At first, I felt a little bit intimidated by the genre and thickness of the novel. As I flipped through the nearly 500 pages telling the story of four generations spanning the 20th century (1910–1989), however, the genre and thickness of the novel was no longer a source of intimidation but rather one of delight.
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko another one of several books that my dad bought for me on his way back from his three-day trip to California, and one that had been on my mental reading list for a while. I would say that Pachinko is (unfortunately?) the first novel written by an Asian-American author that I read and thoroughly enjoyed. Pachinko’s story was especially moving, heartbreaking, and beautiful to read as a Korean, but I think and I’d hope that anyone who reads this novel will feel the way I did regardless of their ethnicity. After all, stories revolving around love, sacrifice, history, and family are universal.
Growing up, I’d heard stories from my grandpa about how truly difficult and tragic life was in Korea during the Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, and the ‘post-war’ era. My grandpa was just 17 or 18 years old when he was permanently separated from his entire immediate family because a bridge was bombed right after he crossed it — him and his family were planning to move south together, but his family was left behind in what later became North Korea.
The collapse of a bridge. The collapse of a family. He never saw his siblings and mother again (his father had passed away when he was a child, which is something I actually only learned a few months ago).
Still, reading about Sunja and her family’s hardships in Korea and in Japan opened my eyes to just how cruel the world must have been as a Korean living under oppression both in their homeland and their adopted homeland in exile.
Honestly, as much as I loved Pachinko, reading this novel was also an infuriating and emotionally taxing experience. The way that Hansu responded so casually about his wife and three children in Japan when Sunja told him that she was carrying his child, the way that so many people blamed Sunja’s ‘lack of judgment’ for her unplanned pregnancy, the way that the Japanese treated the Koreans in both Korea and Japan, and the way that the characters suffer from intergenerational trauma due to colonialism, racism, poverty, and war… so many things just truly made my blood boil and tears well up in my eyes.
The characters in Pachinko did not feel fictional to me at all. While the novel itself is a work of fiction, the characters and the experiences they go through actually are real — the author Min Jin Lee took a very academic and anthropological approach to her process and actually interviewed lots of Korean-Japanese people while she lived in Tokyo, so every character and every story is essentially real. The only fictional element of this novel is the author’s amalgamation of real stories — stories of the characters in Pachinko could have easily been stories of my great-grandparents.
Everyday (and increasingly), I see the way that intergenerational trauma continues to damage my own family and the Korean society in general, as well as the way that Japan continues to benefit from its colonial history with the wealth and power it gained through its brutal exploitation of Korea and other colonial territories.
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
During my freshman spring, I shopped a class called HISTORY 95/195: Modern Korean History because I wanted to properly study Korean history and better understand my family and my roots. I dropped it as I rearranged my schedule, but I promised myself then that I would take the class at some point during my time at Stanford. Because of my international/American education, I’d never properly learned about Korean history in an academic setting. I think that it would be extremely valuable, if not somewhat morally obligatory, for me to learn about modern Korean history and better understand how it shapes Korea today. I think it will also make my heart ache numerous times, but such is the story of my people.
