The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim is a healthy immersion in the reality of history. And for fans of manhwa comics and Korean pop culture in general, it offers the opportunity to appreciate a perhaps unexpected complexity—a touching attention to personal and collective roots. The style of the drawing is an imperious black and white, the ink producing sharp lines on the page. The lettering chosen for the Italian edition goes well with the images, recalling the aspect of handwritten hangeul.

With this graphic novel we understand how the brutal legacy of the Japanese colonial occupation (1910-1945) and the violence of the Korean War (1950-1953) that left the country divided is still painfully present in society and in individuals today (too often the world forgets that the war never officially ended).

  The narration in ten chapters proceeds back and forth, because memory is not linear. We start from 2020 and with this blunt line by the narrator and protagonist, a young writer: “I abandoned my mom.” With these words, one of the themes of the book already imposes itself: the relationship with the parents’ generation, the burden of responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the younger generations, the burden of expectations fed by the older generations after surviving the war. Which brings us to another theme, connected to the previous one: the economic fragility that arose out of the industrial and financial mechanisms of South Korea and the sense of economic insecurity, shared by many peers in other societies around the world, from Europe to North America.

  However, it is through the protagonist’s mother, who takes center stage in the second chapter, that Gendry-Kim explores memory and its painful elaborations. The protagonist knows that her mother had had another son before the war, from a happy marriage that had eased the sufferings of a harsh childhood in the poverty of an undeveloped Korea humiliated by the Japanese yoke, as we read in the third chapter. This section tells the mother’s story when she was a child, developing as a sort of reverse idyll, where the harsh conditions of life do not erase flashes of poetry, and the author’s drawings seem to quote here and there traditional landscapes. The illustration of the pet dog is very tender: his fate anticipates the horrors that are brewing, because the Imperial Japanese Army scours the Korean countryside to enlist young people.

  Then comes the marriage of the young woman, the arrival of the Soviet troops who defeat the Japanese, the fear of the occupation but also the hopes for a better future, while the protagonists of the nationalist movement assert themselves. They are “happy still,” as the fifth chapter alludes to, because the couple has a son and everything seems to have a smile. But in 1950, the war begins and we are shown the anguish of fleeing columns of refugees, the nightmare of those who lose sight of their husband and son in the chaos—as happens to the protagonist’s mother. Here, the drawing style becomes expressionist, and thick black ink dominates the page.

The trauma of forced separations crosses the whole of Korean society like an invisible fault line. The meetings agreed to by the governments of the South and the North, managed by the Red Cross, are not able to really alleviate the sufferings, and The Waiting shows it through the story of two sisters who meet again in 2018, sixty-eight years after their last meeting.

  In the last chapters, the protagonist appeals to her own personal memory: the relationship with the mother’s new partner and her son (who therefore becomes the writer’s new brother), the search for the lost partners who remained in the North, the loss of her sister. She is tormented by the awareness that her mother has lived two lives, and that the second has not been able to erase the first or to cauterize the wounds.

  In the end, what is left? The memories. The protagonist collects her mother’s memories and becomes her guardian and witness, going to live not far from the 38th parallel that divides the Koreas, on Ganghwa Island “located directly across the channel from North Korea.” She thinks, “When Mom visits next time, I’ll take her to the Ganghwa Peace Observatory." There is hope, despite it all.

Marco Del Corona

Culture desk/la Lettura supplement

Corriere della Sera