The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
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The Disaster Tourist
By Yun Ko-eun
Translated from Korean by Lizzie
Buehler
Counterpoint Press, 2020
Yun Ko-eun’s first novel in English translation, The Disaster Tourist, addresses the dark side of our contemporary obsession with travel through the story of Yona, an unfortunate employee at a travel company called Jungle. Jungle specializes in tours to disaster zones, and when Yona is sexually harassed by her boss, the company gets her out of the way by offering her a chance to survey one of their tours being considered for cancellation. Yona selects Muir, a small island off the coast of Vietnam known for both its desert sinkhole and a vicious tribal massacre. Yet shadowy investors in Muir have no intention of letting its tourism industry disappear, and Yona finds herself trapped on the island and enmeshed in a sinister plot to ensure a steady stream of visitors and revenue.
Part black comedy, part thriller, The Disaster Tourist is most successful as a satire. Jungle provides tours based around “earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, avalanches, droughts, floods, fires, massacres, wars, radioactivity, desertification, serial killers, tsunamis, animal abuse, contagious diseases, water pollution, asylums, prisons and more,” fulfilling Korean consumers’ desires for “something exotic, the spirit of adventure.” While Jungle is an exaggeratedly ghoulish enterprise, its offerings are not far from tourism packages that exist in reality, such as trips to Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and areas of New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
During her time at Muir, Yona is exposed to and expounds upon many of the stated motivations for this kind of tourism. One student wants to “be inspired to live dynamically,” while a teacher sees it as a learning experience. Yona expresses the belief that it is “too scary” to visit disaster sites close to home, while disaster sites far away provide distance from the tourists’ ordinary lives and allow them to see the familiar with a new perspective. The trips enable the tourists to experience sympathy, gratitude for their own comfortable lives, and “a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived... Even though I came close to disaster, I escaped unscathed: those were the selfish words of solace you told yourself after returning home.”
Travellers come with pre-existing expectations of how the trip will transform them; in Ko-eun’s portrayal, tourism fulfills the inner longings of the traveller, rather than providing a true meeting of place and person. To satisfy the needs of tourists, the island of Muir and its inhabitants become commodified and objectified.
Yun Ko-eun excels at including small details that show how dehumanizing our search for adventure and exoticism can be. Yona becomes “skilled at quantifying the unquantifiable” with “the frequency and strength of disasters, and the resulting damage to humans and property, transformed into colourful graphs” on her desk. This focus on data extends to the employees, who are ruled by a yellow card system that will be familiar to many workers whose fate is determined by inhuman algorithms. On the island, the tourists are treated to a re-enactment of the massacre of 1963, where Unda tribespeople were slaughtered by the rival Kanu tribe and their heads taken for trophies. A writer buys “Unda skull-shaped decorations” from a vendor, a nauseating transaction that casually marks the transformation of genocide into an opportunity for commerce.
In this way, the tourists’ desire for authenticity and meaning actually ends up leeching Muir of any sense of reality. Accustomed to the tourists’ voyeurism and appetite for tragedy, locals begin performing the roles that are expected of them. An old woman, the relative of a victim from the massacre of 1963, now makes a living by entertaining tourists, so “as soon as Yona pointed her camera at her, the woman said ‘One dollar.’ All of a sudden, she began to pose zealously like a model, and as a result, the picture didn’t come out well.”
Other aspects of The Disaster Tourist are less successful. Yona is a thinly developed character, with no personal attributes, interests, or motivations aside from keeping her job and escaping from her abusive boss, so it is difficult to feel invested in her fate or to take any interest in the moral dilemmas she faces. This significantly lowers the stakes for the thriller elements of the novel. The final act extends the satire to the point of absurdity, long after the reader has grasped the point, leaving the narrative to get bogged down in the logistical details of the tourism industry’s ultimate act of villainy, without providing much emotional payoff or new insight. Yona’s experiences with sexual harassment feel like a plot device to get her on the island and Yun Ko-eun misses an opportunity to connect the exploitation of women workers with the wider exploitation of local people by the tourism industry. Similarly, large parts of the dialogue are transparently exposition delivered in clumsy blocks, rather than sounding like an approximation of actual speech.
As a satire, The Disaster Tourist hits all the right notes, providing a biting critique of our hyper-connected and hyper-commodified society, but as a thriller, it fails to deliver. That makes for a book that is stuffed with important ideas and clever details, but one that lacks interesting characters and narrative thrust, resulting in a reading experience both intriguing and unsatisfying.
—Anna Matthews is a writer and avid reader living in the East Midlands of the United Kingdom.