The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
A Novel
Title: The Disaster Tourist
Author: Yun Ko-eun
Publisher: Counterpoint
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN: 9781640094161
Rating: 3.5 stars
My reading this month is really emphasizing to me the value of reading books from other countries and cultures in translation. I’m not sure if it’s just the three Korean books I’ve read so far this month, or Korean literature in general, but something really interesting is happening in the South Korean literary scene. Like The Wangs vs. the World, this is an ARC that I’ve had hanging around for a while that I just hadn’t found the time to read yet. Like Lemon, this book kind of defies definition and despite being under 200 pages, it is difficult to sum up succinctly. It’s obviously a small sampling, but these books have defied genre and definitely upended my expectations and predictions.
This book starts off normally enough. Yona Ko has worked at the Jungle travel company for ten years. Jungle specializes in vacation packages to places that have recently suffered a natural or manmade disaster and focuses on travelers learning about the disaster, touring the sites, and then sometimes doing some act of community service to help the people affected by the disaster. Yet, Yona is struggling in her career. Her boss is sexually harassing her, she is afraid she is on the verge of getting fired, and a package she recently put a lot of work into was credited to someone else. Hoping to pre-empt her own disaster, Yona offers her resignation. Her boss refuses to accept it and instead offers her a month of paid “vacation” wherein she would pose as a tourist to review a couple of travel packages Jungle is thinking of canceling.
The first package she chooses is to Mui, an island off the coast of Vietnam where ethnic cleansing and a sinkhole claimed many lives in the 1960s. However, so much time has passed between the tragedy and Yona’s visit that the sinkhole doesn’t feel relevant anymore and the trip is very lackluster for Yona. When Yona and her group get ready to make the trip back to Korea, they must take a train to the airport in Ho Chi Minh City and fly back. However, on the train, Yona becomes separated from her group and her luggage and her passport and money are pickpocketed and she finds herself in an unknown Vietnamese town with nothing but a dying cell phone and a command of Korean and English, two languages that almost no one in the town knows.
Without any other real options, Yona returns to the resort on Mui hoping to use their phone to get her situation resolved and to get back to Korea. At this point, what has felt like literary fiction starts to feel like horror. Mui during the tourist off-season doesn’t resemble the island she just visited. She is unable to get the help she needs to return to Korea and soon finds herself wanting to stay on Mui because she is embroiled in a plan to fake another disaster to rejuvenate the dwindling tourism industry. It soon becomes apparent to the reader and much later to Yona that she doesn’t know the full plan and that many lives, including her own, could be at stake here.
Like with Lemon, I’m kind of unsure what to say about this book. I was pretty bored through the book until Yona returns to Mui for the second time. From there I was able to get into the story and the second half flew by. I like both literary fiction and horror, but to me Yun’s horror writing was much more compelling than her literary fiction. The first part of the book struck me as the typical story of a woman who is boringly unfulfilled in her boring life. I felt like I had read that story before and I never really connected to Yona as a character so that wasn’t enough to get me interested. I still didn’t relate to Yona in the second half, but she was doing something other than just existing in her boring quotidian life and the writing was more interesting to me.
Unlike Lemon, I did get some moral lessons out of this book. I think Yun is intending this to be a criticism of disaster tourism and human’s fascination with disaster and destruction. There is also a lot of commentary in this book about how we are only really interested when the disasters are exotic and happen to people whose lives don’t resemble ours. Several characters comment that no one wants to see bad things happen in a life that resembles their own in places that look like where they live. That is kind of bleak, but I do think there is some bitter truth to that. There is also a lot of commentary on the fleetingness of our caring about and compassion for victims of a disaster. We care, sometimes only performatively, until the news cycle or the next disaster pushes the tragedy from our minds. The epilogue mirrors the first chapter in talking about two different disasters. The first chapter opens with, “News of the deaths moved fast that week. Word was spreading quickly, but it wouldn’t be long before people lost interest. By the time funeral proceedings began, the public would have already forgotten the deceased.” The epilogue echos, “News of the deaths had moved fast over the past week. Though initially high, interest in the deaths would inevitably dissipate quickly, especially once all the coffins had been carried away.”
I also think there is some commentary about the dangers of blind obedience and sticking with the status quo and being overly devoted to your job. In the first half of the book, Yona refuses to participate in a protest of Jungle by other workers who had also been harassed by her boss. She wants to quit her job, but instead allows her boss to press her into taking this trip. While traveling, she remembers her predecessor in her job who dared to speak up. He was similarly sent on a trip and while he was gone, she was just shuffled into his job and didn’t really spend much time thinking about what had happened. When she is desperately trying to get back to Korea, she realizes how the time she has devoted to her job and the way that the company provides all the social experiences the workers need has isolated her from anyone outside of her job. She also agrees to go along with the planning of the next Mui disaster without spending much time questioning or examining what they are really doing.
While I was into the writing in the second half of the book, the narration skips a couple of seemingly big beats. For instance, when Yona loses her passport and money, she realizes they’re gone and can’t remember if she left them in her luggage or the hotel. Suddenly, she is telling other characters that she was pickpocketed. When she returns to Mui and gets involved in planning, I got really confused in several places where Yona begins to talk to other characters about completely new developments that the reader hasn’t heard anything about. For instance, she is working with a writer on the plan and suddenly they are discussing a screenplay about the disaster that wasn’t previously mentioned. The screenplay also seems to have predicted or caused some real life events to happen. The way events start to devolve toward the end of the book makes me think that this was the effect the author was going for. I felt like I was being gaslit and in all honesty, I’m not really sure what happened with Yona in the end. I kind of lost the grip on the reality of the story, which I think was what the author wanted. Those instances were just about the only ones in which I related to Yona in this book.
The Disaster Tourist was interesting and thought-provoking, but the first half was kind of a slog and I’m left with feelings of confusion and a lot of questions. This is one I’d really love to discuss.