BOOK REVIEW 'Tiger Season' explores 1960s DMZ and camp town tensions
"Tiger Season" by Gojan Nikolich / Courtesy of Black Rose Writing
“In the old Korea storybooks they called the Imjin River ‘The Water Dragon’ and on that freezing night so long ago, Eddie Profar had heard it roar.”
So reads a sentence on the first page of Gojan Nikolich’s “Tiger Season: A Novel of Korea,” set in 1968 during what some have called the “Second Korean War." Taking place amid negotiations to free American sailors seized by North Korea earlier that year, the novel explores the lives of both the soldiers living on an American base and the Korean women working in the camp town ("gijichon" in Korean) outside its gates.
While a handful of novels have taken midcentury encounters between GIs and so-called “business girls” as their subject, these books tend to focus on intercultural relationships as the heart of the story. "Tiger Season," on the other hand, is more interested in painting a detailed picture of the social and political environment in which a fatherless young man from Minnesota and a young woman orphaned during the Korean War could meet in the late 1960s, while also telling a gripping story involving DMZ night patrols, spies, secret tunnels and negotiations at Panmunjeom, all as a Siberian tiger stalks the Imjin River, quietly claiming lives.
Nikolich depicts the inner world of the near-comatose Eddie Profar, whose “brain burned fiercely like a stubborn ember in an ebbing fire,”with an obvious gift for prose that is finely crafted but takes care not to draw too much attention to itself, always deployed in service of telling the story.
Thanks to the detail on display, with vivid descriptions of the camp town being “a crazy jumble of shacks and slanted tile roofs patched with corrugated metal” or the experience of smiling soldiers having their photos taken next to a sign reading, “Danger! This is a Venereal Disease Zone” being “like taking your picture in front of Mount Rushmore,” the reader might guess that Nikolich witnessed many of the things he describes — a correct assumption.
As Nikolich told The Korea Times, “I served my Korea tour as an E5 Sergeant with the 2nd Infantry Division in 1970-71 at Camp Howze (Bongilcheon) and Camp Casey (Dongducheon), where I worked as a military journalist/public affairs specialist and as editor of the 2nd ID newspaper.”
His position allowed him to travel frequently, even to Tokyo, where the division newspaper was composed and printed.
"I wrote about and attended meetings at Panmunjeom as part of my public affairs job, so that’s where I gathered some of my personal impressions for the book,” he said.
Other even more personal experiences also shaped the book: “In 1970 I was involved in a patrol jeep incident along the DMZ that was similar to the one depicted in the book — both the crash off the cliff and the injuries of the main character. After spending several months in hospitals in Seoul and Busan, I, too, searched for the mystery farmer/guardian angel who happened to call in a rescue helicopter. Sadly, I was never able to thank him. I’ve had a big soft spot in my heart for Koreans ever since.”
The book had its genesis in notes Nikolich wrote during his stay in Korea: “During my hospital rehab, with nothing else to do, I scribbled my thoughts about Korea’s strange camp town world into a notebook that ended up packed away and forgotten for 50-plus years in a box that I didn’t discover until a few years ago when I was cleaning out my garage. Those notes sparked memories, so I used the fictional vehicle of Eddie Profar, Jia the courtesan, Yevgeny Lee and the tiger to tell the story.”
As for the predator in the novel’s title, tigers featured in the stories soldiers traded even in the 1970s. “I’d heard ghost-story talk of a roaming tiger loose out on the ice of the Imjin River. I imagined how this would put a little extra jump in your step while working at night along the fence.”
He also wanted to draw attention to “the neglected tension of those times” and he “also felt that someone should talk about the refugee and orphan history of many of the women who were recruited involuntarily into the gijichon world.”
His sympathy for these young women is on display in passages describing them as “Orphans and runaways who wrote lies home to their families about their jobs as supposed tourist hospitality workers and restaurant cooks. Entertainment assistants, maids at the military camp. They would carry each other’s letters out of the Ville to be postmarked in Seoul or Munsan or Suwon. Never from one of the camp towns, where everybody knew what was going on. There was a tender, vulnerable sorrow to their beauty as they spoke their pidgin English and peddled themselves and their diluted cocktails. Even in such sordid surroundings they seemed strangely innocent.”
Despite the story taking place against such a seedy backdrop and amid Cold War tensions, including flashbacks to the loss of a young girl’s family during the Korean War, the novel isn’t without its humor, often arising from the conversations between characters — particularly when Yevgeny Lee rambles on about his past lives, which always involved soldiering — but perhaps most obvious in a subplot featuring an American general who figures out an ingenious way to one-up his North Korean counterparts during negotiations at Panmunjeom.
It is perhaps not until the end of the novel that it becomes clear how skillfully constructed the story is, as the final pages tie everything together and reveal the threads carefully woven through the pages. Nikolich was glad he waited half a century to write about Korea, saying, “The younger version of me couldn’t have done it properly.”
Readers interested in Korean history and Korea-U.S. relations, as well as anyone wanting to spend time with a compelling page-turner, will find much to admire in “Tiger Season,” published by Black Rose Writing in Texas. Deploying finely wrought prose and engaging characters, Nikolich combines personal experience and historical insight to craft a riveting tale of the Cold War that also sheds light on the often-overlooked experiences of Korean women living in the shadows of American bases.
Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr, and co-author of "Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising."