Two boys sweep the same chimney. One climbs down with a face black from the soot, and the other with a face as clean as when he went up. Which of them goes to wash? A mathematics teacher puts the question to his class in the opening story of Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf, and his pupils, who are clever and obliging, answer it twice and are wrong both times. The first answer is the obvious one, the dirty boy. The teacher explains, to murmurs of surprise, that the clean boy will wash instead, since each will read his own face from the other's. Asked again, the pupils hand the clever answer back to him, and he tells them that this is wrong too. Two boys who have swept the same chimney cannot come down in different conditions. The riddle was never about faces. It was about the quiet assumption that makes a riddle possible, that there is a clean side and a dirty side to begin with.
The teacher then turns to the blackboard and writes Möbius strip. Take a strip of paper, give it a half twist, join the ends, and you have a surface with one side and one edge, on which an ant may walk from what looked like the inside to what looked like the outside without once crossing the rim. The mathematician August Möbius described the object in the middle of the nineteenth century, and I doubt that he foresaw its employment in a Seoul classroom of the 1970s as an instrument of social criticism. Between the teacher's two lessons Cho places a short tale of two evicted men and a property dealer, in which it is hard, by the end, to say who has wronged whom. As I read it, the frame is the thesis. The book will spend its remaining pages dismantling the comfortable belief that the rich and the poor live on opposite faces of the same sheet.
I came back to it this week, after some years, with the Fulton translation at my left hand and the Korean text at my right, and I confess I had forgotten how short the book is for its reputation. It is a cycle of twelve linked stories, published in magazines between 1975 and 1978 and gathered into a single volume in June 1978. Koreans call it, affectionately, Nan-sso-gong, and they have been buying it ever since. Korean press reports put the hundredth printing in April 1996, eighteen years after publication and some 400,000 copies in, the two hundredth at the end of 2005, the millionth copy in 2007 and the three hundredth printing in 2017. By July 2022, the figure quoted in the obituaries after the author died that December, the count stood at 320 printings and roughly 1.48 million copies. For a collection of linked stories about the urban poor, which was banned from sale for a time, as I understand it, by the authorities of the day, this is an extraordinary record.
The numbers are less remarkable than the author's attitude to them. Cho spent his later years, if the Korean interviews are a fair guide, wishing that his book would become a period piece. On its thirtieth anniversary he is reported to have said that it pained him to find young readers still recognising themselves in it. It is a curious sort of bestseller whose writer would have preferred it to go out of date, and the sales figures can be read, if one is in a bleak mood, as a measure of how long that wish went unmet.
The dwarf of the title is Kim Bul-i, who stands 117 centimetres tall and weighs 32 kilograms. He lives with his wife and three children in a shack in Haengbok-dong, which translates as Happiness Quarter, in a borough called Nagwon-gu, the Paradise District. Cho does not trouble to disguise the joke, and the book never remarks on it, which is the reason it works. Kim earns his living from whatever the city will pay a small man to do: selling bonds, sharpening knives, cleaning the windows of tall buildings, mending taps. Then the notice of demolition arrives. The family are entitled to a voucher for a flat in the new development, but the flat costs more than they can find. The voucher therefore becomes a commodity, bought up for a fraction of its worth by speculators who have been waiting for precisely this. The book's most bitter irony is that the paper which proves the poor have a right to a home is worth more to the dealer than to the household that holds it.
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What follows is told as a chain of consequences, none of which the book cares to dramatise. Yeong-hui, the daughter, goes to live with the dealer who has bought up the family's voucher and, at a cost the narrative records and declines to linger over, steals it back. She returns to learn that her father is dead. The eldest son, Yeong-su, takes work in a factory belonging to the Eun-gang group, tries to organise his fellow workers, and fails. Resolving to kill the chairman, he kills the chairman's brother by mistake, and he is sentenced to death. If I read the epilogue correctly, the sentence is carried out. Cho presents all of this in short declarative sentences, with an economy that reminds me of a coroner's report, and he does not raise his voice at any point.
