Pachinko by Min Jin Lee *an essay*
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 stars
This book is a part of my plan to read a book written by an author from every country in the world. Min Jin Lee is from South Korea, although she lives in America. It was interesting to read how she became interested in the Korean experience in Japan whilst living in America and then travelling to Korea and Japan to learn more from the people who live there.
I am really glad to have tackled and finished a "big book" because I have been struggling to pick them up recently, even though they are on my shelf and I know I will love them when I just read them.
The book is separated into 3 parts and follows a Korean family through different generations starting in 1910 and ending in 1989. The moment that changes this Korean family's trajectory is when the daughter, Sunja, of a poor family from Yeongdo District near Busan, becomes pregnant but the father deserts her so a minister offers to marry her to save her from shame and takes her to Japan.
From this moment, we watch as the family struggle whilst living in Japan, away from their homeland, and have to live through the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, the division of their homeland of Korea, and the scapegoating and discrimination of Koreans living in Japan by the Japanese and Koreans who still live in Korea. As the blurb states, they are "caught in the indifferent arc of history" and this is clear as we see these huge historical events pass the family by because their most important struggles are survival, work, discrimination and bringing up their family.
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
What a first line. This really does encapsulate what the book is trying to do. It is showing the erasure of the stories of Koreans in Japan, whilst admitting that this was never important to the individuals living through this period of history anyway. The individuals were not worried about history because they were living in the present although this makes it even more important to remember their stories and experiences.
*spoilers below*
“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage”
One of the key themes that this book focussed on was the erasure of the people themselves in their individual everyday lives where they were treated as not human and not as worthy as those around them. This was horrible to experience through this book because you saw how present that reality was at the time the characters are living but also how present that experience still is way different groups of people.
The way that the narration of this book is able to be empathic to all the experiences - those of the Koreans who are being discriminated against by individuals and by the systems within Japan and the experiences of the discriminators is impressive and shows how all sides to the human experience as so important.
“because she would not believe that she was no different than her parents, that seeing him as only Korean - good or bad - was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.”
This experience of being seen as simply human is key to a lot of immigrant experiences and feels very complicated even to those within the experience as well as people like me who could not imagine living life like that.
This is shown explicitly in the relationship that Sunja's first son, Noa, has with a Japanese girl from university. Although she comes across as not being discriminatory to Koreans and saying that she loves Koreans and thinks all Koreans are good, this is not what Noa has asked of her. All he wishes is for her to see himself as he is, not see him as just a Korean.
“...a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn't be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet.”
One of the largest themes in the book was religion. The minister that saved our protagonist, Sunja, from the shame of being pregnant and unmarried, was asking God for answers as to what he should do and how he should face this situation, even when others would think it wasn't a good idea.
Because of this minister character, the theme of religion kept coming back up. Sunja had to learn to become a Christian and believe in God and ended up praying for things to happen to show that she really did begin to believe.
It was also interesting because the culture where Sunja and Yangjin were from in Southern Korea did not have any religion and this was not a normal part of life, but Christian missionaries were being set up around the country. And then they moved to Japan which also did not have a traditional religion. And then we see the creation of North Korea as it is today where the religion involves worshipping the people in charge as though they were Gods.
“a man must learn to forgive - to know what is important, that to live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement.”
I love this sentiment.
“There was more to being something than just blood.”
I can see the way this resonates within the book but at the same time, it feels less like a sentence from a book and more like a lesson that should be learnt by society as a whole. I like this idea that we can have strong connections through blood but other connections we form can be just as strong. This is demonstrated a lot in this book with the complicated family relations, for example with Hansu and Noa's blood father and son relationship compared to Isak and Noa's father and son relationship.
The characters have to form strong bonds to be able to endure the horrors that they had to throughout their lives and it was so inspiring to see them work together to survive.
“Fill your mind with knowledge - it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.”
This is so true. With the shocking events happening currently in Afghanistan, I can see this sentiment taking place with women who have been academics or led careers, having to destroy evidence that they have this knowledge but thankfully their knowledge does not have to be destroyed.
I do believe in this myself as well. I love knowledge and this is probably why I read so many books and want to know lots of things about the world, society and the people in it. I think it is really good to be knowledgeable about our world and becomes especially important when you are persecuted because you have knowledge within you regardless.
“Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.”
Although I love these messages about knowledge and learning, I never liked Hansu, the character that was teaching Noa these lessons. However, I think this just shows how Min Jin Lee was able to be such an unbiased narrator because although we were made to dislike Hansu's character that did not mean he was wholly bad or had nothing to say of importance.
When characters can be disliked but respected to we can understand their perspective, these characters are really starting to reflect reality because I believe that no person is fully good or fully bad and I think it would be naive to think like that. It also shows real skill by the writer for us to root for characters we don't even like or for us to want certain scenarios because we understand that people are just human.
“A woman's lot is to suffer.”
This phrase is said by Yangjin (Sunja's mother) a lot during the book and is reflected by most of the women in the community as well. It shows a lot about the way that women were seen and treated at the time and these sentiments still exist today.
“All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer - suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother - die suffering. Go-saeng - the word made her sick.”
I can feel the feminist within Sunja coming through with these thoughts but it has sadly taken a lifetime for her to realise that although she can learn much from the women around her, that does not mean everything they say is true, as much of it is sexism learnt through generations.
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This book was a beautiful read with important and difficult themes discussed with unbiased empathy.
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