Yun Ko-Eun, translated by Lizzie Beuhler
Allen & Unwin
Otago Daily Times, November 26th 2020
Seoul-based travel company Jungle offers tours of disaster zones, trips that combine tourism and volunteering, survival challenges or education that leave travellers with a sense of relief, and “an inkling of superiority for having survived”. Long-time employee Yona Ko specialises in quantifying the unquantifiable, surveying the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, famine and war to determine the extent of damage to people and property to determine whether they offer the right mix of danger and emotional resonance to appeal to tourists looking for socially responsible adventure. However recent events have left Yona fearing for her job, so when she is offered the opportunity to evaluate one of Jungle’s less successful tours to the island of Mui, just off the Vietnamese coast, she has no option but to accept the assignment.
The visit turns out to be every bit as dull as she fears: Mui’s once-deadly volcano is dead, the re-enactment of an inter-tribal massacre in which hundreds of villagers were beheaded lacklustre, the massive sinkhole that swallowed the heads of the slain is now a muddy lake, and Yona departs fully intending to recommend the tour be cancelled. Then she loses her tour group and is forced back to Mui, only to find the island utterly transformed. Gone are the market stalls and wide-eyed children; crippled beggars have been restored to health; the communal well she and her fellow travellers so virtuously laboured over has been refilled in preparation for the next group of well-intentioned visitors. She is equally surprised to find that one of her fellow travellers has also returned: a writer (who, it transpires, was also commissioned by Jungle) working for Paul, the international shipping agency to whom the island belongs. He and the manager of Mui’s holiday resort are planning to stage a new disaster to attract international aid, and they promptly solicit Yona to join them, arguing that if Mui is to truly benefit from the aftermath, it also needs Jungle’s support. Seeing an opportunity to redeem herself, Yona agrees – a decision that will change her life irrevocably.
Yun Ko-eun (the pen name of South Korean author Ko Eun-ju) has won a several prestigious literary awards in her home country, and The Disaster Tourist, her first work in translation, slides seamlessly from dark satire to surrealist horror as it progresses, leads readers down a series of seductively slippery ethical slopes that challenge the comfortable assumptions of left-leaning liberals and free marketeers alike. Mui has tailored itself as a disaster area to such an extent that if it loses its status, it loses everything, and since one cannot predict when a natural disaster will strike, why should it not take matters into its own hands? Indeed, is there no moral imperative to do so, even if it harms a few people since their misfortune will benefit the hundreds? If, in the process of facilitating this, Yona also redeems herself in her employer’s eyes, all the better. And doesn’t Paul, the company whose faceless, all-pervading presence is rendered all the more menacing by its nominative personification, deserve a return on its investment in jobs, taxes and infrastructure?
Similarly, her clear-eyed dissection of the sorts of disasters that attract international attention and aid provokes a frisson of guilty recognition, and the story’s ending – as fitting as it is unexpected – is the ultimate condemnation of our consumerist society. Yet, despite its grimness, the novel is shot through with a wicked humour that renders its lessons surprisingly palatable. It is certainly the most memorable and thought-provoking book I have read this year.
Leave a Reply