Pachinko is the second novel from a proposed trilogy by Min Jin Lee who wrote Free Food for Millionaires which focuses on Korean immigrants living in New York and she’s going to follow that up with American Hagwon talking about the importance and perils of education for Koreans around the world. Pachinko is about Koreans living in Japan. It’s 4 generations and spans nearly a century of time taking us through World War 2 and the Korean War. Now I’d never heard of Min Jin Lee before and I was absolutely floored by this book.
This is a fantastic read and it hits me in the post middle-aged, dad-reading sweet spot - this cross generational saga. It’s like a Korean Ken Follet or James Michener and it’s just about as heavy - weighing in at almost 500 pages. And the thing is I wanted it to be at least 200 pages longer. The final generation I felt was given short shrift and it felt a little rushed. But to be fair maybe I just wanted to hang out in this world a little longer. It was one of those books I kept trying to force myself to slow down - to really savour. I just kept wanting to immerse myself in this world. It is an incredible read. Min Jin Lee is not a flowery writer, her words are simple and unadorned but collectively they build to create this huge sense of emotion. But it’s perfectly balanced play here. It never tips over into the maudlin or contrived. And she imbues her characters with a real humanness. These are just so familiar, these Korean characters - which of course is ridiculous considering I am this middle-class, suburban, born in Canada Korean - but I recognize these characters. And if I’m being honest I fell a little bit in love with them. There were chapters here that just broke me. I mean wrecked me - completely in the feels, and I am not usually that type of reader. Lee talks about the impetus for this book, something that she’s been fiddling with for nearly 30 years. She was an undergraduate at Yale back in ’89 when she attended a lecture being put on by an American missionary. He was talking about the struggles of Koreans living in Japan and he was specifically relating a story of one of the families in his parish. The family’s 12 year old boy had climbed to the roof of his apartment building and jumped to his death. His parents going through his things afterwords found his middle school yearbook. And inside they saw the writings of his fellow 12 year old classmates who had written things like: “Go back to where you belong”, “You smell like garlic” “Die, die, die.” And the boy and his parents were Koreans born in Japan. That anecdote really struck me as well. I’ve always known that Koreans dislike the Japanese but I guess it makes sense that the opposite would hold true. Koreans as a whole is a xenophobic culture. And they’re more than a little horribly racist - but much of their ire is directed toward the Japanese and I guess that makes sense. During the occupation the Japanese worked to try and obliterate Korean identity. Koreans were forced to learn Japanese. They were given Japanese sounding names. And Koreans have a long memory for this sort of thing. I remember going to a museum while I was in Korea. Here in North American we’re very familiar with these museum dioramas with life-size wax figurines. Maybe it’s the a neanderthal in a painted cave trying to coax fire out of a pile of sticks, or proud First Nations people surveying the land, hunting bison. Well in Korea what we get is life sized dioramas of Koreans left outside in subzero temperatures so that in the morning the Japanese occupiers could come out with boiling water to pour over their skin so it sloughed off their starving and emaciated bodies. Or another cozy diorama, the interior of a wooden cabin, Japanese soldiers playing cards and drinking using a crate as a makeshift table. But the crate is punctured throughout with long nails and the cutaway you reveal a Korean man with barely enough room to hunch his knees up to his chest, his entire body bloody and ravaged from this makeshift Iron Maiden. I mean, this is just a regular museum. One moment I am looking at a badly taxidermied tiger and then bam occupation atrocities. Meanwhile in Japan - Koreans living in Japan are called "Zainichi", or foreign residents. They are forced to register for alien registration cards once every three years and very few are granted passports making overseas travel nearly impossible. After World War 2 there were nearly 2.4 million Koreans living in Japan and they’re registered as residents of Joseon, or an undivided Korea. But of course after the Korean War Korea was divided into the North and South and so these Zainichi are essentially stateless citizens registered to a country that doesn’t exist. And so this is an exploration of being other, of being unwanted by the country that you’ve called home which paints you in a broad, dismissive brush that defines and constrains what you are. One of the Zainichi in the book says: “In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean regardless of how much money I make, or how nice I am.” How do you survive when you’re considered less. What is the psychological cost of growing up in an environment where you are daily reminded that you don’t belong, that you’re not wanted here. Min Jin Lee writes about passing. How emotionally taxing and diminishing it is to hide who you are to just to avoid harassment, or to even succeed - even now there are jobs closed off to Koreans in Japan. In the early 1900’s there were very few legal employment opportunities for Koreans. Pachinko was one such opportunity. Played by the majority of Japanese it was still looked down upon by the middle-class Japanese. Something that only thugs and gangsters would work in. Now I’d never heard of Pachinko before but it is huge. In 2014, it generated annual revenues of about $190 billion dollars, which is about twice the export revenues of the Japanese auto industry. Right now maybe one in seven Japanese play pachinko regularly. Now I’ve talked around the book here a lot but I haven’t really talked about the plot. Well I’m here to tell you the plot doesn’t matter - unless you think it’s important hearing about the story of a family learning to survive in a country hostile to their very identity. How with integrity and love they learn to succeed and persevere in an environment of hate. Pachinko is my first 5 star rated book of the year. I absolutely loved it. I want you to go out and read it. But you don’t need me to tell you that. I’m hearing it being praised out there on a regular basis now. It’s being hyped and talked about so get on that bandwagon. In the meantime I continue down the Korean author rabbit hole. And I hope you guys all have a great week of reading and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye!
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