Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko: Colonialism with a twist.

Korea and Japan are nations about which I know very little.  The heroes of this book by Min Jin Lee – Koreans who immigrated to Japan during the period when Korea was a Japanese colony (1910-1945) – are people about whom very few people know much.  All that said, the people portrayed in this book have served as research subjects about the nature of prejudice and the heritability of intelligence. 

In the US, there is a pernicious issue with intelligence tests.  African Americans score significantly and consistently lower on IQ tests than European Americans do – the mean score is a standard deviation lower – which is a considerable amount.  As both groups become more intelligent (and this happens – we have to update IQ tests every eight or ten years because the norms are no longer accurate), the differences between the groups remain.  This led a Nobel Prize winner in a field outside of psychology to publish a book, the Bell Curve, in which he maintained that this discrepancy proved that African Americans are inherently less intelligent than those from European stock. 

Psychologists were outraged by this claim and worked to amass data to determine whether this was, in fact, the case, and found that it simply was not so.  We can use data, they surmised, to compare heritability of a trait like intelligence within a culture, but not between two different cultures.  One of the studies that I refer to as a teaching device in explaining this is one looking at Korean-Japanese who, like African Americans, consistently score lower on IQ tests than the dominant culture – ethnic Japanese, in Japan.  The interesting thing is that when these two groups emigrate to the US, where they are indistinguishable to the dominant, European, culture, unlike in Japan where there are multiple markers – from language – to immigration status – to physical characteristics (and this last is emphasized in the study – but not in this book) – that make the Korean nationals as easily identifiable to the dominant culture there as African Americans are here; when the two groups emigrate here, the differences in measured intelligence disappear in two generations.

The conclusion, of course, is a simple one: we should work to make African Americans visibly and culturally indistinguishable from European Americans!  And we should quit being able to visually discriminate men from women, too, I suppose…  In any case, I was interested in seeing whether a novel about the functioning of these discriminated against individuals would help me appreciate them – and in what ways the experience of this minority group would map onto or have some equivalence to the experience of African Americans.  To do that, I had to know something about the author.  Min Jin Lee is, in fact, a Korean American – and she gathered her information for this book largely through interviews with individuals in Japan of Korean descent.  She then wrote a novel – a creative integration of her experiences – from the third person omniscient perspective.  She wisely, I think, chose not to inhabit the first person of people whose experience was vastly different from hers (just as the author of The Help chose not to do this).

The central protagonist in this story, Sunja, is the daughter of a man who was shunned and, by all rights, should never have married, because he was born with a club foot and cleft palate and was slow to speak.  These deformities should have kept him out of the marriage pool in the early part of the twentieth century because it was assumed that his defects would be passed on to his children.  He, in turn was the only child of a lovely couple who ran a boarding house in a coastal village of Korea and who subsisted, quietly but happily, by housing and feeding workers – mostly fishermen.  Because of the Japanese occupation, the steady work and the food of the small plot of land they owned made Sunja’s father very attractive to the parents of three girls and no sons who did not know whether they could feed their children – so her father was arranged to marry one of them and she was born.

She was raised a proper Korean – which means that she was quite proper – we would say shy – and lived in a tiny world peopled with her parents, the boarders, and the two girls who worked for the family.  All of these people lived in a tiny house together and worked all of the time to keep the household running and to be fed.  She fell in love with a handsome import/export man, Hansu, who took a fancy to her at the market and, thinking that he would marry her, she had sex with him, only to discover that he was already married to a woman in Osaka, Japan.  When she became pregnant, her lover offered to make her a kept woman but she refused.  A sickly protestant minister – Isak, the son of a wealthy family – stayed in the boarding house on his way to live in Japan with his brother and sister-in-law and decided to marry her despite her pregancy as the Christian thing to do.  After they moved to Osaka, to live with Isak’s brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee, they had her first son, Hansu’s biological child Noa, and then a son together, Mosazu.  (Please note that the brothers and the sons are all biblical names: Isaac, Joseph, Noah and Moses, that have been transliterated into Korean).

