by Yun Ko-Eun
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
THE DISASTER TOURIST
“A gripping literary thriller about disaster, adventure, and a crisis of conscience that will resonate with any traveler.”
—JENNIFER CROFT, author of Homesick and winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights
“An endlessly surprising and totally gripping read, The Disaster Tourist is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. It questions every aspect of life we so often take for granted, smashing apart any easy distinctions between natural and artificial, normal and abnormal, peaceful and violent, personal and political. There could not be a more prescient moment for this too-real fiction about how we create our own disasters on every scale and what resilience might mean in the face of catastrophe.”
—ELVIA WILK, author of Oval
THE DISASTER TOURIST
Copyright © 2020 by Yun Ko-eun
English translation copyright © 2020 by Lizzie Buehler
First Counterpoint edition: 2020
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by SERPENT’S TAIL, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-64009-416-1
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Cover design by Sinem Erkas
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CONTENTS
1 Jungle
2 The Desert Sinkhole
3 The Cut-Off Train Car
4 Three Weeks Later
5 The Mannequin Island
6 Adrift
7 Mui Sunday
Epilogue Mangrove Forest
Afterword
1
JUNGLE
Northbound: High atmospheric pressure, cherry blossoms, news of deaths
Southbound: Dust clouds, strikes, debris
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.
A tsunami had hit Jinhae, in the province of Kyeongnam. Jinhae was where cherry blossoms first bloomed in early spring. When it happened, on an otherwise typical afternoon, life in the city had stopped. In an instant, everything was underwater: tourists beholding the flowers, pedestrians meandering about, buildings that had been warmed by the sun, and street lamps on the edge of the beach.
Yona went down to Jinhae on Friday evening. Jungle—the travel company where she worked as a programming coordinator—didn’t currently offer any travel packages to visit the post-tsunami rubble, but it would soon. After arriving, Yona’s first tasks were to hand over donations and dispatch volunteers. She spent the weekend giving out money—ten-thousand-won contributions from nearly a thousand Jungle employees—expressing her condolences and assessing the situation. Jungle divided disasters into thirty-three distinct categories, including volcano eruptions, earthquakes, war, drought, typhoons and tsunamis, with 152 available packages. For the city of Jinhae, Yona planned to create an itinerary that combined viewing the aftermath of the tsunami with volunteer work.
Yona’s return to Seoul took longer than the trek down south. As Korea marched into spring, cherry blossoms were blanketing the country. The flowers had already bloomed in Jinhae, and during Yona’s weekend away from home, northern blossoms began to bud as well. Once she was back in Seoul, Yona turned on her TV. After the south coast tsunami, the news broadcast not only typical weather forecasts and programmes about the flowers’ arrival, but also information about where the ocean currents would take the tsunami wreckage now trapped in their waters. The trash consisted of artefacts of daily life stolen by nature, mostly pieces of plastic and forgettable knickknacks not yet decomposed. Soon to be forgotten by their former owners, they were destined to swirl about the sea for decades. The debris flowed south along the currents, bobbing atop ever-moving waves.
Predictions about the trash’s future path varied. Some said it would flow into the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, the one that was seven times the size of the Korean Peninsula. Others guessed that within the next two years it would end up along the coast of Chile. Some people even estimated where the trash would be ten years from now. Most citizens just hoped that they wouldn’t cross paths with the tsunami’s remains. They wanted to shield themselves from disaster, to hide from risk.
However, one segment of Korean society differed from the risk-averse majority. These voyagers carried survival kits, generators and tents as they searched out disaster zones worthy of exploration. They were the kind of people who would relish the chance to weather the open sea in search of the mythical island of trash. Jungle was the travel company for such adventurers.
Yona had once dreamed of going on treacherous journeys. The first place she’d ever travelled to was Nagasaki, her trip inspired by a single sentence in a guidebook: ‘The city is home to statues commemorating citizens who lost their lives in the atomic bomb explosion, as well as those who passed away in local storms.’ The guidebook mapped the location of the Nagasaki statues, but as she read, Yona had realised she didn’t care where the statues were. Instead, she’d begun to wonder what exactly went missing when a person lost his or her life, and if the lost life was ever found elsewhere. Yona was always wondering about this kind of unknown information—like where rocks that fell off the side of a mountain ended up. And what about the scales removed from a filleted fish, or unwanted potato sprouts, or even bullets?
