There is a particular kind of demolition I remember rather too vividly from my twenties, and it had nothing to do with Korea. Along the docks of Leith, not half a mile from where I am now sitting, the old bonded warehouses were coming down — their blackened sandstone peeled back to expose a century of tar, herring salt, and quiet ruin — to make way for the glass-fronted flats that would eventually swallow the whole waterfront. I remember a retired stevedore standing at the cordon, hands in his pockets, watching the wrecking ball as though it were performing a funeral rite he hadn't been invited to grieve at. Nobody had asked him whether the docks should become luxury apartments. Nobody ever does.
I was reminded of that man rather forcefully this week, upon returning, after some years, to Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공), a work that occupies in Korean letters roughly the position Dickens occupies in ours, if Dickens had written with the clipped, unsentimental economy of a coroner's report.
Cho published the twelve linked stories that make up this novel between 1975 and 1978, collecting them that June into a single volume. It became, almost against its own bleak instincts, one of the best-selling works in modern Korean publishing history. By the time of the author's death in December 2022, it had passed 320 printings and roughly 1.48 million copies, a readership figure that would make most literary novelists, British or otherwise, faintly nauseous with envy. Cho himself won the Dong-in Literary Award for it in 1979, and by the time he died, aged eighty, the book he'd written as a young man's furious protest had become something closer to a national scripture of guilt.
The technique is the first thing that strikes a Western reader trained on linear narrative. Cho opens the cycle with a mathematics teacher lecturing his pupils on the Möbius strip — that maddening topological object with only one continuous surface, where what appears to be the "inside" and the "outside" turn out, upon inspection, to be the very same plane. It is not a decorative flourish. It is the entire argument of the book, smuggled in before the reader has even met the dwarf. Cho then tells his story from a rotating cast of narrators — the dwarf's three children, a sympathetic outsider, and, devastatingly, the industrialist's own privileged son — so that the reader is forced to stand on both sides of the strip and discover there was never a "both sides" to begin with. It is a formal argument that class exploitation is not two separate moral universes colliding, but one continuous surface that the comfortable have simply never had to walk all the way around.
The dwarf himself is named Kim Bul-i — 金不伊 in the original hanja, a name whose faint irony took scholars years to unpack, since it appears only once, buried in the author's preface to the first edition. He stands 117 centimetres tall and weighs 32 kilograms: not simply short, but visibly, medically dwarfed, a body that has absorbed both a congenital condition and a lifetime of insufficient food and made them indistinguishable from one another. He is, we're told, the grandson of an emancipated slave — his own grandfather having been among those freed by the Gabo Reforms of 1894, and having, extraordinarily, been frightened rather than liberated by the news. I find that detail almost unbearably precise. Here is a family whose entire modern history is a rehearsal of the same lesson, generation after generation: that freedom, when it is finally handed down from above, tends to arrive as another door nobody has actually opened for you.
Kim Bul-i and his family live in Nagwon-gu Haengbok-dong — which, translated without mercy, means "Paradise District, Happiness-quarter." Only a bureaucrat with a truly Korean gift for irony could have named a demolition-bound slum with such cheerful precision, and Cho knew exactly what he was doing when he let the address stand, unremarked, at the top of the chapter. When the eviction notice arrives, the family is offered a resettlement voucher for a flat they could never afford to move into — a piece of paper immediately worth more as currency to property speculators than as shelter to the family that earned it. The dwarf's daughter, Yeong-hui, seventeen and — we are told, almost cruelly — too pretty to be believed as his child, disappears for days trying to recover the family's stolen voucher from the speculator's son, only to return and discover her father has already climbed to the top of a brick-factory chimney and fallen to his death. His eldest son, Yeong-su, will later join the labour movement, kill the conglomerate chairman's brother in a moment the novel refuses to let us cleanly condemn or applaud, and be executed for it. None of this, I should say, is presented with the operatic grief a British reader might expect. Cho simply states it, in short declarative sentences, and moves on — which is, perversely, what makes it unbearable.
