It seems like everywhere one looks, one can see the effects of hallyu, the Korean wave: Parasite is the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture; Squid Game is Netflix’s most-watched show; and each BLACKPINK member is a brand ambassador for a major fashion house, marking the band as global style influencers.
When one looks at the successes of South Korean pop culture and soft power, it’s hard to look past them and the glittering metropolis that Seoul has become to consider any version of South Korea that is less glamorous or less affluent. But the South Korea before this massive economic shift is what lies at the center of E.J. Koh’s debut novel from Tin House, The Liberators.
Told from the perspective of multiple characters, The Liberators follows four generations of a Korean family. The novel’s main focus, however, is on a Korean couple, Insuk and Sungho, at the height of the military dictatorship; their immigration to San Jose, California with their infant, Henry, and Insuk’s overbearing mother-in-law, Huran; and their new lives in the U.S. Koh also touches upon major events in 20th-century Korea like the Gwangju Massacre, the 1988 Olympics, Korean repatriation after Japanese surrender, and the Sewol ferry incident.
At first glance, it’s easy to compare Koh’s work to Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel, Pachinko, given that both deal with four generations of a family and that Korea’s occupation is at the center of both novels. However, while Pachinko covers one family’s experience, mostly at the hands of the Japanese government and its treatment of Korea, The Liberators focuses more so on American involvement in Korea and the Korean American community, specifically on the West Coast, mimicking Koh’s own experience living in both California and Washington.
One of the most striking features of The Liberators is how it defies plot expectations: the novel is composed entirely of vignettes and emotional reflections. Other novels with a similar structure, such as K-Ming Chang’s Organ Meats and Tommy Orange’s There, There, which also utilize point-of-view shifts every chapter, use this technique to create a cohesive plotline. The Liberators, however, is largely plotless and doesn’t reach a clear climax. While Organ Meats culminates in Rainie building a new body for Anita, and There, There’s chapters build up to a robbery at a powwow, The Liberators contains no such defining moment; it reads more like a collection of various memories. While this could be a turn-off for readers interested in plot-driven stories, this choice could also reflect that, just like in real life, stories and moments do not always lead to a life-defining moment. Sometimes, life just keeps moving forward.
Soft and intimate, the novel takes us into pivotal moments in the characters’ lives—a father murdered for suspected American sympathy, a church’s Easter basket-making competition, a meeting with a North Korean defector—as a means of touching upon how a shared history amongst Koreans binds them together. Even when removed from the country by a continent, like Sungho and Insuk, or by a generation, like Henry, who has lived most of his life in the U.S. and therefore has no lived memory of Korea, this history continues to impact them and they continue to seek out other Koreans as friends and lovers.
By featuring a range of Korean characters who differ in generations and political views, Koh speaks on the varying experiences of the diaspora in America and touches upon han within a uniquely American context. Poet Cathy Park Hong, in an interview with The Yale Review, defines han as “a mixture of shame, paranoia, rage, and melancholy that has to do with a small country living under colonialism, American war, and neo-imperialism.” Park Hong says that han is “supposed to not exist” in the U.S. and in her own poem, “American Han,” Koh reflects on how a historian once told her, “Koreans outside of Korea can’t know han.” Yet, han and the shared Korean emotional consciousness are very much at the center of The Liberators, illustrating Koh’s clear stance that Koreans outside of Korea can know han.
For example, in one scene, when Huran becomes upset over several other elderly Korean women teasing her, one laughs, telling her, “You have no one else but us.” Huran has to put up with these women and how isolating life can be—even as a member of the diaspora. When separated from one’s home country, one ends up befriending those with shared experiences, searching for mutual understanding in the aftermath of trauma, even if they wouldn’t have been friends back home.
Koh argues that this isolation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In another scene, Robert, a pro-reunification activist, and Sungho get into an argument. When Sungho insists he wants nothing to do with North Korea, Robert tells him, “But it’s a part of you…Even the horrible parts.” This can be read either as anti-assimilationist or as, I believe Koh intends, a gentle reminder that one’s home always remains with them.
This ethos of gentleness pervades the book; even the violence that bubbles over almost every page is discussed in a way that is beautiful and poetic. As Insuk’s dad, Yohan is tortured for being an American sympathizer in an unnamed water-based act of violence, he says:
“Torture was as old as intimacy. I heard water in my ears and followed it south to the coast of Busan, where I’d been the week before, encountering its waters rushing under the narrow bridges, bubbling in red buckets of clams, splashing from vendor faucets, drip-dropping under eaves of market stalls, swirling in glass mugs of beer, wetting mouths with cider, and squishing inside galoshes, muddying tracks to dock houses, and the plight of the sea bream, cleaved on a wooden block, leaving its spine and shivering eye.”
Here, Koh blends the violence of his torture with an idyllic, pastoral scene of life in Busan through water, even going so far as to liken it to intimacy. As the character recedes from the present into the past, Koh touches upon a Korea pre-war and pre-dictatorship, speaking on the loss of, presumably, an ideal Korea untouched by foreign powers and the violence of colonization. While some readers may find this poetic approach to describing violence unusual, it is also important to not shy away from the realities of Korea’s history. Additionally, Koh’s approach to describing it in gentle terms ensures that the book does not make a spectacle out of this violence.
Ultimately, The Liberators is a poetic portrayal of the Korean diaspora in the U.S. and how 20th-century history impacts them to this day, reaching beyond the pristine image of South Korea that hallyu paints for the rest of the world. Paired with Koh’s numerous poems, such as “South Korean Ferry Accident” and “American Han,” and her memoir, The Magical Language of Others, The Liberators marks Koh as possibly the greatest chronicler of American han and as one of the most promising writers today as someone that has exhibited mastery across several genres.
