{"id":5450,"date":"2021-06-09T22:10:15","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T05:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5450"},"modified":"2021-06-09T22:11:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T05:11:00","slug":"korea-blog-the-techno-mythological-imagination-of-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5450","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: the Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young\u2019s I\u2019m Waiting for You"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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South Korea has one of the first populations who can claim to have collectively traveled through time. In a trivial sense, of course, we all travel through time, forward at a rate of one hour per hour, one day per day, one year per year. But this country, as no introduction fails to mention, underwent in the second half of the 20th century a transformation already seen in other societies \u2014 \u201cdevelopment,\u201d \u201cmodernization,\u201d \u201cWesternization,\u201d call it what you like \u2014 but at an unprecedented speed. Aggressive industrialization compressed a century of history into just a few decades, and the aftereffects of that process account for much of the good, the bad, and the weird in Korean life today. Among other traces, it has left tragi-comically wide generation gaps: for many Koreans, interactions with their parents feel like Westerners\u2019 interactions with their disoriented great-grandparents.<\/p>

\u201cMy dad lived his whole life in his hometown,\u201d says the narrator of the story \u201cI\u2019m Waiting for You.\u201d But \u201cby the time he passed away our hometown was a completely different place from where he was born. Buildings had been put up and roads laid, mountains flattened, and the courses of rivers diverted. Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?\u201d The reflection comes in one of a series of letters to this narrator\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, whom he won\u2019t be able to see for nearly five years. Both are aboard separate spaceships, she to emigrate to a distant solar system with her family, and he expressly \u2014 by way of light-speed travel\u2019s dilation of time for the traveler \u2014 more quickly to pass the years her trip will require before they reunite for their wedding on Earth.<\/p>

For his fianc\u00e9e doesn\u2019t intend to stay with her family, of whose meddling in her life she\u2019s had enough. She wouldn\u2019t be the first Korean to go to great lengths to get away from relatives, nor the first to engage in instrumental immigration: \u201canyone who travels to another solar system gets an outer planets residency permit,\u201d she explains, and \u201cthere are loads of advantages when it comes to taxes and things like that.\u201d The more things change, as many a literary vision of the future has meant to show us, the more they stay the same. But change is precisely what the narrator\u2019s fellow emigrants in time went into the \u201cOrbit of Waiting\u201d hoping for: \u201cSome people are traveling to the year their pension plan matures, others hope real estate taxes will come down while they\u2019re away. There are artists too, who believe they were born in the wrong era.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Korea has one of the first populations who can claim to have collectively traveled through time. In a trivial sense, of course, we all travel through time, forward at a rate of one hour per hour, one day per day, one year per year. But this country, as no introduction fails to mention, underwent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5454,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5450\/revisions\/5454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}