In recent years, perhaps triggered by the commercial and critical success of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and the American publishing industry’s shift towards selling more diverse literary voices in all genres, there has been a surge of Korean American novels inspired by the lives of the authors’ parents and grandparents—i.e., the experience of living in twentieth-century Korea through the peninsula’s colonial and war-torn decades. Many of these books are finely wrought, deeply researched, and rightly criticize the United States’s interventionist and destructive role during the Korean War. In reading work about the same period of North and South Korean history by Korean authors translated into English, however, one can’t help but notice a greater level of nuance and complexity that a less American-centric authorial lens allows.

    Few Korean writers are more accomplished and acclaimed worldwide than Hwang Sok-yong. In the author’s  original afterword from Mater 2-10, Hwang writes that the novel was born from a conversation with an old man in Pyongyang in 1989. The old man’s father was a railroad worker who had fled from Seoul during a South Korean crackdown on labor unions, which were associated with Communist activity during the Cold War.

    Now 81, Hwang has authored dozens of books, spent seven years in a South Korean prison for an unauthorized trip to North Korea for which he was later pardoned, fought on the side of the Americans in the Korean Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, and has been a vocal activist for Korean reunification. Mater 2-10 might be his final book, and at nearly 500 pages, it is Hwang’s capstone, a book that brings together the author’s interests in Korean history, reunification, and leftist politics into a single definitive work. 

    The book begins with Yi Jino, a third-generation railroad worker who has been laid off, high in the air. For over a year, he holds a one-person strike on the precarious catwalk, atop a factory chimney, subsisting on meals and medical aid brought up by his union. While he braves the elements as seasons change, his ancestors visit him in apparitions or hallucinations. His mother calls and says, “Picketing has always been in the Yi family blood . . . Don’t even think of coming down any time soon. So many have died for the cause already.” Those who have read The Guest and The Old Garden will be familiar with Hwang’s blurring of the boundaries between the living and the dead. The book toggles between the stories of Jino, his great-grandfather Baekman, who started as a railroad trainee in the 1920s, his grandfather Ilcheol, and his father Jisan.

    Hwang’s novel portrays a colonized nation—first under Japanese rule, then American—that hated and criminalized unions for a century. Workers who demanded fair wages and safe working conditions were routinely kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered. While the American labor movement has had infamous eruptions of violence throughout its history, the persecution of unionized workers in South Korea was brutal and ruthless on another level. 

    One of the most complex and compelling characters is Choi Daryeong, recruited and given the name “Yamashita” by a Japanese policeman who struggles to pronounce his Korean name. Daryeong’s job is to infiltrate and spy on labor unions, starting with book clubs formed by factory workers. With the fervor and ruthlessness of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, Daryeong spends decades encircling his old classmate Yi Ilcheol and his family, first for his Japanese bosses and then for his American ones. He does his job so well that he climbs the ranks from spy to police chief. 

    The exploration of moral gray areas is a characteristic of much of Hwang’s fiction. Daryeong is a nuanced character empowered to choose his own circumstances rather than to simply endure injustice. Though he’s clearly the Yi family’s archenemy, Daryeong describes himself as neither victim nor villain. In a meeting with Ilcheol, Daryeong says, “Just as you drove a train for a living, I did police work—for a living.”

    Mater 2-10 refers to the locomotive that was originally manufactured during the Japanese colonial period, “Mater” being a Japanese abbreviation for “mountain.” The railroad these locomotives ran upon were eventually seized by the South Korean Army only to be destroyed by the Allies as they retreated. Today, the ruins lie in the Demilitarized Zone as a symbol of the severed connection between two nations that were once one.

    My hope is that, with the surge of interest in literary work from Korean Americans about twentieth-century Korea, readers will be encouraged to seek out work from writers like Hwang Sok-yong, whose vital, complicated stories come from both research and lived experience.

Leland Cheuk

Author, No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019)