Book Review: Black Flower – Kim Young-ha

Ford, G. (2013) Black Flower by Kim Young-ha, Asian Review of Books, 27 June.

South Korean fiction in English translation is rare, historical fiction even rarer, and Black Flower, a splendidly written and evocative love story from Kim Young-ha (the award-winning author of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and Your Republic is Calling You, both available in translation) that combines Korea and Central America, must be unique. Kim Young-ha—a forty-four-year-old ex-military policeman—is a real find.

After the U.S. annexed Hawaii in 1898 to, supposedly, keep it out of the hands of the Japanese there was a search for new sources of labor. Korea became one and started to ship contract labor to the islands. The sole voyage to Mexico by the British ship the “Ilford” was a quirk in a short-lived but lucrative trade. Only a month after it sailed there, the final voyage to Hawaii took place as Japan forced the pliant Korean Government to pass the Emigration Protection Act designed to stop Korean laborers from competing with their Japanese counterparts.

Black Flower’s easy writing tells a wider story from that brief moment of time between in the first decade of the twentieth century. The centerpiece of the plot is an affair between an orphan boy Ijeong and Yeonsu, a young Korean noblewoman. There is no happy ending. The two meet on the “Ilford” as it transports—on behalf of the Continental Colonisation Company—more a thousand indentured labourers from to Mexico where they are contracted to work for four years in the plantations of henequen, a variety of sisal. The Koreans—beguiled with thoughts of a land of warm food and beautiful houses—are completely unaware of their fate.

The cast on board are a magical cocktail: a shaman, an apostate priest, a homosexual Japanese deserter, a thief and an interpreter leavened by nearly two hundred half-starved soldiers from Korea’s disbanded military. The voyage is bad enough. They are packed together like animals and treated little differently. The minor Royal, Yeonsu’s father, who had enrolled himself and  his family in the enterprise in the expectation of being treated as a representative of the Korean Empire is the first, but not the last, to rue his decision. He, and his family, are treated as the rest of the passengers: badly.

Yet this is no eighteenth-century “death ship”. The Koreans are valuable cargo and there are enormous profits to be made. The endless misery is instead sea sickness, diarrhoea and bad food all in close confinement. Only two die—and one born—during the passage.

When they finally arrive on the Yucatán Peninsula, they are divvied up like cattle amongst the local hacienda owners. Our two fumbling lovers are torn apart. Mexico is far from a land of milk and honey. It is ferociously hot and dry and the work is brutal and cruel as their hands and bodies are left torn and bleeding from the iron thorns of the plant that is their life. Yet eventually they become the equal of the uncooperative Mayas their recruitment was designed to undermine and break.

Ijeong is—temporarily—re-united with Yeonsu amidst strikes, insurrections, and forced Catholic conversions before being fleeing for his life. As the end of their four-year “sentences” approaches, more and more Koreans are allowed to buy out what’s left of their contracts in what might today be called “a Bosman”. They drift into Mérida and nearby cities and many of the men, particularly the ex-soldiers, end up as mercenaries in the Mexican Revolution. Most fight with Pancho Villa, but some side with General Obregón.

When it’s over, a group—including Ijeong—sign up for Guatemala’s Civil War. At a certain point abandoned they establish “The New Korean Republic” in the jungle around Tikal: in a sense, Korea’s last capricious imperial venture.

Kim Young-ha traveled to Yucatan in 2003. The descendants of 1033 emigrants who left Jemulpo harbour are still there. They don’t speak Korean, but they do still eat kimchi.