According to FEMA, there are four phases of disaster management: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. But in Yun Ko-Eun’s recent novel, The Disaster Tourist (translated by Lizzie Buehler), there can also be a fifth—monetization. At the center of The Disaster Tourist is Jungle, a travel company that turns disaster sites into “disaster destinations” for tourists to explore and enjoy. Yona, the novel’s protagonist and a Jungle employee, brags that the company boasts such packages as “earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, avalanches, droughts, floods, fires, massacres, wars, radioactivity, desertification, serial killers, tsunamis, animal abuse, contagious diseases, water pollution, asylums, prisons and more.”
As a programming coordinator, Yona’s job requires her to assess the profitability of various packages—that is, she must figure out how to sell horrific disasters to interested interlopers. “The packages Koreans like are those with something exotic,” she says, “the spirit of adventure.” Early in the novel, Yona is sent to the island of Mui, where Jungle hosts a six-day “desert sink-hole trip,” which promotional materials promise to be “frightening and grim.” But once she arrives, she discovers Mui isn’t what it seems to be.
Though Counterpoint Press published the novel’s English translation in August 2020, The Disaster Tourist was originally released in Korea in 2013. Despite its age, the novel is prescient, to put it mildly, in its handling of issues that have gained traction on account of the MeToo movement and the current Covid-19 pandemic—questions, for instance, of workplace sexual harassment and high-risk “essential” work.
In the past few years, Korean literature has gained international traction, with authors like Yun, Han Kang, Bae Suah, Ha Seong Nan, and Hye-Young Pyun—notably, all women!—making significant waves with the English translations of their novels. The Disaster Tourist is Yun’s first novel to be translated into English, a compact and propulsive dystopian thriller that stands out as one of 2020’s best works of translated literature. With translations by Buehler, I talked with Yun about dystopian fiction, touch starvation, and why she never makes any compromises when it comes to writing.
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): You’ve said that “translation isn’t a neutral delivery of information, it’s a new creative experience” and compared the process of translating The Disaster Tourist to “writing the book a second time.” Can you talk more about the experience of having your work translated, and what the relationship between you and translator Lizzie Buehler looked like during the translation process? (And perhaps even what it looks like now!)
Yun Ko-Eun (YK): Lizzie Buehler sent her first email to me in March 2017. She was translating three of my short stories for her senior thesis as a comparative literature major at Princeton University. I still have the files that she sent me then—they were three stories from my collection, Table For One, the English translation of which is forthcoming this year from Columbia University Press. This sparked regular email correspondence between me and Lizzie over the past several years, and finally our names came together as author and translator on the cover of The Disaster Tourist. Lizzie paved the way for the novel’s publication in English; she allowed it to reach English readers. One of my favorite books is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, and in one sense it feels like Lizzie was a mail pilot blazing a trail through the dark night.
After years of communicating only through email, Lizzie and I were finally able to meet in Seoul in the summer of 2019. I remember that day well, because it was so hot and humid. There weren’t very many people downtown. As everyone else tried to conserve their strength by staying inside, Lizzie and I walked through Seoul like we were bewitched. We explored alleys, drank tea, ate noodles, ate bingsu, and visited the time capsule plaza and department store roof that were the settings to two of my short stories—all as we showered ourselves in sweat. That day, I was amazed to realize that even though Lizzie and I are different ages and from different cultural backgrounds, we have so many similar characteristics. We have similar fears, and we’re curious about many of the same things. As we stood at a sunbaked crosswalk, I asked Lizzie about the title my novel that she’d translated. “The Korean title of the book is Travelers of the Night, but the English title is The Disaster Tourist. What do you think about that?” She answered that the original title was more poetic and metaphorical, while the new title was a bit more direct. We shared a similar feeling about the title change; in the English publishing market, we thought, The Disaster Tourist would attract more attention.
One year later, when the book finally came out in the summer of 2020, we were in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. If not for the pandemic, I would have gone on a book tour in the UK and the US. Disappointed that we were still limited to exchanging messages by email, I decided to mail Lizzie a gift—Korean cosmetics and a pen engraved with her name. This went wrong, too, when the package was lost in the mail. I was all too upset about it (since then I’ve been afraid to send international mail), but Lizzie’s reaction breathed fresh air into the situation. “So I guess someone is using a pen with my name on it?” she messaged me, the day after the package was confirmed to be lost. As soon as I heard those words, a new story started to take shape into mind. I asked Lizzie if I could write about what had happened. And that was the beginning of another story.
