After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.

This one won’t cheer you up.

I learned about a kind of hidden history I had no idea about from this book. For one, this book does give voice to a set of experiences that are by their very nature voiceless. But two, this story involves a set of events that do not get discussed pretty much ever in the West and especially not right now during the winter Olympics.

I found out that South Korea experienced a series of coups in the 60s and 70s, that among many other consequences led to a student uprising in 1980 that was violently put down. Hundreds of high school and college students (among others) were killed when they rebelled against the authoritarian uprising after the assassination of the former president.

This novel doesn’t fully explored those events as a series of linked plot elements, but instead projects the voice of various actors (through representational voices) including an older factory worker looking back decades later at the physical and sexual abuse she incurred, a student who was tortured and imprisoned, an aid worker, a dead student narrating specifically as a corpse (not a disembodied spirit). The resulting novel is told through this extended vignettes and experiences and is over all impressionistic. Her Korean audience would be well aware of the events as part of their social consciousness but for me this was eye opening.

As an American, we have plenty of violent episodes where dozens and hundred of people died as a result of political operating like the massacre at Wounded Knee, the  Bonus March, and various others, but we are pretty good at relegating those kinds of things to the past. Even the murders at Kent State, for as awful as those were, involved four deaths. There’s no veneer of decency that didn’t lead to hundreds of deaths as students marched against Vietnam, but we were definitely lucky.

(Photo by Lee Chunhee)