Black Flower in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 19, 2012 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: translated-fiction, novels

I quite enjoyed Kim's previous novel in translation, Your Republic is Calling You, and eagerly picked this up as soon as I heard the premise. Following the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1905, a number Koreans emigrated to other countries, including more than 1,000 packed on the British steamer, Ilford. Having eagerly signed contracts with the Continental Colonization Company, they were bound for Mexico, where they believed high wages and a better life awaited them. (Several thousand Koreans ca I quite enjoyed Kim's previous novel in translation, Your Republic is Calling You, and eagerly picked this up as soon as I heard the premise. Following the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1905, a number Koreans emigrated to other countries, including more than 1,000 packed on the British steamer, Ilford. Having eagerly signed contracts with the Continental Colonization Company, they were bound for Mexico, where they believed high wages and a better life awaited them. (Several thousand Koreans came to Hawaii around the same time for the same reason.) However, the passage across the Pacific (which the first 1/4 of the book details) was their first hint that their new life might be harder than expected. Packed below decks in conditions only marginally better than an Atlantic slave ship from a century before, the Koreans underwent gruesome hardships. Once in Mexico, they were transported to the Yucatan and sold into indentured servitude on large henequen plantations or haciendas, to work alongside native Mayans.

Kim attempts to dramatize all this through the eyes of several fictional characters, including a poor teenage boy, a family of the royal clan (including a comely teenage daughter), various ex-soldiers, a thief, a former Catholic priest, a eunuch musician, and even a shaman. The short sections alternate among the characters, as the reader learns what drove them to the desperate decision to leave their homeland, and how their sense of social order is upended in their new circumstances. Although the book more or less makes the two teenagers and their love story its center, it suffers from too many shifts in perspective. This gets worse in the last third of the book, when he periodically leaves the Korean workers to zoom in on some diplomatic efforts being made on their behalf, as well as various Mexican aristocrats plotting during the Mexican Revolution.

These all feel like the mistakes of a writer trying historical fiction for the first time -- there's often the sense of research getting shoehorned in, simply because the author had facts at his disposal. Several times, the book totally grinds to a halt for an info-dump that reads like a cleaned-up Wikipedia entry (for example, the details of the henequen plant, or the background to the Mexican Revolution). It's a fascinating little historical episode, and Kim is very effective at portraying the suffering, but it never really worked for me. While it might be true that Koreans fought alongside Pancho Villa and Zapata, and founded the short-lived nation of New Korea in the jungles of Guatemala, those threads arrive so late in the book and are given so little space, that they are robbed of their potential. A fascinating piece of history, disappointingly told. ...more

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Sep 10, 2013 Verity rated it liked it

Shelves: literature, global-culture-and-history

Short Review: Interesting story on a little known piece of history. ...Makes me wonder if every major author has at least one work that is historical fiction.

Long Review
The backdrop of <> is a departure from Kim's other translated work, shedding light on a relatively obscure piece of Korean and Central American history that brought a small group of Koreans unknowingly into Mexican slavery. The material is presented true to Kim's form, juggling a myriad of backgrounds and motivations that keep th ...more

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