SS: In writing The Disaster Tourist you took significant inspiration from 1984, and you’ve said that you modeled your novel’s enigmatic shipping corporation after Orwell’s Big Brother. In reading The Disaster Tourist I was also reminded of HBO’s Westworld, which like your novel revolves around a faceless corporation and morally dubious tourism. This is to say that your novel honors a long tradition of dystopian storytelling, but with a timely twist: yours is a distinctly ecological dystopia. How would you characterize the future of dystopian literature, and how do you think our present will shape the next generation of dystopian authors?
YK: Until recently, when talking about dystopian fiction, I used the phrase “near future.” Not the far-off, distant future, but something closer. Now, however, the timeline of dystopia seems to have completely changed. Dystopia is the story of the present—the same present that we’ve been experiencing for a long time. Science fiction has recently become spectacularly popular in Korea, and this can also be understood as an extension of our interest in the present. There’s the influence of the coronavirus pandemic, of course, but there’s also the climate crisis and endless terrorism and waves of refugees. I often worry skeptically that perhaps we’ve lost the power to solve these problems ourselves. But worrying is much healthier than becoming numb to distress. Only by worrying can we find a way to move forward. Dystopian stories place us at the innermost layer of reality, where a very fine wind blows between truth and fiction. As readers, we just stand at the boundary, but standing there sometimes gives us the power to experience fear.
SS: In the novel, Yona is faced with a sort of Faustian bargain. It often feels as though this type of compromise is required to attain success—at least by capitalist standards. What has your own experience been as a writer navigating a literary landscape that’s undergirded by capitalism? Do you feel writers have to make concessions or compromises to be (or at least feel) successful, as Yona does?
YK: I’ve now written seven books, and the truth is, I’ve never felt like I had to bargain or make a deal with anyone in order to write. I just wrote the way I wanted to. Maybe that’s why I’m not as famous as I could be? I’m joking! But there is one thing that I recognize I have to mediate with: time. Sometimes I feel like I have to split myself in two to get work done, with one half of me writing while the other half of me does everything else I need to do. There are times when I’m good about going between these two different halves of myself, but I always find myself making excuses to procrastinate. If I could just spend one year writing without interruptions, I think, I’d be able to finish a masterpiece!
SS: At the center of The Disaster Tourist are the issues of desensitization and depersonalization—two symptoms of living in a media-saturated, capitalist society. During this pandemic, we’ve become desensitized to climbing death tolls, which in themselves are depersonalized. Can you talk a bit about how issues of desensitization and depersonalization play out in the novel, and what Yona’s fate might reveal about interventions we should be making in our own lives?
YK: Last year, Bill Hayes’ Scenes From the Pandemic really made an impression on me. I underlined several lines from this book and thought about them for a long time. As a person living in a time where touch itself has become burdensome and intimidating, these days I realize I’m really mourning that lack of touch. Touching something, whether with our hands or with our hearts, is a basic human desire. Yona from The Disaster Tourist isn’t exempt from this desire, either.
Neither Yona’s family nor her friends make an appearance in the novel. Maybe if they had, we would have seen a different side of our protagonist, but that wouldn’t have changed the novel’s ending. By the end of the book, Yona exists only as rumors and conjectures—what kind of person was she? What was she like? Because of this ambiguity, I didn’t want to give readers the chance to grasp Yona from various angles. Even so, readers will notice a subtle emotional change in Yona after she embarks on the trip to Mui. The feeling of “excess,” or freedom, which to Yona had been so rare, is finally allowed once she’s no longer in her office. What matters here is the result of Yona’s change in emotion. Yona thinks that she has the right to save Luck from Jungle’s manmade disaster. But her hubris in her downfall. To the enormous, mysterious corporate entity known as Paul, Yona is nothing more than a cog, and when that cog decides to stop on its own, the entire wheel breaks. Yona’s attempt to stop acting as a cog that serves Paul can be seen as an attempt to recover emotions that she’d previously hidden. Her unexpected deviation in behavior makes it possible for the crocodiles, including Luck, to live. Sometimes cogs are able to break down the entire machine.
