A Novel by E.J. Koh, reviewed by Julia Hou
THE LIBERATORS (Tin House Books)
E. J. Koh’s latest novel, The Liberators, begins with language, then war, recounting the early memories of Yohan, a newly widowed father in the midst of the Gwangju protests in 1980s South Korea. Loss is inseparable from Yohan’s childhood. At the end of Japanese colonial rule, Yohan was a boy brimming with words: “on a tree, I carved tree…on my mother’s grave, I wrote grave.” He was sent to the military at fifteen, where language loses its light. He leaves having written his last words “on the side of an ICU tent, filled with my dismembered comrades, in the blood I owed them: death, death, death.”
In Yohan’s present day, three decades after the Korean War, Korea is still grappling with the aftermath of war and the division of the country into North and South. The book moves seamlessly through different points of view to tell its fractured story, following Yohan’s daughter, Insuk, and her husband, Sungho, in their move to California, along with their son, Henry, and Insuk’s mother-in-law, Huran.
Politically, the characters are helpless, unable to change the course of history’s events. Though the political events happen remotely, like scenes out of a movie, they nevertheless cause fault lines to form and rupture the lives of Koh’s characters. It’s clear why Insuk, Sungho, and Robert, Insuk’s friend and Korean reunification activist, all of whom grew up in Korea amidst the turbulence, experience these shifts, but like an earthquake, the aftershock can be felt at great distances. Henry, who’s lived in California since he was only a few months old, is still painted by the shadows that war and revolution cast. The characters’ histories and thus their senses of self are inextricably tied to Korea, entangling Korea’s political and social restructuring with the generational trauma they face.
Koh doesn’t limit the points of view to the main characters, complicating the novel’s notion of right and wrong. So often stories—and thus our perception of the world, which is built from stories—are one-sided; stuck in one point of view, with one protagonist, and all others cast as an ally or an enemy. But The Liberators refuses to flatten our world; there are chapters from the points of view of minor characters like Toto, Henry’s dog, and Tomoko, a flight agent who detains Robert at the airport, and these stories are as rich and heartrending as those belonging to the characters whose arcs span the entire book.
Even North Korea, villainized by the West for decades, refuses caricature. Like the flawed and struggling characters of Koh’s novel, North Korea, too, has a past, has a future. Recently emerged from the ravages of Japanese colonialism, North Koreans were “…the victims of the worst carpet-bombing in history” at the hands of the U.S. during the Korean War. It makes sense that “…they can’t trust the world. They hate everyone because their kids were melting on the ground.” And in some ways, North Korea’s isolation has cultivated a stronger sense of cultural identity. Jennie, Henry’s partner and one of the few North Korean characters, says “The North preserves our Korean. It’s why a North Korean never wonders whether they’re Korean,” an unexpected boon that the children of westernized Asian diaspora could never claim.
Despite being out of their hands, the question of reunification is so central to the characters’ lives that at times it feels like healing the country will heal the people. And there is so much to heal, so many ways the characters carve each other up. In the first half of the book, Huran and Insuk have a strained relationship because Huran is possessive of her son, and Sungho continues to choose his mother over Insuk. The tension between them boils over in a single chapter, where the political and personal fully intersect: Insuk and Sungho’s relationship cracks open when Huran goads Sungho into violence against Insuk, causing her to have a miscarriage. Insuk, in an act of desperation, begins an affair with Robert. In the background of this hurt floats the ghost of Sungho’s father, Jeha, who used to beat Huran, and abandoned Sungho as a child. But the chapter’s true focus is a quiet moment between Insuk and Robert before their affair begins. Robert has Insuk undress, and he uses her lipstick to draw a tiger on Insuk’s back. Later, Koh dedicates a full page to this drawing: the Korean peninsula, which looks like a tiger in all its ferocity “[if] the country had no stitches.”
As a poet and translator, Koh knows how and when to use space on the page. She brings the brokenness of the characters to life with an immediacy and urgency that demands the reader pay attention. The language is spare and fraught with meaning, not everything is said out loud or explained, and moments that might have been ordinary in another writer’s hands become significant, acting to demonstrate character as well as make a statement about the broader political context. As with Yohan and his guard, the night before Yohan’s death, drawing words on each other’s palms. The guard writes words like death, man, father, traitor, but Yohan only writes life, over and over, the only word he needs, and every time he does, it echoes off the page like a war cry: for himself, for his family, and for the Korea he knows.
The freedom that Korea seeks from its colonizers echoes the freedom the characters want from their emotional struggles. Korea is shattered and trapped by greater powers just as Koh’s characters are trapped by their habits of hurting each other. These rifts seem uncrossable and unending because the characters have only ever known a divided Korea, a divided family. But the line that partitions Korea along the 38th Parallel is “…an arbitrary line. It’s not a natural border. The border is manufactured and maintained. It doesn’t actually exist,” just as the line between Huran and Insuk, between Insuk and Sungho, doesn’t exist. Time passes, tectonic plates shift, and with a push, a conversation, the walls come down. Huran and Insuk make peace on Huran’s deathbed. The leaders of the Koreas hold a summit and declare plans for a united Korea. And in the wake of these miracles, Insuk and Sungho rediscover the playfulness and love of their youth, “his joy…larger than [her] body.”
Of course, the political peace doesn’t last. To this day, Korea is split down the middle, bleeding at the border. But the last image of the book is not of war, nor is it of peace; in fact, there is no country in it, no news story, no borders. The novel ends with Insuk giving her mother’s hanbok to Jennie, her daughter-in-law, a generosity with layers as deep as their friendship. “I never knew the beauty of this hanbok,” Insuk says, “until I saw it on you.”
In the very beginning of the book, Yohan watches the Korean government impose martial law and mow down student protestors, and says “Perhaps it was more terrifying if there were no spies. If there was no one but us.” No one but us killing our own. But in the end, no matter how terrifying, that is all there is: no one but us, nothing but our choices. Nothing but a room and a hanbok and a woman stepping into it, surrounded by her family, fault lines eroded away.
Julia Hou is a fiction writer and software engineer based in Brooklyn. She served as a reader for The Oakland Review at Carnegie Mellon, where she studied computer science and creative writing. She is the creator of a digital artist book, Asterisk, and an alum of the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. You can find her at juliahou.me.
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