human decency

Today I had time to kill before a meeting. I found myself in the library. Usually when I choose to read a book, I'll have searched it up and therefore have some basic knowledge about when it was written, who wrote it, and the broad shape of the story. But this time I picked one off the shelf without really knowing a thing about it beforehand, only that it was written by a Korean female author. It was a short story called Human Decency by Gong Ji Young (공지영 - 인간에 대한 예의), the Korean title scrawled in reverse on the mustard yellow cover.

I have to admit, the story reminded me a lot of Sebald's novels. You might have heard me reference him a few times before in my earlier posts. Having read all his novels, I get the strange and false impression that I know him personally. (And he would be disgruntled by me referring to his books as novels, but oh well.) This, to some extent, has always happened with the authors I've read from extensively in the past: their figures in my mind take on more dimension with every word of theirs that I've internalised, and before I realise it, they've become ghostly companions in my life, from whom I can only listen but never talk to.

I've mentioned Annie Dillard's quote before, that a stranger is a friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth. This is how I've always thought about Sebald, whose protagonists (which in many ways represent him) seem almost comically, and perpetually befuddled by past tragedies they keep on stirring up like silt at the bottom of a pond. Gong Ji Young's protagonist is more canny, opinionated, and exacting; her words cut to the quick, her self-reproachment like a hard kernel inside her, and if Sebald's characters are aliens out of joint from their own lives, Gong's character is damnably aware of the history she drags behind her, leaving dark morraines in its wake. But still, I'd call her a stranger on account of her disillusion, and the discontinuities which mercilessly segment her life, rendering certain parts unreachable.

At the beginning when she meets with a subject of an interview (she is a writer for a women's magazine), she is not afraid to admit to us her initial mistrust towards the interviewee, who has lived and worked for a while outside Korea. Maybe her chagrin is justified. At the express request of her editor, she has had to postpone publishing an interview with a former political prisoner who has recently been discharged from a twenty-year prison sentence.

She can't help but feel uneasy about the dissonance between these two remarkable people: on one hand, a distinguished artist who walked freely in India under the tutelage of a meditation master, who was struck by revelation while gazing at the snowy peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro. On the other, a prisoner who endured years upon years confined to a cell that was just seven paces in length, and upon release, had forgotten how to open a door from the inside.

But Gong never condemns the wandering artist, nor does she lionise the revolutionary. Here I can't help but be reminded of Merry Levov from Phillip Roth's American Pastoral, a political terrorist turned orthodox Jain—having gone from mailing bombs to wearing a piece of hosiery over her mouth so as not to harm even airborne microorganisms with her breath. These are all people that have had their lives torn asunder by the angel of history.

As a precocious young girl, Merry witnesses the famous self-immolation of Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Ðức on television. The narrator thinks that this was the moment she was infected by the political furore of 1960's counterculture, the same egregore which must've gone on to animate Patty Hearst & the SLA. In Human Decency, the protagonist receives news that an old friend, Yunseok, has passed away after setting himself (and his boss) on fire while demanding a wage hike. His friends cannot even attend his funeral, as most of them (including the protagonist) are political fugitives wanted by the dictatorship.

To this day, people still write essays about Thích Quảng Ðức. How many others, like Yunseok, have undergone the same unimaginable pain, made the same sacrifice, only to be caught beneath the massive glacier we call collective forgetting, picked up and taken far away? Self-immolation can end a war; self-immolation can't negotiate a pay raise of less than a dollar. So, which is it?

Yunseok hadn't been careful. He had set himself on fire for the sake of a 700-won daily wage hike. Why had he forgotten how volatile paint thinner was? The company hadn't given the raise. The owner had survived, and Yunseok had died. His mother probably still works at the factory cafeteria…And while I designed my budget books, I would pause for a moment, stare into space, and mumble, Idiot. Idiot. That's the only influence he had on me.

In meetings with friends, Yunseok would get drunk and sing so loudly that they would routinely be kicked out from bars. Below is a song he sings before he leaves to his factory job the next day, the last time the protagonist sees him alive.