To Live Is To Hope: Min Jin Lee’s ‘Pachinko’
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s been my constant companion these past few weeks, housebound in a very storm-torn Scotland with a broken knee, a tempestuous saga following the story of four generations of a Korean family from their origins in an island fishing community off the coast of Busan at the dawn of the 20th century to their struggles to survive in 1980s Japan against extreme racist discrimination with devastating socio-economic repercussions.
They rely on the pachinko business, a pinball machine-style game that exploits a legal gambling loophole, giving rise to an industry now more lucrative than the automotive industry in Japan, generating more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore combined. It also became one of the only sources of employment for Korean expats, who were denied citizenship despite generations of history there and thus were rendered stateless by the wars. But the associations of the industry with social inferiority and with the organised crime of yakuza gangs only compounded this bigotry, the topic of the near empty lecture the author went to at Yale in 1989 that gave her the seed of the narrative she would spend the next three decades nurturing, a process that included the complete disposal of several full drafts, only finding its final form when she moved to Tokyo and Osaka for a period of meticulous interviewing and intense rewriting. Having emigrated from Seoul to New York aged just 7 without a word of English as the daughter of a war refugee turned businessman from the north and a wealthy minister’s daughter and piano teacher from the south, working with her parents in their small oft-burgled Manhattan costume jewellery store at the weekends while weathering the whips and scorns of school in Queens and then the Bronx during the even more difficult week, she had an intimate familiarity with this collision of worlds. Over the years, language became her power and storytelling her activism.
In the book, this sea-hopping journey is given to Sunja, who is present for most of its 500 pages. In the author Q&A at the back, MJL responds to a question on the counterpoint of female beauty and age that she “wanted to reflect how a poor young woman’s unconventional beauty, unknown even to herself, can be magnetic and resilient” — “I am interested in the physicality of women who live their daily struggles with integrity; their beauty captivates those who know them”. We follow Sunja as she grows up on that small island of Yeongdo under Japanese occupation until she falls pregnant by a rich businessman who she later discovers already has a wife in Japan, forcing her to marry the kind yet near-stranger minister en route to join his brother in Osaka from his home in the north of Korea. Her epic life story as she strives desperately to protect her two sons, both born in Japan, at any and all costs as they live through first WWII and then the ramifications of the Korean War, is one that will stay with me forever.
It opens with a Dickens epigraph, who becomes a recurring anchor and motif for a certain character and all he contends with throughout the story: “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration”. And this is perhaps the central locus of the book, the question of where and/or what home is. In the great game of life, what does home mean… what — and where — is it? Where does it reside? For me the final answer that scorches its closing pages is: hope. Life is, at its blazing core, hope. Against all odds. In the face of the most horrific sorrows. To live, is to hope.
There’s this song called Youth by Kim Feel and Kim Chang Wan that serves as one of the recurring themes in the TV show Reply 1988, a beautiful drama released in 2015 about five families living on the same street in Seoul through the 80s and 90s and how their stories intertwine like ivy. I listened to it a lot while reading Pachinko, and its yearning ache as an elegy to the halcyon days of its title seemed the perfect soundtrack… like Sunja thinking of Yeongdo, of the oranges and the sea. And then Isak. And then Noa. And then, in her winter, all those promises and dreams of her spring. Yangjin of Hoonie. Yoseb of the North, his siblings, his parents. Mozasu of Yumi. Haruki of Mozasu. Etsuko of her children when they were young and oblivious. And perhaps to an extent Koreans of Korea, the one that few can remember. The one from before. Or especially for those who were stranded stateless in Japan by the wars, for a nationhood free of persecution, free of shame and suffering.
Indeed in the biblically epic battle amidst the ravages of war and oppression with shame and duty and desire and faith and forgiveness and failure and suffering and salvation through labour, it seems everything is a game of pachinko. Life, love, prosperity, motherhood… with few winners, and far more losers.
And yet—
And yet—
And yet—
Hope.
It’s still sodding there, stubbornly clinging on, sprinting at the tsunami with an umbrella because you’ll always, always believe you’re going to win.
And what could be more human than that?
“It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes—so this was how she became a woman. Without Hansu and Isak and Noa, there wouldn’t have been this pilgrimage to this land. Beyond the dailiness, there had been moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, even in this ajumma’s life. Even if no one knew, it was true.”
