INTERVIEW

• An Outsider Within: A Chat with Kim Young-ha Vol.8 Summer 2010

  Kim Young-ha is a representative of Korea's new generation of writers. His latest novel to be translated into English, Your Republic Is Calling You, will be published by Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin this fall.   On a breezy, borderline windy spring day, I sat down with writer Kim Young-ha at an outdoor café with arguably the longest name in all of Seoul. Located in the Hongik University district well-known for its indie music and club scene as well as its uncountable array of cafés, Look Outside the Window, The Wind Is Blowing, One Day from the North, One Day from the West is the kind of quiet, understated place just off the main street where you could imagine tucked in a corner. With eyes fixed to his laptop, fingers clicking in fits and spurts, a man pausing to look up in thought out a window. In other words, it’s the kind of place where Kim Young-ha feels right at home. It was quite fitting that for a writer known as a hipster with a pulse on the state of contemporary culture and Korean society, Kim had with him a brand new iPad, not even available yet outside the U.S. Like many of his generation who went to university in the late 1980s during a time of tremendous political, economic, and societal change, or “chaos,” as Kim describes that time, he was struggling with finding a new identity in the midst of so much uncertainty. “As an author,” Kim commented “I feel my duty is to grasp and change and express the feeling of my generation.” "My generation is different,” Kim says, in talking about how he and his contemporaries are no longer interested in writing about more traditional aspects or topics favored by Korean writers of the past. “We focus on the individual.” Indeed, the characters that appear in Kim’s novels and short fiction are alienated, isolated, often without meaningful human connections wandering through the crowded neon-lit streets of Seoul, crammed into vehicles, trapped in elevators, or fixated on their computers while they listen to jazz, muse about Western art, and drive imported cars. Kim burst onto the Korean literary scene in 1996 with his short novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, a story about connections and dislocations with an anonymous narrator who assists the walking wounded in committing suicide. Since then he has published several novels and dozens of short stories, over 24 of which have found their way into foreign language translations. He’s also won numerous literary awards in his native country. His latest work, Quiz Show, which was also adapted as a musical last year, captures the inner lives of educated, talented, yet disaffected people in their 20s, groping for a cause that will give meaning to their increasingly isolated lives in cyberspace. Likening the job of a writer as being similar to that of a spy, Kim says that of all his characters, the one he identifies with the most is Ki-yong, the North Korean protagonist-spy of his latest novel to be translated into English, Your Republic Is Calling You. According to Kim, both writers and spies spend their time observing and recording the life that’s going on around them, which at the same time puts them in the position of being slightly removed from those they attempt to get to know. “I felt myself an outsider as a university student, like Ki-yong,” he says, of the character who enters South Korea posing as a leftist activist university student during the 1980s. “After graduation I also felt like I was an outsider.”   Reportor Kim Stoker and novelist Kim Young-ha   It’s not only the distance that an observer must have in order to fully gain perspective of those being observed that makes Kim feel like an outsider. Growing up near the DMZ, often moving as a result of being raised as a soldier’s son, Kim’s sense of removal from his peers was exacerbated by an accident when he was 10-years-old. His family was living in a cheap rental house on a military base. He and his mother were poisoned by gas fumes from a coal briquette (commonly used for heating at the time). As a result, Kim lost all of the memories from his childhood before age 10. Without memory, without a concrete grasp of one’s past, it is hard to formulate a sense of place and belonging. Writing has been a way for him to “confront my inner problems…my past and trauma.” “Sometimes I feel I have no roots,” Kim says. “I feel myself floating on water.” It wasn’t until he started to write in his 20s that he realized his early childhood memories had been lost. It was then that he confronted his subconscious. “Now I live just as a kind of nomad,” he says, comfortable living in Seoul or New York or any number of other cities throughout the world. Set to be published by Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin this September, Your Republic Is Calling You tells the story of Ki-yong, a North Korean spy sent to the South who is now working as a distributor of foreign films in Seoul. He lives a typical middle class life as “The kind of man who supports his family but is ignored by them.” His wife’s indifference is masked by her secret love affair with a young college student, and their young teenage daughter is cautiously navigating her own way through adolescence. Told in a 24-hour span of time, Ki-yong has to figure out how to react after he receives “Order No. 4” commanding him to return “home”—the first directive he’s heard from Pyongyang in the past 10 years. Kim Young-ha’s interest in the lives of those on the fringes of society takes a new turn in Your Republic Is Calling You. “This novel is about the new diaspora,” he explains. “Ki-yong is kind of an immigrant.” Kim goes on to explain how his complex antihero is not really North Korean or South Korean. “I was looking for a character who sees Seoul and South Korea as a foreigner…[Ki-yong] always feels himself to be an immigrant, an illegal immigrant.” To be sure, Seoul from Ki-yong’s perspective is a dynamic, vibrant capitalist metropolis, yet at the same time it’s a surreal reminder of how alien he feels having grown up in the stifling “harmonica apartments” in the North. In the South he had to adapt and assimilate: “As a transplant in South Korean society, his whole mission was to adapt. He didn’t have the confidence or the courage to resist or reject change. That was a privilege of only the natives.” Ki-yong’s father told him, “Don’t be a fish; be a frog. Swim in the water and jump when you hit the ground.” Indeed, Kim’s depiction of the fast-paced lifestyle of Seoulites will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the city. “Korea is a very fast changing country,” he says. “When I wrote that novel, I wanted to show Seoul to the readers, even to the Korean readers in different ways.” From the eyes of Ki-yong, an outsider within, the streets of Seoul have “never grown more familiar to him.” Kim would agree with his protagonist: “We think we know Seoul but I believe we don’t know [about] where we stay, where we live, so that’s why I combined Jongno with COEX. Jongno is a very old street and COEX is a newly built complex …Seoul is a city where everything is mixed, old things and new things, and weird things [that we take for granted.]” These days, Kim is preparing for a year-long sojourn to New York where he will be a visiting scholar starting this fall at Columbia University. No matter where in the world he is, Kim Young-ha will continue to be a voice for those on the fringes of Korean modernity. “When I write I feel happy,” he says. “I feel alive.” Kim’s growing base of foreign readers should surely hope that he stays a happy man. By Kim Stoker   1. What Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator (2006, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.) 2. Black Flower (2003, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.) 3. Your Republic Is Calling You (2010, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.) 4. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (2005, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.)   5. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (2006, published in Germany) 6. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (2007, published in Turkiye) 7. What Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator (2008, published in Italy) 8. Your Republic Is Calling You (2009, published in France) 9. Quiz Show (2009, published in China) 10. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (2002, published in France)  

FICTION

• Diary of a Murderer Vol.32 Summer 2016

  I killed people regularly for thirty years. I was really diligent back then. Now the statute of limitations has passed for them all and I can even go on about them anywhere. If this was America I could probably publish a memoir. People would attack me. Let them, if they want. It’s not like I have many days left. If I think about it, I’m a pretty tough one. After all those killings, I stopped cold. I felt like, well, like a boatman who’d just sold his boat or a mercenary who’d just retired. I can’t say for sure, but there must have been guys in the Korean War or the Vietnam War who killed more people than me. Do you think they’re all losing sleep over it? I don’t think so. Guilt is fundamentally a weak emotion. Fear, anger, or jealousy is much stronger. In the grips of fear or anger, you won’t fall asleep. When I watch a movie or TV show with someone unable to sleep because of guilt, I laugh. What are these writers who don’t know a thing about life trying to say? ... One of my walls is covered with notes. They are notes of various colors that stay on the wall when you stick them on, and though I don’t know where they came from, they’re all over the house. Eunhui might have bought them to help me remember. These notes have a special name, but I can’t remember what that is right now. After the north wall was covered with these notes, now the wall facing west is plastered with them, but they’re no good. They’re notes I don’t understand, notes I don’t remember why I stuck there in the first place. Like the one saying “You must tell Eunhui.” What was I supposed to tell her? Each of the notes are like distant stars in the universe to me. Nothing seems to connect them to each other. There, there’s also one that the doctor wrote for me: “Imagine it like a freight car hurtling forward without knowing the rails are cut off ahead. What do you think would happen? Wouldn’t the train and the freight pile up at the point where the tracks stop? And it would be chaos wouldn’t it? Sir, this is exactly what’s happening inside your head right now.” * I remember an old lady I met in the poetry class. She told me that in the past—she emphasized this part—she had had a lot of love affairs. She said, I don’t regret it. When you get old, they’re all memories. Whenever I’m bored I think about each of the men I slept with. I’m living just like that old lady. I recall each of the people that have died at my hands. Now that I think about it there was a movie about that. Memories of a Murder. * I believe in zombies. There’s no reason why something you can’t see doesn’t exist. I often watch zombie movies. I once kept an axe in my bedroom. When Eunhui asked why I kept an axe there, I said it was because of zombies. Axes work best on dead people. * The worst thing in the world is to be murdered. That’s the one thing that I won’t let happen to me. * I hid the syringe in the sewing kit near my head. A lethal dose of pentobarbital sodium. It’s a drug used to put cows and pigs to sleep. I’m thinking of using it on myself when I get to the point where I’m smearing my shit across the walls. I can’t let it go that far. * I’m afraid. Frankly, I’m kind of afraid. I’ll read a sutra.    pp. 44–47Translated by Krys Lee

• I Have the Right to Destroy Myself Vol.28 Summer 2015

    Part 1  The Death of Marat   I’m looking at Jacques Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired—bloodied—nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas. I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection of a young revolutionary in the wake of a sudden attack nor the relief of a man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Seeing this painting for the first time, your eyes initially rest on Marat’s face. But his face doesn’t tell you anything, so your gaze moves in one of two directions: either toward the hand clutching the letter or the hand hanging limply outside of the tub. Even in death, he has kept hold of the letter and the pen. Marat was killed by a woman who had written him earlier, as he was drafting a reply to her letter. The pen Marat grips into death injects tension into the calm and serenity of the scene. We should all emulate David. An artist’s passion shouldn’t create passion. An artist’s supreme virtue is to be detached and cold. Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, lost her life at the guillotine. A young Girondin, Corday decided that Marat must be eliminated. It was July 13, 1793; she was twenty-five years old. Arrested immediately after the incident, Corday was beheaded four days later, on July 17. Robespierre’s reign of terror was set in motion after Marat’s death. David understood the Jacobins’ aesthetic imperative: A revolution cannot progress without the fuel of terror. With time that relationship inverts: The revolution presses forward for the sake of terror. Like an artist, the man creating terror should be detached, cold-blooded. He must keep in mind that the energy of the terror he releases can consume him. Robespierre died at the guillotine.   I close my art book, get up, and take a bath. I always wash meticulously on the days I work. After my bath, I shave carefully and go to the library, where I look for clients and scan through potentially helpful materials. This is slow, dull work, but I plod through it. Sometimes I don’t have a single client for months. But I can survive for half a year if I find just one, so I don’t mind putting long hours into research. Usually I read history books or travel guides at the library. A single city contains tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of years of history, as well as the evidence of their interweaving. In travel guides, all of this is compressed into several lines. For example, an introduction to Paris starts like this:   Far from just a secular place, Paris is the holy land of religious, political, and artistic freedom, alternately brandishing that freedom and secretly yearning for more of it.  Known for its spirit of tolerance, this city has been the refuge for thinkers, artists, and revolutionaries like Robespie-rre, Curie, Wilde, Sartre, Picasso, Ho Chi Minh, and Khomeini, along with many other unusual figures. Paris has fine examples of excellent 19th-century urban planning, and  ike its music, art, and theater, its architecture encompasses everything from the Middle Ages to the avant-garde, sometimes even beyond the avant-garde. With its history, innovations, culture, and civilization, Paris is a necessity in the world: If Paris did not exist, we would have to invent her.   One word more about Paris would be superfluous. Such succinctness is why I enjoy reading travel guides and history books. People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life. I always take a trip when I’m paid at the completion of a job. This time, I will go to Paris. These few lines in the travel guide are enough to pique my curiosity. I will spend the days reading Henry Miller or Oscar Wilde or sketching Ingres at the Louvre. The man who reads travel guides on a trip is a bore. I read novels when I’m traveling, but I don’t read them in Seoul. Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting. At the library, I flip through magazines first. Of all the articles, the interviews interest me the most. If I’m lucky, I find clients in them. Reporters, armed with middlebrow, cheap sensibilities, hide my potential clients’ characteristics between the lines. They never ask questions like, “Have you ever felt the urge to kill someone?” And obviously they never wonder, “How do you feel when you see blood?” They don’t show the interviewees David’s or Delacroix’s paintings and ask them their thoughts. Instead, the interviews are filled with meaningless chatter. But they can’t fool me; I catch the glimmer of possibility in their empty words. I unearth clues from the types of music they prefer, the family histories they sometimes reveal, the books that hit a nerve, the artists they love. People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges. They are waiting for someone like me.    pp. 3 - 6

• Black Flower Vol.24 Summer 2014

  “What sort of land is Mexico?” This was at the Seoul Young Men’s Christian Associa­tion. An American missionary spoke, his black beard covering his neck. “Mexico is far. Very far.” The boy narrowed his eyes. “Then where is it close to?” The missionary laughed. “It’s right below America. And it’s very hot. But why are you asking about Mexico?” The boy showed him the advertisement in the Capi­tal Gazette. But the missionary, who did not know Chinese characters, could not read the advertise­ment. Instead, another young Korean explained the contents of the advertisement in English. Only then did the missionary nod. The boy asked him, “If I were your son, would you tell me to go?” The mis­sionary did not understand right away, so the boy asked again. The missionary’s face grew grave and he slowly shook his head. “Then, if you were me, would you go?” The missionary was lost in deep thought. The boy hadn’t been long at the school, but he was bright and unusually quick to understand. He had been raised as an orphan, but had not grown timid, and he stood out from the other students with simi­lar stories. The bearded missionary gave him some coffee and a muffin. The boy’s mouth began to water. The peddler who had taken him around the country had taught him: “If someone gives you something to eat, count to one hundred before eating. And if someone wants to buy something of yours, double the price that comes to mind. That way no one will look down on you.” The boy rarely had the opportunity to fol­low these instrucions. No one gave him anything to eat, and no one wanted to buy anything he owned. The missionary opened his eyes wide. “Aren’t you hungry?” The boy’s lips moved slightly. Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four. He couldn’t bear it any longer. He took the sweet-smelling raisin muffin and began to stuff it into his mouth. When he had fin­ished the muffin and coffee, the missionary brought him to a room with a lot of books and showed him a map of the world. On it was a country that looked like a sunken, empty belly. Mexico. The missionary asked him, “Do you really want to go? You’ve only been attending school for three months... how about studying more before you go?” The boy shook his head. “They say that chances like this do not come of­ten. I heard that boys with no parents are welcome.” The missionary could see that his heart was set. He gave the boy an English Bible. “Someday you will be able to read it. If you earn some money in Mexico, go to America. The Lord will guide you.” Then he hugged the boy. The boy held the missionary tightly. His beard brushed the nape of the boy’s neck. The boy went to Jemulpo and stood at the end of the long line. In that line he met the strapping man who tousled the boy’s hair. “A person must have a name. Forget childhood names like Jang-soe. Take Kim as your family name and Ijeong as your given name. It’s easy to write—just the character i (二), meaning two, and the character jeong (正), meaning upright.” As the line grew shorter he wrote the boy’s name in Chinese characters. It was seven strokes in all. The man’s name was Jo Jangyun. A staff sergeant engineer in the new-style army of the Korean Empire, he had set aside his uniform when the Russo- Japanese War broke out. There were a number of others in the same situation. Two hundred of these men, who had suited up together and trained in the new-style long rifles with the Russian advisory corps, had thronged to Jemulpo. There were enough of them to form an entire battalion. They had no land and no relatives. No nation needed an army more urgently than the feeble empire, but no rice could be found in the empire’s storerooms to feed them. Above all, the Japanese were demanding a curtailment of Korean military expenditures and a reduction in force of arms. Soldiers on the frontiers left their barracks and wandered off, and when they saw the Continental Colonization Company’s advertisement they raced to Jemulpo. They were the first to want to leave for Mexico, where work, money, and warm food were said to await them. Jo Jangyun was one of those men. His father, a hunter in Hwanghae province, had left for China; someone had seen him living with a Chinese woman in Shanghai. But Jo Jangyun did not go to Shanghai. Instead he chose Mexico, where they said the sun was warm year-round. And didn’t they say his wages would be dozens of times higher than a soldier’s pay? What did it matter where he went? There was no need to hesitate. Life in Mexico couldn’t be any harder than it had been in the army. The boy cast his gaze over the ocean once more. Three black-billed seagulls wheeled above his head. Someone had said that there was gold in Mexico. They said that yellow gold poured forth from the earth, making many suddenly rich. “No. That’s Amer­ica,” insisted another, but he sounded uncertain too. The boy repeated his name. “Kim Ijeong. My name is Kim Ijeong. I am going to a far land. And I will return as an adult Kim Ijeong. I will return with my name and with money and I will buy land, and there I will plant rice.” Those with land were respected. That was a simple truth the boy had learned on the road. It couldn’t be Mexican land. It had to be Korean land, and a rice paddy. But another thought had raised its head in the boy’s heart, the thought of another strange land, called America. The seagulls fluttered above the surface of the water as if dancing. The quicker ones flew away with fairly large fish in their beaks. The wings of the gulls were tinged red. The sun was setting. The boy went down to the cabin and again wedged himself into the corner. The coarse, low voices of men could be heard between the cries of children. There was no strength in the voices of these men; they did not know their futures. Their words dissipated like the foam that washed against the prow of the ship. The boy closed his eyes. He hoped that he would not wake until breakfast.    pp. 6-9