The title's own symbol does the same understated work. In the earlier story "Space Travel" (우주여행), Kim Bul-i is given, by a sympathetic idealist named Ji-seop, the fantasy of a small ball launched towards the moon — towards some habitable, more forgiving planet where a man's height might not determine his worth. It is a lovely image, and Cho lets us believe in it for exactly as long as it takes a ball to leave a hand. Then gravity, which does not read novels and has no politics, brings it back down. The dwarf never reaches the moon. He reaches, instead, the top of a chimney — a structure built entirely for the purpose of exhaling industrial smoke into the very sky he'd hoped to escape into.
It would be easy, and rather lazy, for me to reach for Dickens here, and I shan't resist entirely: the resonance is real. Both writers were, at bottom, furious about what industrial "progress" does to the bodies that build it, and both wrote in an age when readers needed reminding that the poor were not a separate species. But where Dickens builds cathedrals of sentiment — Little Nell dying by page count, practically — Cho gives you almost nothing to weep with. His sentences are short, his adjectives rationed, his tone closer to Zola's clinical fury in Germinal or the flat, almost bureaucratic despair of Orwell surveying Wigan. This is, I'd argue, a distinctly East Asian discipline at work: the refusal to perform grief for the reader's benefit, on the understanding that dignity, even in catastrophe, means not making a spectacle of one's own suffering. The restraint is not coldness. It is, if anything, the deepest possible respect for the dead.
What has kept this novel alive in the Korean imagination, well past the point where most protest literature settles safely into the syllabus, is its uncanny habit of resurrection. Cho's book was filmed in 1981 by the director Lee Won-se, and the production is itself a small tragedy of censorship. The intended score by the folk musician Kim Min-ki — his entire catalogue already blacklisted for its anti-authoritarian associations — had to be scrapped entirely. The factory-district setting of the novel was relocated, under pressure, to a fading salt-flat village in Siheung, as though the state could edit the geography of injustice simply by moving the camera. Then, in March 2007, thirty years after the novel's first serialisation, KBS finally brought it to television for the first time, in its long-running HD TV Literature Theatre strand — a belated admission, perhaps, that the story had never actually gone away.
Most striking of all is a four-minute documentary segment from EBS's Jisikchannel-e, broadcast on 21 January 2009. It aired the day after the Yongsan tragedy, in which police attempting to clear a rooftop protest by evicted tenants in central Seoul triggered a fire that killed five residents and one police officer. The programme's producers hadn't planned it as commentary; the timing was simple coincidence. But Korean viewers didn't experience it that way. A novel written about eviction in 1978 had, without anyone intending it, become breaking news thirty-one years later. I don't think there is a tidier illustration, anywhere in world literature, of a text that refuses to become merely historical.
I think often, these days, about that stevedore on the Leith cordon, and about how easily his kind of quiet, unphotographed grief gets absorbed into a city's official narrative of "regeneration." Scotland has its own dwarfs, its own small balls launched hopefully and uselessly towards moons of one kind or another — men whose entire working lives are demolished so cleanly that within a decade nobody remembers there was ever a docker there at all. Cho Se-hui understood something the wrecking-ball operators of every nation would prefer we forget: that the people cleared away in the name of progress are not an absence to be tidied up, but a continuous surface running under the whole shining structure — a Möbius strip with nowhere, in the end, for the poor to actually get off.
Recommended Resources
English translation:
☞ The Dwarf (trans. Bruce & Ju-Chan Fulton, University of Hawaii Press) — Amazon (Paperback): https://www.amazon.com/Dwarf-Modern-Korean-Fiction/dp/0824831012
☞ Amazon (Kindle edition): https://www.amazon.com/Dwarf-Modern-Korean-Fiction-ebook/dp/B014M1FGSS
Korean edition:
☞ Aladin (2024 revised edition): https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=334157624
Screen adaptations (reference only — original novel takes editorial priority):
☞ EBS Jisikchannel-e (2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7lWDyxnB0A
☞ KBS HD TV Literature Theatre (2007): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUSkclql1WI
☞ 1981 film (poor video quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISEN_toFuA
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh