Author Kim Young-ha: Billie Jean is not his lover

Kim Young-ha is a celebrated South Korean author whose 1996 debut novel about a suicide consultant earned him his nation’s most coveted literary award, the Munhak-dongne prize. His genre-crossing style and penetrating voice have generated tons of international buzz. We were lucky enough to connect with him ahead of his talk at the Capital M Literary Festival this Sunday.

You studied business, then worked as an assistant detective, and are now a novelist. What’s the connection amongst the three?

Studying business made me see the desires of people and the reality of the world. Military service at the military police revealed to me the 'underworld' that I had not recognized before. Writing novels allows me to combine these experiences I've been through.

In I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, your character says, "Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting." Do you share this sentiment?

Those are definitely words spoken by the character in the novel, and not mine. Readers should be aware that he is a person of expansive delusion. He even believes that he can be a god in killing somebody. I, as a greedy reader, always grab novels first whenever and wherever the circumstances permit.

The themes of your first novel are particularly dark and somewhat disturbing. How did you enter into the mental space of your lead character to achieve that kind of stark writing?

I started to write the novel right after I was discharged from the military police. So I was pre-occupied by gruesome images and stories that I had seen and experienced in the army. That's why the atmosphere of the novel was so dark. Back then, I was also into French philosophers like Georges Bataille who were obsessed with the death drive (Thanatos) and eroticism. I think that might have also influenced the novel.

Your second book, Black Flower, is a fascinating take on a small bit of Korean history. How did you come upon this historical narrative, and what drew you to write about it? How did you research the details, and how did you imagine the lives of the characters?

A friend of mine took a flight from L.A to Seoul and he heard an interesting but unbelievable story from the historian sitting next to him. 1,033 Korean immigrants crossed the Pacific Ocean and landed in Mexico. After their five-year work contracts expired, they learned that Japan had colonized Korea. Because their country had basically disappeared, some of them stayed, became involved in the Mexican Revolution and others were hired by Guatemalan anti-government guerillas. Eventually Korean people in the Guatemalan jungle built a small “country” and were suppressed by the government army. All the immigrants were either totally absorbed or they disappeared. This diaspora story captivated me at once. I thought it could be a sarcastic parody of The Book of Exodus.

I traveled the Yucatan peninsula and the Guatemalan jungle for research and started to write the novel in Antigua, Guatemala. Unfortunately there was nothing but one or two newspaper articles about the small “country” they had built. So I had to fill in almost all the details myself. This novel will be published in English next year.

Between a widespread diaspora and the division of North and South, Korean identity is wrought with questions of nation, race, belonging ... how much does this background influence your desire to write, and your choices for the topics of each book?

When I was a child, my father was an army officer. My family had to live near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where I was always hearing the North Korean propaganda speeches. That experience made me think a bit about strange themes like border, nation, prohibition, death, belief and so on. Growing up near the DMZ, one of the most dangerous areas in the world, is quite a rare experience. I think my childhood was the most crucial thing for my ability to write novels. Your Republic Is Calling You, my fourth novel, is the story about a forgotten North Korean spy. It is not just a coincidence that I pick this kind of 'borderline' character. He lives half his life in the North and the other half in the South. I have always felt myself standing on that border.

In Los Angeles, the Kogi beef truck has been all the rage for the past couple of years. (For those who don’t know, it's a truck that serves Korean-Mexican fusion such as bulgogi tacos). Have you tried it before? What are your thoughts on this kind of trendy diasporic cuisine?

Korean food is quite a fashion in New York as well. But it is not authentic yet. Only a small part of Korean cuisine gets exported. This means Korean food has a lot more potential to be globalized. Claude Levy Strauss once said there is a culinary triangle with three types of food: raw, cooked and rotten. Korean food is not weighted toward a specific apex. It covers all three apexes of this triangle. Koreans eat the raw (vegetables and fish), the cooked (bulgogi) and rotten (soybean paste). That's the reason Korean food can fit so many variations easily.

How do you like teaching at Columbia University? Does anything strike you about the students in America? Their approach to literature? How does it vary from what you've experienced in Korea's literary and academic worlds?

Actually I am not teaching at Columbia University regularly. But I meet the students occasionally at the seminars and literary events. I find American students are quite different when they read my novels. In Korea, students understand the background of the novel very well. So they just focus on the novel itself: characters, plot and style. But American students keep asking questions that Korean students are not curious about. American students are trying to find clues for understanding Korean society. Thanks to their ignorance, I can get an 'exotic' perspective or different viewpoint to look back on where I am from.

Have you read your work in English? How do you feel it translates?

Nope. I haven't read translated works of mine. I just trust my editor and translator and let them work. Whenever I see the books that are translated into languages that I can't read like German, French or Turkish, I feel like I’m meeting a boy who insists that he is my biological son from an ex-girlfriend. They say it is my book, but I am not 100% sure it is mine.

Kim Young-ha speaks about his work at the Capital M Literary Festival on Sunday, Feb 27. RMB 65, RMB 10 (students). 5pm. Capital M. For tickets or to reserve, click here.