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Yun Ko-eun (author), Lizzie Buehler (translator), Table for One, Columbia University Press, 2024. 280 pgs.
This series of short stories by Yun Ko-eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler, invokes slightly off-kilter worlds that lurk in the corners of everyday life. While Yun’s fiction portrays ordinary people in everyday life and deals with topic such as individualism, automation, obsession, reality, change, and remembrance, they lurch between the mundane and the surreal. They possess a certain “unconventional universality”.
Although I have never really had any qualms about dining alone, “Table for One”, the first, and best, of the nine stories still resonates with me for its truth, in that singular eating is often seen as odd, with always the accompanying question, “just a party of one?” In a collectivist society like Korea this might be considered particularly odd, but in the West not so much. An office worker enrols in a course for building confidence about eating alone as she is inexplicably excluded from lunching with her fellow office workers. When, she is finally included in the lunch crowd, as unexplained as before, she realises that “I could truly appreciate how comfortable it was to eat in solitude”. After eating several times on her own, she finds that, ultimately, “eating alone” has additional benefits:
I was in the spotlight. Alone at both barbecue restaurants and wedding buffets, I was not lonely but a star in the crowd, and with that thought, I was awash with the feeling that I was the center of the subway, the core of the earth, the nucleus of the universe, the world’s innermost layer.
Ultimately the woman in “Table for One” finds that when dining alone, you are not really dining alone, you have the perfect partner and perfect conversationalist—yourself. In the sense of isolation and dislocation that many have in modern society, perhaps we should cultivate the enjoyment of ourselves as individuals rather than just situating ourselves within the herd.
Humans and machine interaction is the theme in “Roadkill”. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a motel during a never-ending snowstorm. Everything is automated, everything is “vended” by machine, and human actions watched by closed circuit television. When this salesman’s credit cards and ID do not work, he is left with no way out but to leave the hotel as he can’t explain his problem to the automated system. On leaving the hotel, he sees an elderly person who has fallen in the snow: “In a second, this elderly person had become the most unfamiliar creature on earth.” However, while he saw a person lying there, others did not. The other guests outside the hotel simply “saw fur and a tail and claws”, saying that “wild animals run across that road a lot. Isn’t that why it’s a wildlife crossing zone?” Humans are almost unrecognisable. This is quite shocking—can we really solve everything by standard responses and automated categories?
We have all experienced the frustration of trying to deal with a problem when we call customer service centres automated hotlines, and we can’t get hold of any humans. While automation can be convenient for organisations and cost-effective, it can ultimately be time-frustrating as problem-solving measures are not always able to be neatly categorised. I go out of my way to get served by humans rather than clicking on a link, pressing a button or scanning a QR code.
Another story, “Iceland”, reminds us about those “personality” tests on social media (we’ve all done them!); here the example given is “what country are you?”: The narrator states “my body and mind were worn out after years of trying to satisfy the demands of this country.” She had first taken a survey about how “Korean” she was, failed miserably, thus finding a country that she was more “suited” to. This country was Iceland: “I realized that I hadn’t chosen Iceland: Iceland had chosen me. I was the ideal citizen—even if I was currently marooned somewhere less appealing. Iceland, hadn’t moved: I had. I drifted toward Iceland.”
The narrator “maps” herself onto various aspects of Iceland—we infer aspects of her personality from the following:
Iceland was a country of emptiness. Its area was similar to that of South Korea, but little of the land was inhabitable. Because it was so far north, the guide told me, Iceland was sometimes absent from world maps. Iceland: a land casually omitted from the earth, like the invisible words following an ellipsis at the end of a sentence.
The reality of Iceland does not intrude. We constantly want to escape reality—4the grass is always greener elsewhere. Other places remain “greener” than the place you live because it exits in your imagination, you don’t know the reality of it.
Today, it was time for me to read Iceland. My trip, which took place for one hour each night, required a bookmark instead of a suitcase. Apart from my imaginary vacations, I’d never actually ventured beyond the borders of Korea. I had no real need to.
If she had really visited Iceland, it would never be able to meet her expectations. We talk about wanting about change, but how often do we really step into a new situation? Too often we stay with the status quo we know.
Other stories include a man with a pathological fear of bedbugs (“Sweet Escape”). In this story a man offers up his body to save his building from infestation of bed bugs. It’s partly about paranoia and partly about how our obsessions are fuelled by the media and those around us. In another story, a time capsule in Seoul is dug up years before it was intended to be unearthed (“Time Capsule 1994”), raising questions about how we remember the past and the disappointment of how our views of history changes over the course of time. When an object found in the time capsule (a blank CD) that is unaccounted for in the inventory of the time capsule’s contents, disconcertion results. Perhaps the emptiness on the disc means “insert the kind of memories you want”?
“Hyeonmong Park’s Hall of Dreams” deals with the commercialism of escapism, our quest to escape reality. The popularity of the Hall of Dreams heralds other dream-producing start-ups eager to muscle in on the action. However, reality ultimately intrudes and people finally realise that dreams become lies. Think of all the science fiction movies about the consequences of escapes from reality that sometime brings.
These stories (and a few others not mentioned here) tackle the annoyances, hopelessness, and loneliness of modern life that pervade the protagonists’ decidedly ordinary and solo lives and take them to the extreme in a serio-comic manner that has more impact on the reader than a simple horrific tone would do.
How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “Slightly Off-kilter Worlds: Yun Ko-eun’s Table for One.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Feb. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/02/24/table-for-one.
Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]