The title belongs to the father. A young tutor named Ji-seop, who later takes a factory job in order to work among the labourers, tells Kim something simple. If honest work, decency and prayer have brought him to this, then the earth is a dead place and he should go to the moon. The dwarf takes him at his word. Whenever things go badly he shoots a small iron ball towards the moon, and his last attempt is made from the top of a brick-factory chimney, the moon a single step ahead. He grips the lightning rod, leans out into the dark and launches a paper aeroplane. His body is found afterwards inside the chimney, and the book, as I read it, is careful not to say whether he fell or jumped. It is a lovely image of hope, and Cho lets us believe in it for exactly as long as it takes a ball to leave a hand. A chimney exists to carry the waste of a factory up into the sky, and it is the only height the dwarf is ever permitted to climb.
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It would be easy to reach for Dickens, and I shall not resist altogether, since both men were furious about what industrial progress does to the bodies that build it. But Dickens builds cathedrals of sentiment, and Cho gives the reader almost nothing to weep with. His nearer relatives, I think, are Zola in Germinal and Orwell on the road to Wigan Pier, both of whom understood that a plain account of a miner's wage can do more damage than an aria. The publisher's own description of the English edition speaks of a lean, clipped, deceptively simple style, and for once the blurb is telling the truth. Restraint of this kind is sometimes mistaken for coldness. I take it to be the opposite, a refusal to turn another person's catastrophe into a performance, and a form of respect for the dead.
The structure repeats the argument. The viewpoint passes from chapter to chapter among the dwarf's children, a sympathetic neighbour, the tutor and the families of the comfortable, so that the reader is made to stand on every part of the surface in turn. The cycle also returns to topology more than once. A later chapter is called 'The Klein Bottle', after a closed surface that has no inside and no outside at all. I read it as a second and more drastic version of the teacher's first lesson, though I would not press the point beyond what the stories themselves will bear. What Cho is after is plain enough. Exploitation, in his account, is not a collision between two moral worlds. It is one continuous surface, and the comfortable have simply never been made to walk all the way along it.
The book has had a busy life off the page. The director Lee Won-se filmed it in 1981, with Ahn Sung-ki among the cast, and the production, as I understand it, fared no better with the censors than the novel had done. The setting was moved from a factory district to the salt pans at Sorae, and the audience, by the account I have seen, was small. Korean readers meanwhile kept the presses busy. The revised edition that the bookseller Aladin lists today is dated 2024, and when I looked this week it stood fifth in the shop's weekly ranking of Korean novels published before 2000, nearly half a century after the first edition. I find that a more convincing review than any I have read.
The novel also has a habit of turning up in the news. On the morning of 20 January 2009 riot police raided a rooftop watchtower in the Yongsan district of central Seoul, where evicted tenants had barricaded themselves in protest at the compensation offered for a redevelopment, and a fire broke out. Five of the tenants and one police officer died. The courts later held the protest leaders responsible for the blaze, a verdict that the families and their supporters have contested, and I shall not try to settle it here. What I can report is that Korean readers did not wait for a verdict before reaching for Cho's book. A Korean blogger, writing that same morning if the timestamp is to be believed, headed a post with the title of the novel and embedded a short television segment about its author, and the heading spoke of the dwarf's story being told again. A novel about an eviction, written in the 1970s, had become a way of understanding a news bulletin thirty-one years later.
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I am conscious that I read all this as a Scotsman, and that my own country has a word for the clearing of people from land to suit someone else's profit. The Highland Clearances were carried out by landlords, not by planning committees, and the legal paper was different. But the courteous vocabulary of improvement, and the tenant's discovery that he had been a guest in his own house, will be familiar to anyone who has read Cho. The comparison is imperfect, and I make it only to say that the book needs less translating than it might seem to. A country that pulls down a street in the name of improvement always produces someone who stands and watches. Cho asked who was standing on the other side.
Which brings me back to the two boys and their chimney. The teacher's riddle has no answer because its premise is false, and the novel is a long, patient argument that the same goes for the polite fiction that the poor and the comfortable come down from different chimneys. Kim Bul-i climbs the only chimney the book will let him, and the reader is left, at the end, with the soot on his own face. I suspect Cho would have thought a tidy conclusion rather an impertinence. I will say only that, having asked myself the question all week, I find I should prefer not to be the boy who goes off to wash.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Nanjangi-ga Ssoaollin Jageun Gong, Cho Se-hui, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English translation: The Dwarf, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (University of Hawai'i Press), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
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