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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving, The Liberators is an elegantly wrought family saga of memory, trauma, and empathy, and a stunning testament to the consequences and fortunes of inheritance.
At the height of the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with an infant and Sungho's overbearing mother-in-law. Adrift in a new country, Insuk grieves the loss of her past and her divided homeland, finding herself drawn into an illicit relationship that sets into motion a dramatic saga and echoes for generations to come.
From the Gwangju Massacre to the 1988 Olympics, flashbacks to Korean repatriation after Japanese surrender, and the Sewol ferry accident, E. J. Koh's exquisitely drawn portraits and symphonic testimony from guards, prisoners, perpetrators, and liberators spans continents and four generations of two Korean families forever changed by fateful past decisions made in love and war.
Yohan
Daejeon, 1980
By an early age, I could read and write in six languages. I found a tool—an ink brush, a twig, or my stub finger—and used it to draw a character on parchment, dirt, or air. When one line touched another, my heart reached my fingertips to impart meaning. At five, it was for pleasure that I left words all over town: on a tree, I carved tree; in the river, I spelled river in pebbles; on my mother's dress, I inked dress. At some point, my mother set me down and didn't pick me up again. On my mother's grave, I wrote grave. I was just a boy at the end of Japanese colonial rule. I wrote my words as if I couldn't live without them, as if I were made of nothing but words. I classed rock, plant, animal, man, and God. I observed a patch of weeds and then myself in the mirror to see the differences between plant and man. Between them was a middle point, or animal. I asked what stood between man and God, but the grave said nothing. I watched the country divided up as spoils of war. When I was fifteen, I was taken in for vandalism and sent to the military. I labeled my boots boots, and my gun gun. I spelled fire with sticks, lit it up in flames. Penned grenade, pulled the ring. My last words I wrote on the side of an ICU tent, filled with my dismembered comrades, in the blood I owed them: death, death, death.
After my years in the military, I was made of silence. I carried out my duties quickly and without protest. Peeled out the bunks, torn and stiff, and myself, thirsty and whiskered, I worked the sprawl, search, and rescue; leashed the dogs; unspooled rope; baked bodies; collected resin for fuel tanks; plunged drills down holes; poked at slugs with my rifle. One day the older recruits marched me to the showers and told me to get prim. I accepted two medals for protecting foreign dignitaries. My director and department were shocked to hear I wanted to retire to a lowly auditor at the age of twenty-four. They were puzzled by my decision, but after a roomful of handshakes, after I'd surrendered my clothes for the next soldier, my leaky and clouded binoculars, and a tin of hand-rolled cigarettes, I was installed in Daejeon as the youngest superior at the office. I so assumed my position nobody called me again.
I never asked what wonders I might have been capable of had I been left as the boy filled with words, or whether foreign dignitaries might have come from across the ocean to witness how I read and wrote throughout fall, winter, spring, and summer. I pictured my mother outside my room, telling visitors not to wake me since I needed my rest, and myself, stirring up with a smile before I snug-gled back into the covers. I didn't regret that she had died before the surrender since she had not lived to see the war. Rather than words—using them whenever it snowed or rained or blossomed or the sun touched me on my way to the office—I grew skilled in courting. It didn't come easy, but I understood courting fundamentally. Courting was forcing a thing to become unlike itself. I had become removed from my own nature. So I married and had a daughter. I changed the structure of myself—an animal into a man—to love my wife. Then only life could change what God intended to be human into an animal, even into a plant, vulnerable to the crush of a heel or an aneurysm. To replace a rock in the ground with my wife, then my wife with a gravestone on the surface.
* * *
One morning in 1980, I was in my midforties, when I picked up the phone and called my employee. At twenty-three, my daughter was one of few unmatched girls her age, and my employee had two sons who wanted to build airplanes. His sons sketched planes on their napkins. A perfect tea set of aeronautical engineers. I rang from the guest room on the first floor, my late wife's room. The windows overlooked the steps to the entrance where tall iron gates jostled in the wind. The fog drew rosefinches, like blooms in the low bush, whose ...
Excerpted from The Liberators by E.J. Koh. Copyright © 2023 by E.J. Koh. Excerpted by permission of Tin House Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Liberators begins in the city of Daejeon in South Korea. The year is 1980 and the country is ruled by a military regime that is imprisoning and disappearing suspected dissenters at an alarming rate. Twenty-three-year-old Insuk has fallen in love with a classmate at her university named Sungho. Her father Yohan approves of the match, but just as they're preparing to celebrate the union, Yohan fails to return home one evening. Insuk never sees him again.
Sungho and Insuk marry; their first night as man and wife sets the tone for their relationship going forward — Sungho's mother Huran, with whom he lives, lays a heavy guilt trip on the newlyweds for taking the bedroom, relegating Huran to a bed by the stove in the kitchen.
By 1988, Sungho and Insuk have a five-year-old son, Henry, and the family (including Huran) have relocated to San Jose, California. After years of conflict, Insuk and Huran grow closer, while Insuk and Sungho drift apart. Insuk develops a connection with her boss at the grocery store where she works, a fellow Korean immigrant named Robert who is a vocal evangelist for the reunification of North and South Korea.
