This blog was meant to be exploring transitions, but with only a couple of months to go before I start at UBC, I find myself drawn back to literature. I’ve been having dreams in the last month about my past: about teaching, about writing, chairing sessions, and publishing. And, as happens once in a while, I’ve discovered a stunningly good author: one of those authors who startle you, deeply move you, and send you back to the library searching for as many of their works you can find. I came to Hwang Sok Yong’s works in translation through two coincidences. I’d been reading an academic study in which his novel The Old Garden featured and then, one morning, coming out of Vancouver Public Library, I found another of his novels, The Guest, on display.

What struck me about the novels? As a background, a complex and intricate sense of history that is part of a broad intellectual vision. The author who I thought of when reading Hwang who has comparable vision is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, especially in the Buru Quartet. There’s a similar breadth of understanding of political processes, aligned to an interest in human beings in all their contradictions who live through them, and try to live good lives, to positively change the world, often at great personal cost. Yet there’s a difference in both form and meaning. Pramoedya’s novels have largely linear narratives, with a protagonist moving through times even if Minke is defeated, there is a sense of the inevitability of the forces of history that will lead to Indonesian independence and, by extension, the faith that those very same forces will lead to the eventual downfall of Suharto’s New Order. Hwang’s novels — or at least the two I have read to this point — are recursive. They consist of the testimonies of ghosts, or if people now dead, which intersect with the memories of those now living. And there’s also a sense of puzzlement, looking back at the struggles of the left from the perspective of a world entirely changed accompanied, perhaps, by continuing hope for the future.

The first of Hwang’s novels I read, The Guest, is about the digging up of memories. It begins with two brothers, Christians, born in a Korea but now living out the last years of their life in America. The elder brother dies and the younger brother, Yosop goes on a journey to his home village in North Korea as part of one of the waves of family reunions. In doing so, he begins to unearth further a past that hauntings have suggested from early on in the narrative. It’s a past of horrific cruelty, in which neighbours who have lived together for years massacre and torture each other during the period immediately before and during the Korean War, finding justification in what they are doing in Christian and Marxist ideologies. Hwang doesn’t blame these ideologies per se, but he’s more interested in how they form the scaffolding for inhuman acts. Reading the novel, I was struck by its connections with Elizabeth Minnich’s The Evil of Banality, and her concept of extensive evil. The acts that happen are horrific, but they are not the actions of a few people, but rather of almost all the participants, to whom they come to seem natural and normal. Both the North Korean regime and the Christian survivors retrospectively distort the truth of what happened to fit into their own narratives: the regime blames the Americans, the Presbyterians blame Satan. Yosop, in the presence of ghosts, confronts the past, and performs a ceremony to bring peace to his brother. Yet the narrative ends with him in Pyongyang, preparing to leave for America, staring at his own reflection in the window. Much seems unfinished. The process of retrieval of memory reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and yet there’s somehow a harder socio-political edge to Hwang’s writing. Even as it remains emotionally resonant.

The second of Hwang’s novels I read is The Old Garden.  It centres on the lives of two lovers, Hyun Woo, who is an activist eventually imprisoned by the South Korean state, just as Hwang was, and Yoon Hee, a schoolteacher and painter, whose life continues while Hyun Woo is imprisoned. I won’t write too much about the plot, because there are a series of revelations that Hyun Woo later learns, reading Yoon Hee’s diaries and letters, and this disinterring of secrets is an important part of the book. However, a few features of the novel stood out for me. First, the ability to evoke place – here the house in Kalmae, where Hyun Woo and Yoon Hee first fall in love. Second, a sense of the imperfect connections in history that alternately inspire and baffle. Yoon Hee studies in Berlin and is present when the wall comers down, and the Cold War seems to end, and yet Korea still is divided. And then, like The Guest, there’s a sense of living on, wondering about the meaning of the traumatic events that you lived through in a present where it seems difficult to remember their significance.

I’m lucky that I have a few more of Hwang’s novels that have been translated into English to still read: unlike Pete Buttigieg, I don’t think I’ve got the capacity to learn a new language just because of my interest in reading a novelist. But it’s also interesting to think of how much I, as a reader, enter the books I read. I first read Pramoedya at a moment of important transition in my life, just before I came to live in Southeast Asia, at this time in a summer in Vancouver, 25 years ago. I remember reading the Buru Quartet continuously, staying up late in the night, or sitting out on the balcony in the now-vanished library in the graduate student centre.  Now, twenty-five years later, I read Hwang without any plan of going to Korea, but there’s nonetheless something that I find in the books that speaks to me, about new starts, different directions, making at least a temporary peace with the past.

If I’ve had dreams about a past life, I realise, I’ve also had dreams about transitions. Of going to the US in the 1980s, of huge red brick buildings which resemble those of the University of Florida seen through a distorting mirror. Of China, and a narrow island in the middle of the Xiang River, surrounded by long grey rafts of bamboo. Arriving in Singapore, in a rainstorm. The sun on our bedroom wall so early in the morning, beaten this way and that by the trees. All these dreams that I struggle to remember, piece together over coffee, of starting again.