I have just read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, in one fell swoop, in the last seven or so hours, curled up in this computer chair, using Kindle Cloud Reader, one hand on the mouse wheel. It has kind of broken me. Also, I don’t know what Pachinko is. I know I can look it up and probably find videos but I’m not, for some reason, at least not now. I read it on a whim because it was on one of the San Francisco Public Library’s lists, and all of SFPL’s e-copies weren’t on hold, so I just started reading it, and didn’t stop.
Here are a few excerpts from the afterword.
Pachinko is a kind of vertical pinball game played by adults in Japan.
There’s more than that, but I’d gathered as much from the descriptions in the book.
Orientalism, the objectification or erasure of Asian beauty and distortion of Asian sexuality deny Asian humanity. I treat all of these issues in my writings.
I treat all of my issues with denial and playing then quitting social video games. I was so invested in my WoW Classic guild that I was not only the main tank, I also bought a domain name and set up a Discourse instance. And now I’m going to quit it over their love and defense of a stupid boy who says things like “females don’t play video games” and when asked by a woman to please call us “women” and not “females” said “I’m a scientist and that’s what they’re called” so we’re all rage-quitting and it is a marker of my great power and agency that I can rage-quit my position of importance in a guild where I ran 40-person raids any time I want. Right? Right?
Anyway the book is about Korean refugees in Japan, and a lot more than that. Like the phrase “a woman’s lot is to suffer.” I remember reading Joy Luck Club and being fascinated by all of the talk about “eating bitter,” which is a Chinese phrase I’d heard before, uttered by my own Chinese mother who was born on an island foreign to her parents, and I was born on a continent foreign to my parents, and I could never understand, truly, the special role of Chinese women and all of the bitter they have to eat and all they have to suffer for their children or for their filthy fuckboys that they love so much or for beauty or to escape, even for a moment, and most of all for regret. Soooooooooooooooo yeah. Obviously it’s hard not to feel some connection, even though I am not Korean, to a book about Asian women in a country that is not their own, with family that escaped war, with belonging and not belonging and Christianity and disbelief in god and confusion about how to do traditional funeral rites along with your western christianity and obsessing over having male children and physical beauty and money and survival and respectability and furniture.