It is the second son, Mosazu, who ends up, quite by accident, working in the Pachinko parlors of the title and then owning them.  Bullied and harassed at school for being Korean, he dropped out to work in one of the few places that Koreans could work – a Pachinko parlor – one that was owned by Sunja’s former lover and his brother Noa’s father Hansu – unbeknownst to him.  Pachinko is a game of chance – one in which a ball is dropped into a field of pegs and, as it strikes each peg, it can presumably bounce in either direction.  Based on a cascade of such 50-50 choices, the ball ends up at the bottom of the board in one of a series of bays – each of which has a very different pay out rate.  It is kind of like a Japanese version of a slot machine, and Pachinko, largely unknown outside of Japan, is a huge business, grossing three times what the auto industry does there annually.

1970s Pachinko Game

So, Pachinko becomes a central metaphor of the book.  Who we are – the family we are born into – the genetics that we are endowed with – are a matter of chance.  We could be born into a Japanese family – or into a Korean one.  And we could, like Noa, the son of the import export man Hansu, a man of action who, it turns out, runs the mob, have a very academic bent and want to study English literature.  Or we could, like Mosazu, son of the introverted and scholarly priest Isak, become a man of action – punching the boys at school who make fun of him and other Koreans and going to work in the gang related pachinko shops – and becoming an owner/operator who is quite wealthy and sends his son to school in America.  And, in a further twist of fate, we could, like Noa, discover that our father is Hansu, not the gentle Isak, and we could end up feeling such shame that a mob boss was financing our education that we could drop out of school and become – purely through chance – a pachinko parlor operator too – though one who was doing that while passing as a Japanese national.

The strange twists and turns of chance and genetics – and the two as linked – turn the psychological study I opened this post with on its head.  It’s not that we are genetically superior or inferior, it’s that we are randomly genetically endowed – and we are shaped by the environments that we are randomly tossed into.  Which ends up amounting to the same thing – our measures of people’s functioning with an intelligence test is necessarily a measure of multiple random events – and, if we parse them all out, we find that, regardless of which genetic shaker we use, we end up with the same constituent elements.

But I think the role of culture in shaping the experiences of the people in this book moves to the forefront as the randomness of genetics is asserted.  We discover that the intense self-focus – Sunja’s attempts to be the proper, correct Korean girl and then woman; Yoseb’s attempts to care for his family as a man should; Kyunghee’s and Sunja’s forays into the world of commerce against the tides of culture; that the cultural forces that they face are intent on keeping them in place not only through externally imposed shameful repressive measures, such as insuring that they can’t secure passports to leave the country, but much more insidiously through the internal control of the deep sense of shame – the sense that they are essentially inferior and must do what they can to hide that through industry and, somewhat ironically, self-pride.  And, also somewhat ironically, these internally repressive forces prove able, across generations and through the power of the exertion of will, to achieve forward movement – but also to create tragic limits to that potential for growth.

Without spoiling any more than I already have, I think this long book – and one that does not dive beneath the surface of the actions of its characters – except occasionally to articulate the conscious intent of the actors – ends up painting a picture of the arc of the twentieth century from a very interesting vantage point – and, in the process, the author creates characters about whom we care deeply.  One of the plot devices that she seems to use to do this is, again ironically, the creation of this family as being, in important senses, exceptional: Different from the Koreans who can’t rise above the filth and squalor to which they are relegated.  Just as Mosazu is a successful Pachinko owner in part because he learns the trade of subtly changing the angles of the pins on a daily basis to stay one step ahead of the patrons who are working to detect patterns in the falling of the balls, so we are drawn to characters who stand up to the laws of chance and largely seem to make them work in their favor.  We admire this when it works – and we mourn when it fails – when the sweep of history – or the pernicious effects of a lifetime of being bullied by mean spirited, ugly, and effective attacks leads a character (I just wrote us and revised it – we identify with these characters) to implode.

In the game of life, when we perceive resources to be limited and we need to maintain our power over others, we use similar means to control and suppress those we would have serve us.  Elsewhere I have looked at James Cone’s and Dorothy Holmes' (among others) take on these mechanisms within American culture – especially as it relates to African Americans, and there are more similarities here than we would want to admit as we look through a very different cultural lens at the functioning of a vastly different culture.

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