Fiction in translationReviewEconomic development and the loss of tradition are seen through the microcosm of life on a rubbish dump, in this impassioned novel from South Korea
The narrative of east Asia’s economic success is far better known than the consequences of the region’s rapid development. In Familiar Things, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, one of South Korea’s most venerated novelists urgently examines the darker side of modernisation through the micro-society of a rubbish dump.
An unnamed city’s local landfill site, both invisible and ubiquitous, houses an entire community. When Bugeye’s father is sent to a government re‑education camp in the 1980s, the rest of the family is forced to forage for their livelihood in a shanty town ironically named Flower Island. They join the trash pickers who search for recyclable materials, leftover food and house-building supplies and live in cardboard and tin shacks constructed on top of the city’s main dump. The community is “filled with things used up and tossed aside, things people had grown tired of using, and things that were no longer of any use to anyone at all ... The people who lived there were likewise discards and outcasts driven from the city.” Bugeye and his new friend Baldspot feed off the edibles they collect from the trash and attend school only when they feel like it.
The landfill exists alongside a fantastic world from an earlier period of Flower Island, a phantasmagoria of beauty and nature to which the two boys can escape. They encounter this parallel island through a spirit boy whose comings and goings are interrupted by the modern-day island’s drifts of fog and heaps of trash. A physical manifestation of the folkloric dokkaebi, the boy is known to be a creature that causes mischief. But in Familiar Things, the dokkaebi also represents the threatened traditions of the past. He struggles to survive as that mystical world is threatened by present-day man-made rubbish.
The community endures countless indignities and horrific discoveries, such as when Bugeye and Baldspot dig up a dead cat writhing with maggots. Still, the gravity of these problems and the choices that people face are captured with respect. Hwang has a keen interest in invisible societies, and he does not condescend or pity them.
The novel’s most impassioned passages depict garbage as a social phenomenon, the visible evidence of capitalism. “People bought things with money, did whatever they wanted with those things, and threw them away when they were no longer of use. Maybe folks like him [Bugeye’s father] had also been thrown away when they were no longer of use.” The community is dehumanised as people jockey for boxes of free instant noodles and focus on compensation when a young man loses his legs instead of on his suffering.
Hwang challenges us to re-evaluate the cost of capitalism, to see what and who we have left behindBugeye and Baldspot, like most of the characters in Familiar Things, may be crudely depicted but their innocence powerfully communicates the pernicious effects of capitalism. After the spirit boy leads them to a large bundle of money in the dump, the boys take their new wealth and venture into the city for the first time. Once they have visited the bathhouse and purchased new clothes at the market, Bugeye and Baldspot call each other Jeong-ho and Yeong-gil respectively, revealing their full legal names as if their appearance as “normal middle-class” boys finally makes them visible to each other.
Yet in the department store, surrounded by desirable goods, the boys’ newfound status unravels. The store’s elaborate Christmas decorations remind Baldspot that Santa Claus never visits their neighbourhood; Bugeye retorts that Santa Claus is “‘just a lie they made up so they can sell stuff”. Baldspot’s cheap parka is evidence enough for a store employee to declare him a thief, as he does not appear wealthy enough to be shopping. The department store is a microcosm of the greater middle-class society that excludes the two boys and reinforces their lack of identity and value. Here, a person is nothing and no one without money.
Familiar Things is not particularly notable for vividly rendered detail, singular language or voice. But the measure of a novel is not only its artful telling, but also the power and value of the story being told. Hwang observes what is most familiar to us, the mammoth accumulations of waste in our everyday lives, “the hell that we have created”. He challenges us to look back and reevaluate the cost of modernisation, and see what and whom we have left behind.
Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean is published by Faber. Familiar Things is translated by Sora Kim-Russell and published by Scribe. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
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