SS: Reading The Disaster Tourist, and relating to it as an American despite its Korean setting, made me think repeatedly of what Bong Joon-Ho once said in an interview: “Essentially we all live in the same country called capitalism.” What’s your take on this quote? Do you agree?
YK: Of course I agree. I mostly write books about big cities, and the setting of The Disaster Tourist—Mui—is, according to my standards, no different from a large urban center. Mui moves according to the rules of a city. It functions under the gravity of this era: money. It is a place where you have to have something to sell, where the people of Mui decide to package disaster in order to survive in a capitalist world. Selling an existing disaster is horrible enough, but what’s worse about Mui is that they decide to create a disaster. Paul is the center point in this process, and almost no one knows about the plan artificially to engineer a catastrophe to drum up tourism. Even the screenwriter only knows part of the story. Everyone just says, I’m doing what Paul told me to do, and they push aside any impediments to fulfilling his orders. But no one even knows who or what Paul even is. At this point, Paul is a Big Brother-like power, and at the same time an excuse for people to act indifferently. This disjointed structure is just like a big city. Urbanites don’t know where the goods and food that they buy come from. But the further they are from the farms—the further they are from the fishing grounds—the further they are from the source of the story. What begins as a lack of knowledge can later become the deliberate exclusion of information, turning people into unwitting accomplice in an unknown crime.
SS: What’s so refreshing about this novel is that you resist easy morality: on every side of the novel’s central conflict are comprehensible motivations. While reading, I was reminded of Arendt’s “banality of evil,” which she formulated in response to the 1961 Eichmann Trial. You dramatize this idea so well when you write: “If someone had ordered her to push people into the sinkholes, Yona would have said no and left instantly. But because her contribution wasn’t direct, Yona stayed silent, and as she got more used to her position, she grew insensitive to the effects of her work.” Can you talk about the role of moral ambiguity in the novel, and how you demonstrate various kinds of immoralities?
YK: I like to see and create characters who are at a crossroads. This is because our lives are full of points where we have to make decisions. If readers were to count the number of times that Yona has to make a choice in The Disaster Tourist, I think that each reader would end up with a different number. What for some people may be a situation that allows for choice is to others a situation with no freedom to choose, and there’s only one answer. For some, a spot that looks nothing like a door may seem like a perfect escape hatch for others. Yona faces a series of choices in her life even before she leaves for Mui: she has to decide whether or not to enforce Jungle’s refund policy, how to react to sexual harassment, and whether or not to join a coalition of victims of sexual harassment. To some readers, Yona is a completely average person; to others, she’s timid or selfish, naive or spontaneous. As many Yonas exist as the number of readers. One moment in the novel that stands out is when Yona plucks up the courage to save Luck. But if Yona had known that this courage would lead to a great sacrifice, what choice would she have made? I’m curious to know, but I didn’t include this conundrum in the novel. Perhaps if I had, the book would have been colder, crueler.
SS: You’ve called having your work translated into another language “one of [your] literary dreams.” Now that that dream has come true, what’s your next literary dream?
YK: My favorite novel by Martin Page features a character who buys 3,334 copies of Emily Dickinson’s poetry books each month and parachutes them to remote locations. Although he is not rich, he wants to bring the gift of poetry to people around the world. If anyone wants to buy 3,334 copies of my book to distribute by parachute, I’m ready—my book’s now been translated into English! In order for a book to reach the hands of readers around the world, it first must be translated into a language used by many people. Now that the English translation of The Disaster Tourist has been released in the U.K. and the U.S., readers have no need to hesitate. Although now we’re in the era of drones rather than parachutes, so I might need a drone to fulfill my dream of becoming a bestselling author.
Of course, I don’t mean that my actual literary dream is to drop my book all over the world with a drone. However, I do hope that more people have the opportunity to come across my work. The poem “To My Poem” written by Wisława Szymborska reveals four possible outcomes for a work of poetry. The first outcome is the best: being read, reviewed, and remembered. Of course I’d like that for my work, but if it’s not possible, the second outcome is a good option, too: just being read. Having a reader.
Yun Ko-Eun is the author of several novels and short story collections published in South Korea. She is a recipient of the Hankyoreh Literary Award, the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award, and the Kim Yong-ik Literary Award. The Disaster Tourist is her first book to be published in English. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
Sophia Stewart is the assistant interviews editor at Asymptote Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
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