The Liberators is about duos and dichotomies. Two Koreas (albeit this is up for debate), a husband and wife, a mother and daughter-in-law. The 34-year timeline the novel covers gives the author room to show how a relationship can evolve over the course of its life, how two people can go from enemies to friends, for instance, or how one person might drift away, unconsciously, and then return to where they belong.
It's also a story of persistent idealism. The other Koreans in the San Jose community believe reunification is an unrealistic fantasy, and Robert a foolish dreamer. Korea was not split in two until 1948, yet only a generation later, it seems unfathomable to most in the novel that things could be any other way.
In a flashback chapter, we see the match strike that lit Robert's idealism aflame — before he was born. He grew up on Jeju Island with his mother, who remembered the events of 1948 distinctly, including "when mainland South Korean police, backed by US troops, landed … in boatloads to slaughter would-be commies and refugees from the North … they chucked slabs of rock to grandfathers and grandsons, told them to stone each other to death. Then both were shot with a resounding end."
American responsibility for a split Korea (both for the initial fissure and its enduring existence) casts a long shadow across the novel. In just over 200 pages, EJ Koh covers a remarkable amount of 20th century Korean history, with enough detail to offer vital context for the characters' homesickness for a homeland that has become unrecognizable, that has been irreparably broken by political gamesmanship and imperialism.
Koh's writing has a natural elegance. She can set a scene with poetic acumen; the dry cleaning business Sungho opens is "in a building where green bottle flies as smooth as sea glass swarmed." She cleverly and aptly captures a character's essence with minimal description, as when Insuk describes her mother-in-law:
"Huran gives me the impression of a cat sprawling in the comfort of any arrangement so long as she can slip in and out of its fences."
The book's third part, which focuses on Henry as a young man, enamored of an activist named Jennie who works with Robert, is somewhat meandering. Koh gives room to even peripheral characters, such as Henry's pet dog, ably weaving an interconnected web of love and relationships. Since the novel is very slim, however, one might feel that some of these tangents are taking vital space from the more interesting and central characters.
Nevertheless, it's a pleasure to float in the current of Koh's narrative, following every drift and fork, traveling back and forth through time. Her characters tell the overarching story of the Korean diaspora in all its complicated and contradictory messiness. And while Robert's dream of reunification remains just that, The Liberators demonstrates that the existence of two separate Koreas is and has always been a fiction.
Reviewed by Lisa Butts
Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me
Jimin Han, author of The Apology
Joseph Han, author of Nuclear Family
In EJ Koh's The Liberators, Insuk's friend Robert is an activist passionately in favor of the reunification of North and South Korea. Korea was occupied by Japan from the early 20th century through 1948; when the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II, Korea was split along the 38th parallel by the United States. The northern region was occupied by the Soviet Union, and the southern by the US. This was meant to be a temporary solution to instability but the split has continued through the present day, cemented in part by the Korean War. Efforts toward and talk of reunification have been a regular part of Korean diplomacy ever since.
In 1972, North and South Korea issued the July 4 South-North Communiqué, which presented three ideals intended to pave the way to reunification — independence, peaceful unification, and national unity. However, no tangible progress was made by this declaration due in part to conflict between President Park Chung-hee (of South Korea) and President Kim Il Sung (of North Korea).
The next major milestone was the Inter-Korean Summits, taking place in the early 1990s. Over eight meetings in Seoul, the two halves hammered out the Inter-Korean Basic Agreement, which renounced armed conflict and encouraged cultural and economic exchange. In the years that followed, South Korea provided a great deal of financial assistance to North Korea, where food insecurity was a frequent problem.
In The Liberators, Koh mentions South Korea's Sunshine Policy, which emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was based on three principles (as outlined in Sunshine in Korea [2002] by Norman D. Levin and Yong-sup Han): "no toleration of North Korean armed provocations, no South Korean efforts to undermine or absorb the North, and active … attempts to promote reconciliation and cooperation between the two Koreas." It was introduced by President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in 2000. Despite vastly altering inter-Korea relations for over a decade, the Sunshine Policy is declared by many to be a failure because it did not achieve lasting reconciliation or reunification.
In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, Korean journalist and filmmaker Haeryun Kang writes about the conflicting feelings about reunification that she has experienced over the course of her relatively short lifetime. She recalls witnessing a moment of triumph during the 2018 Seoul Olympics when North and South Koreans competed together on the same ice hockey team to cheering crowds of spectators chanting "We are one!" but notes that the percentage of South Koreans who express a desire for reunification seems to be waning based on a recent opinion poll. She explains:
"I still dream that all Koreans can have the freedom to meet each other, for separated families to reunite, for North Korean defectors to safely return home if they want. But those things seem as distant as ever."
In January 2024, reunification took another step backward when Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un declared that cooperative efforts between the two Koreas had been a "mistake." The situation continues to evolve, but in his incendiary statements that refer to South Korea's close relationship with the United States, it is evident that the shadow cast by US involvement, in 1948 and up until the present day, has played no small part in the ongoing conflict.
North-South Korean border, 2011
Photo by MIchael Day (CC BY 2.0)
Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities
By Lisa Butts
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