Yona had worked at Jungle for over ten years, surveying disaster zones and moulding them into travel destinations. As a child, she hadn’t imagined doing work like this, but she was skilled at quantifying the unquantifiable. The frequency and strength of disasters, and the resulting damage to humans and property, transformed into colourful graphs now spread out on Yona’s desk. Next to the graphs lay a world map and a Korean map, place names marked with notations to indicate which disasters had occurred there. To Yona, certain places were now interchangeable with disaster. New Orleans made her think about the remaining traces of Hurricane Katrina. In New Zealand, it was the earthquake that had shaken the city of Christchurch into rubble. Near Chernobyl, the ghost towns that emerged after the region was exposed to radiation, along with the Red Forest created by the fallout. In Brazil, the favelas, and in Sri Lanka, Japan and Phuket—like in Jinhae—the damage wreaked by tsunamis. Ultimately, no city could ever completely evade catastrophe. Disaster lay dormant in every corner, like depression. You never knew when it might spring into terrible action, but if you were lucky, it could remain hidden for a lifetime.
Every year, the world experienced on average 900 earthquakes that measured higher than 5.0 on the Richter scale, and 300 volcanoes—large and small—exploded across all seven continents. These facts were as quotidian to Yona as the changing colours of a traffic light. Only last year, almost 200,000 people had died in natural disasters. With an average of 100,000 annual deaths over the past ten years, calamity was growing more powerful and periodic. And while technological innovations prevented more and more catastrophe, new and wilier di
sasters popped up as well. Learning about misfortune was what Yona did. Because calamity was her job, it had a tendency to occupy her mind even during her off-hours. Working at Jungle was all encompassing.
‘It’s the customer service line,’ Yona’s subordinate said as he handed her the phone.
Now Yona would repeat phrases she’d said a thousand times, like an android on autopilot. ‘Ma’am, if you cancel, you’ll incur a service fee,’ or ‘Sir, this is specified in the contract.’ Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Yona’s responsibility, but she had already fielded several customer complaints today. The calls were coming in at the most inopportune moment.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said calmly into the phone, ‘but refunds are not possible.’
Customers always responded to this sentence in the same way.
‘But there are still three months left until the trip,’ replied the voice on the other end. ‘Why would there be a one hundred per cent penalty for cancellation? I’m cancelling because my child is sick. Are you really saying that there’s no chance of a refund? Actually, why is it that none of your trips allow for cancellation?’
‘Cancellations are possible, sir,’ Yona said, ‘but we cannot refund deposits already paid in full.’
‘Cancellations are possible, but refunds aren’t? Is it always like this? That means I should have only paid part of the deposit at first. If this is how you’re going to be, I’ll have to file a complaint with the Consumer Protection Bureau.’
‘Would you like me to transfer you to them now?’ Yona asked. ‘I’m sorry to say, they won’t be of any help. Our contract clearly stipulated from the beginning that your trip cannot be refunded, regardless of the date of cancellation. You signed the contract, sir. Since you’ve already paid the deposit, you received a large discount, so buying early wasn’t a bad idea. If you still decide to go on the trip, rest assured that you received the best possible price. People signing up now are being charged thirty-five per cent more, even if they pay the reservation deposit up front.’
‘Look.’
The customer’s voice had grown cold.
‘I told you that my child is sick. He’s in the hospital. In a situation like this, can’t you be a decent person and let me cancel?’
‘If you’d like, we can cancel your order,’ Yona said.
‘But a refund isn’t possible, right?’ the man asked.
‘That is correct, sir.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Sir—’
‘I asked you what your name is! I’m done with all this crap. Tell me your name.’
‘Yona Ko.’
With that, the man hung up. He was angry, and so was Yona. Most of the time, customers were more forgiving of higher-ranking employees, which was why customer service passed calls up to programming coordinators. On a day like today, though, when Yona was inundated with work, she didn’t have time to be bothered by distractions. Jungle didn’t want her to waste her efforts with disgruntled customers, either. Yona was one of the brains of the company, not its lips.
She wondered if her recent role change at Jungle might indicate that she was the target of a ‘yellow card’. She had known about the company’s preferred form of discipline since being hired. A yellow card was less a warning than a siren, signalling a growing and irreparable fissure. Once you’d received one, as long as the moon didn’t fall out of the sky, you could do nothing to stop the already-widening fracture. Yona wondered if she might get an actual yellow slip of paper, by mail or email or even courier, but she knew better: that wasn’t how it worked. Yellow cards showed themselves in a discreet manner, but were unmistakable, so that the recipient could appreciate the crisis that had befallen his or her career.
Two divergent paths faced the yellow card recipient: work as diligently as possible in a newly hostile office environment, or fight back with all of one’s being. Yona had heard of someone who’d risen back to his original position, five years after a swift fall from grace. In the meantime, that person’s assistant had become his boss. Even after returning to his original job, the man worked for only a brief period of time before quitting. His health was poor. Quite possibly, the shock of the yellow card and five years of tumult had caused a tumour in his brain. Yona didn’t know him personally, but the story circulated through the office. Supposedly, the subject was the former head of the team one room over.
