100-odd pages had me hooked. It was nineties Korea, the financial crisis, the sense that something was coming. Something bad. Something ready to tear at the fabric of society. But it wasn’t aliens. It wasn’t a serial killer. It was numbers. An almost incomprehensible force with foreign origins that pulled men out of their offices and threw them unceremoniously off bridges, never to return home.
The final image of the novel was also something that stayed with me. It was beautiful. An aging man once again finding some sense of purpose. A young child, traumatized, but with the knowledge that she must continue. The two of them, yin and yang in many ways; completely different and yet totally the same. The way it’s written is a movie scene. I could see it all unfold in my mind’s eye. That is the beauty of the writing.
But then there’s the areas where the novel didn’t grab me as much. Lion’s speech towards the end felt like it was building towards being the story’s big set piece. Where the underlying philosophy is shoved to the surface. We are finally going to get the forensic examination of what education is, should be, could be — and yet never is. It honestly felt like it was going to herald itself as a moment that would become part of literature, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.
There is, of course, a particular danger when a novel starts telling you how important it is. You can feel the machinery moving. The characters stop being people and instead become representatives of ideas. The dialogue becomes less about what somebody might actually say and more about what the author wants somebody to say. You begin to recognise the scaffolding. And once you see the scaffolding, it becomes rather difficult to admire the building.
And so it simply fizzled out. Lion was unconvincing. I felt just as confused as the audience members. It was the same with Danbi’s downfall. A sentence was all she got: “Caught at the airport with money in her purse” – or words to that effect. Yes, there was a bit of a post-script, but we never got to see her mind process it. We never got to feel it, to be there when it happened, despite her being the villain of the piece. She was essentially killed off-screen, taking our satisfaction with her.
Here, if I may be so bold, is my biggest problem with the novel - but it’s not what the rest of the internet is arguing about. There are countless people online trying to claim authority over what makes a Korean novel, who gets to tell the Korean story, whether Korean-Americans feel "han" and all the usual stuff. It’s certainly not my position to get involved in that. But I didn’t really get a sense of the novel in that way. For me, I gradually got bored of all the sex.
It was this couple having sex. Then this couple. This couple were having sex for the first time. These two had never had sex. This woman loves having sex. This girl is lying to her parents about having sex. And so on. But it wasn’t Fifty Shades of Gray. It was all Taylor Swift or Coldplay sex. A little bit of panties, stockings, the occasional spanking and then on to the next one.
Now, it’s quite possible that my inner British man is coming out and I’m too prudish for all this. There is, after all, a particular British talent for pretending not to be interested in sex while simultaneously being fascinated by it. We have built entire cultural institutions around this contradiction.
But I don’t think that’s the case. I absolutely adore Ang Lee’s incredible Chinese drama “Lust, Caution.” Tang Wei and Tony Leung are simply magnetic. I think Park Chan-wook’s "The Handmaiden," with Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee doing things that you didn’t think were possible on screen, is pure gold. This is sex turned up to eleven and placed in an historical setting that removes you enough from the warp and woof of modernity to add a dash of distance and, simultaneously, cosplay to the whole thing. It’s kinky.
American Hagwon is church sex. It’s the kind where you keep your socks on. There's nothing wrong with that but, the way I read it, it was just that for 300-400 pages. It was like a Mills and Boon novel or an episode of Desperate Housewives. Give me sex, sure. But give me something else as well in between, please. Give me Shogun.
Ultimately, I feel about American Hagwon the same way I do about BTS’ latest album. I didn’t really enjoy it because I don’t think it was written for me. I’m just not the target audience. Perhaps that's the problem with being a critic — or at least one of the problems. You spend enough time examining culture and eventually begin to believe that your own response to something must be saying something important about the thing itself. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you simply don't like the music, don't enjoy the book, don't understand the appeal and would rather go home and read something else. There is a certain freedom in admitting that.
Nevertheless, many people like both of these things and fair play to them. I’ll always have "Pachinko," though.