• Your Republic Is Calling You Vol.8 Summer 2010

  Your Republic Is Calling You tells the story of a spy who receives a mysterious calling to return back “home” to the North. He has 24-hours to gather up the loose ends of his bourgeois life in the South.   In the 1980s, when Ki-yong was in college, South Korea was closer to North Korea than it was to today’s South. Jobs were guaranteed for life and college students never worried about their futures. The banks and conglomerates, with their lobbies of imported marble, seemed indestructible. Adult children took care of their parents and respected them. The president was chosen by a huge margin, through indirect election, and the opposition party existed only in name. Most people weren’t too interested in the world beyond South Korea’s borders. The North’s motto, “Let’s Live Our Way,” described South Korea during the 1980s. In redistributing resources, the government’s whim was more powerful than market principles, so government employees were severely corrupted by rampant bribes and fraudulent dealings, just like in the North. All students, whether they were in high school or college, were in the government-controlled students’ national defense corps, heading to school a few times a week in drill uniforms. And once a month the entire citizenry would participate in civil defense drills. The capitals of both countries would turn pitch black once every few months for the mandatory blackout drills, initiated to better prepare for possible air raids. The South today is nothing like the South of the 1980s. Today’s South is actually a completely different country, one that morphed organically into something different from the North. Now it’s probably more like Singapore or France. Married couples don’t feel the need to have children, the per capita income is around twenty thousand dollars, the futures of banks and large conglomerates aren’t set in stone, tens of thousands of foreigners arrive every year to marry Koreans and to obtain jobs, and elementary school students fly out of Inchon International Airport daily to study English abroad. Russian guns are sold in Pusan, sex partners are found online, people watch live broadcasts of the Winter Olympics on their cell phones, San Franciscan Ecstasy is transported in FedEx boxes, and half the Korean population invests in mutual funds. The president, humorless and unable to laugh off satire, is the target of jeers, and a party representing the workers was elected to the National Assembly for the first time after liberation from the Japanese occupation. If Ki-yong had predicted that the South would change like this in twenty years, he would have been treated like he was crazy. Sitting on a red plastic Lotteria chair in Chongno -o-ga, Ki-yong thinks about the three countries he’s lived in. North Korea, the South of the 1980s and 1990s, and the South of the twenty-first century. One is already a relic of history. He is standing at a fork in the road of his life. Which should he choose, the North or the South? For the first time in his life, he wants to kneel in front of someone and ask: What would you do? No, he would just ask, What do you think I should do? For the past twenty years, he’s believed that he was working a job that was a little more dangerous than your average one. In a world filled with large-scale layoffs and series of bankruptcies, collapses of department stores and bridges and fires in the subways, he didn’t think that his life as a forgotten spy was that perilous. But he forgot about his destiny, which hadn’t forgotten about him, just like Paul Bourget’s poem that stated, “One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.” 

ESSAYS

• The World of the Text Vol.23 Spring 2014

REVIEWS

• [TURKISH] When AND How Does a Human Become Human? Vol. 65 Autumn 2024

• The Dark Lives of Men: Diary of a Murderer by Kim Young-ha Vol.44 Summer 2019

• The Achievements of Contemporary Korean Literature: Memoir of a Murderer by Kim Young-ha Vol.39 Spring 2018

• Magic, Martyrs, and Motorcycles: I Hear Your Voice by Kim Young-ha Vol.37 Autumn 2017

• Reading Korean Prose in Russian: What Took Place No One… by Kim Young-ha Vol.33 Autumn 2016

• History and Longing: Black Flower by Kim Young-ha Vol.3 Spring 2009

• Death Reborn: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-ha Vol.14 Winter 2011

• A Master of Murder: How a Murderer Remembers by Kim Young-ha Vol.22 Winter 2013

• Speed to Salvation: I Hear Your Voice by Kim Young-ha Vol.16 Summer 2012

• Urbanites Swim Upstream: Nobody Knows What Happened by Kim Young-ha Vol.10 Winter 2010

• Jacks of All Trades and Masters of None: Quiz Show by Kim Young-ha Vol.1 Autumn 2008

BOOKS