Recently, whenever Yona went into work, she’d felt like a dandelion seed that had somehow drifted into a building. The chair she sat in each morning was definitely hers, but for some reason, sitting in it was awkward, like this was the first time she’d ever touched the piece of furniture. She grew uncomfortable whenever she saw the new hires striding up and down the hallways, like giants already in control of the place. When Yona voiced her discomfort to a few close co-workers in the bathroom, they said that her complaints were baseless. As soon as Yona opened her mouth, their casual conversation—light as the paper towels they were throwing into the bin—took on a heaviness, and Yona’s co-workers looked at her with very serious faces.
‘Is something going on?’ one friend asked.
Yona figured that she was making the situation worse by bringing it up, so she quickly washed her hands and tried to forget her unease. But the truth was, several days earlier there had been an uncomfortable incident. She’d shown up for a meeting on time, but when she arrived, no one was in the room. A wide-eyed junior staff member had approached Yona from the hallway.
‘Isn’t there a meeting?’ Yona asked, confused, as she stepped out of the conference suite.
The man replied with a wink. ‘Today’s a foul.’
‘A foul?’ she asked.
‘That’s what they told me,’ he said.
Foul? Was this some sort of new jargon? An abbreviation? A kind of slang? As Yona racked her brains, she remembered hearing a similar sentence a few days ago, in the department next to her own: ‘It’s because of a foul.’
‘Okay,’ she replied in a fluster, losing the chance to ask, ‘But what’s a foul?’ Yona figured that she didn’t have to determine the meaning of the word; she just needed to understand the situations in which it was used. But she didn’t have any idea what those situations were. Of course, she could have just asked someone, but she felt uneasy letting people know that she didn’t know what ‘foul’ meant.
The co-worker hurried away, and Yona stared blankly at the empty conference room before stepping into the lift. After meetings, employees would crowd into the bathroom or smoking area to relieve built-up tension, but today, even without such social exertion, Yona was too exhausted to do anything but rush back to her desk. As Yona boarded the lift; so did Kim—another co-worker. Once the doors closed, he spoke.
‘Johnson is asking me to send my greetings to you,’ Kim told Yona.
‘Who?’ Yona asked.
‘Johnson. My Johnson.’
Kim pointed to his crotch. The lift was descending from the twenty-first to the third floor, and Kim and Yona were the only two people inside. Without even giving her a moment to be surprised, Kim grabbed at Yona’s bottom. The action wasn’t a mistake, it was deliberate: a brazen gesture that suggested Kim didn’t care if he was caught.
‘Are you older than I thought?’ he taunted her. ‘Why didn’t you understand what I said?’
Yona turned her body as casually as she could to avoid eye contact with Kim. Now he was pushing his hand into her blouse. Yona’s chest pounded furiously, although not because she was seeing the unsavoury side of Kim for the first time. Nor was it because her boss was sexually assaulting her. No: according to what Yona knew, Kim only targeted has-beens—employees who’d been given a yellow card, or who were about to receive one. She was horrified to think that her rejection of his advances might be the grounds for a yellow card.
Yona stepped aside, fearful of the CCTV on the wall behind her. She tried to stand still like nothing was happening. She didn’t want the episode to be discovered; the CCTV recorded t
irelessly, twenty-four hours a day. Additionally, Yona wasn’t sure when the lift was going to open its door, revealing her and Kim to colleagues waiting on another floor. Kim was harassing her so shamelessly, he was almost asking for his actions to be made public. His touch felt extremely impersonal somehow: he didn’t speak to Yona as he molested her. The doors to the lift lurched open and two people entered. By then, Kim’s hand had already moved from Yona’s chest back into his pocket. He said something in a low voice that the others may or may not have heard.
‘You should pay a bit more attention to words,’ he warned Yona. ‘Not knowing the language of this day and age, that’s like going around wearing a sign that says, “I don’t care if I get left behind!” ’
When Kim got off, the other riders in the lift sneaked glances at Yona. After that day, Kim slipped his cold hands inside Yona’s skirt two more times. The important thing wasn’t the temperature of his hand, it was the hand itself, but she hated the clamminess so much that just thinking about it gave her goosebumps. Kim had been Yona’s immediate supervisor for the past ten years, and he kept her on board every time there were changes in personnel. He was a competent boss. Or to be more accurate, he wasn’t a competent boss but a competent underling, and thanks to that he could maintain the facade of proficiency. Kim’s employee performance rating was exactly fifty per cent, and his likes and dislikes were clear. He shook people he didn’t approve of until they broke. Yona was frightened by the thought of others learning that she had become Kim’s newest target. If his sexual offences remained covert, she was inclined to bear the discomfort. Yona thought about her complacency and then shook her head. No, what made her most uncomfortable right now was that she’d tolerated his actions three times without doing anything. She felt like she was somehow cooperating. But victims would understand her hesitation to act, she thought.
It was a warm spring. The first thing that came to mind when Yona thought of the season wasn’t flowers or the budding leaves, but sweat. When she had visited the tsunami aftermath in Jinhae, sweat dripped down her neck the entire weekend. As soon as spring turned to summer, Kim called Yona into his office.