Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
First posted November 2017
There is no hyperbole great enough to cover how much strongly I felt about this book.
Life-altering, I would recommend it to anyone without reservation.
This is one of the greatest novels I have read. Ever. It is firmly ensconced, along with last decade’s The Hakawati, in my pantheon of favorite books. Its scope spoke to me personally, pushing me to confront my own debt load and tighten the ties to my family. Pachinko gave form to a life I didn't know I wanted to build for those around me and to a legacy beyond my immediate self. I can’t stop thinking about the four generations of turmoil that shaped everyone with which we came into contact, and how each and every person lived their own, best, life.
Through the course of the novel Sunja was my touchstone, my protagonist, though I’m sure another reader could select nearly any character to become their emotional core. Sunja is the basic choice, the foundational one. To come at Pachinko like a clever book-reviewer or first-year lit major, it would likely behoove me to toss off her quodam lover Hanso or her son Noa (a non-human character like the island nation of Japan would be too cheeky by half) as the ballast that keeps the tale from falling off its razor’s edge:
Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn’t himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn’t care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn’t care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn’t possible. It would never be possible with her.
This idea—of struggling to have an internal identity that is recognized by society and the world—is not a concept that I, as a white American male, have ever had to consider. I can be whatever I choose, because I am the Western global default; I don’t have to battle against a prebuilt stereotype. There are no modifying racial or ethnic verb prefixes when you’re talking about white Americans. This continues to be an issue that eludes my internalization—though perhaps purposefully, since the few years of being taunted as a hard-J "jew" in grade school led me, like Noa, to scrub myself of any external markers of ethnic differentiation (sorry dad).
As much as I personally identify with the younger generations, it all comes back to Sunja. Sunja, scion of global hardships I cannot truly even imagine, pierced my heart. In the beginning—the actual beginning is Sunja’s grandparents, yet I find my memories of Pachinko focus on Sunja—she is just trying to survive famine and war, while seventy years later Solomon, her grandson, is being exploited as a junior associate in an international banking firm. The troubles change form, but never function: identity; what it means to be Korean when there is no Korea because it is occupied; because it has sundered by imperial powers; because you are Japanese in all but name but they will not recognize you as their own. Citizen status of has never struck me quite like this; the non-status of Koreans in Japan is something someone more versed in history would have already begun to brace for much earlier beginning the book. I, naïvely, never see it coming:
In America, there is no such thing as a Kankokujin or Chosenjin. Why the hell would I be a South Korean or a North Korean? That makes no sense! I was born in Seattle, and my parents came to the States when there was only one Korea,” she’d shout, related on of the bigotry anecdotes of her day. “Why does Japan still distinguish the two countries for its Korean residents who’ve been here for four fucking generations? You were born here. You’re not a foreigner! That’s insane. Your father was born here. Why are you two carrying South Korean passports? It’s bizarre.”
What do you do, when you have no nation, when you have no tribe, when you have no people? While the answer seems to be, “You survive,” the story makes it clear, right from the very beginning, that the ends do not, ever, justify the means:
“Father and Mother are starving back home. Uncle can’t feed his own wife and children. At this point, I’d sell my hands if I could. God wants me to honor my parents. It’s a sin not to care for them. If I have to be disgraced—” The girl started to cry. “Isn’t it possible that the Lord is providing Yoshikawa-san as our answer?” She looked at Pastor Yoo, who took the girl’s hands into his and bent his head as if in prayer.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort—the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn’t work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn’t be laundered by good results.
And so it comes back, time and again, to identity. Do the hard thing, do the wrong thing, do the best thing; the options all jumble together and the results can seem random. Only once did Sunja choose her own happiness—the ends over the means—and it led to an outcome so shocking to me that I closed the book, shut my eyes, dropped my head back, and breathed out, hard, on the subway. I do not know how people can keep their identity when society takes so much at caprice; Sunja lost so much. She never felt good enough, never felt like she deserved the good things that happened, always felt responsible for the bad bits; once her hope for the next generation shatters—reminiscent of Great Expectations, though Pachinko surpasses that work in structural form—those low expectations have keep her plugging away while they rob her so. Identity and expectation—from self, from society—continue to fold together into a perfect narrative dozens of time throughout the book. Yes, I am saying that Pachinko is better than Dickens.
With that, I cannot say more. In a time of Western pushback against immigration, in a time dripping with venom against cultural plurality, in an age fraught with jackbooted conformism, Pachinko is required reading. It is brilliant, it is lovely, and it is heartbreaking. There are no easy answers here. There are only people.