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Gong Ji-young (author), Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (translators), Togani, University of Hawai’i Press, 2023. 264 pgs.
Steeped in social justice themes, Korean writer Gong Ji-young’s 2009 novel Togani (The Crucible) is finally available in English, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton and published by the University of Hawai‘i Press. That the project languished on the desks of two agents for so many years, as recounted in the afterword, was somewhat of a surprise but not exactly shocking. The novel is based on the notorious Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where many students were serially beaten, sexually abused, and raped by the administration and teaching staff, including the school’s principal. Togani tackles a heavy and sensitive subject matter but does so honestly without sparing unpleasant details. Although the reader will encounter some faint glimmers of hope, they are likely to experience discomfort for Togani is at its heart an indictment of a society, warts and all, a society which first lets down its most vulnerable and then proceeds to trample them underfoot.
The novel’s protagonist Kang In-ho is a man who has lost his confidence after his business goes belly up. Feeling himself to be a failure, Kang sheepishly takes on a temporary post teaching the hearing-impaired he has been offered through his wife’s connections. He is lured by the pay cheque that will, above anything else, put food on the table for his family. Uncertain about the future that awaits him far from his home in Seoul, he heads to the fictional city of Mujin—a stand-in for Gwangju, which is described as a historic cradle of democracy and human rights, but where progressive and traditional values remain in conflict. He arrives amid a heavy fog that the town remains mired in all through the novel. The fog is something Kang is advised that he best adapt to; its use as a device to illustrate the grey shrouding the town’s dirty secrets and unspoken relations of power that protect its upper-crust residents quickly becomes apparent.
At the Home of Benevolence, which is run by a private social welfare organization, Kang gets off to a rough start on the job. To secure his position, he must pay a bribe to the school’s development fund. The classroom is no better. The mood is sombre and the students are reluctant to open up. Then comes the bombshell. A student, the brother of a boy in the class, has been killed by a train the day before and the students do not believe it to was an accident. The situation only grows more suspicious from there; after school, Kang hears screams from the locked women’s bathroom where a girl is being raped by the Principal and he witnesses colleagues violently disciplining the students. Yet his initial attempts to probe these assaults lay bare the school’s hypocrisy and strengthen the staff’s hostility to him as a meddling outsider.
After some rumination, Kang overcomes his moral quandary—to see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil––and takes his concerns to Sŏ Yujin, his divorced female college senior who works at the city’s Human Rights Centre. Kang thus finds himself launched into a campaign to expose the evil pervading the school. As he fights for the children who cannot defend themselves, his feelings for them only grow stronger. The path forward, however, is riddled with obstacles, starting from the foot-dragging of a complacent police sergeant—who surrendered his sense of justice to the “reality” of the system—to the buck being passed between offices. The influence of the accused, their supposed contributions to the community, and their service to the Church and religious piousness generates not only wilful blindness to their crimes but encourages their supporters to manipulate the truth.
As the trial gets underway, the author lays bare the contradictions of the legal system and its failure to guarantee justice when faced with a “cartel of silence”. As soon as the proceedings commence, the reader is confronted with the injustice of a court that fails to provide interpretation in a case involving the hearing-impaired. The naked and unvarnished truth then struggles to persuade when it enters this crucible of insanity. Young survivors take the stand only to be called liars, Kang’s name is maligned with malicious rumours about unfortunate events in his past when he takes the stand as a witness, the defence attorney benefits from deference as a former judge arguing his first case, and the accused patch up their misdeeds through unscrupulous trickery involving agreements and payoffs.
When the verdict is finally given, the accused get off with probation and are welcomed back to the Home of Benevolence. No real justice is to be salvaged and the elites of the town realize their desire, which is that nothing changes. The townspeople go back to living as they were, but the children stand alone with a few good adults, like Sŏ, in their corner. Kang, however, loses the will to continue struggling and leaves Mujin in haste. With his marriage strained by the ordeal and his reputation dragged through the mud, he is a tortured soul forced to choose between his family and his new friends in Mujin.
The novel’s final pages offer an opportunity to reflect on the reasons we fight for causes when the odds are stacked against us, and what we seek to gain by doing so. When there is an easy path, but we choose the hard path, is it out of virtue for the vulnerable; so we can tell them they are not alone and as important as anyone else, or is it to preserve our own humanity? How much of ourselves and our individual conscience do we lose if surrender the fight to the tyranny of society?
The exploitation and abuse of young people with disability and human rights violations in social welfare institutions remain far from relics of the past in South Korea. Only a week ago, police launched an investigation into a specialised private day-care accused of more than 500 acts of abuse against developmentally disabled children in the span of two months. Meanwhile, improving the public education system for disabled students continues to be a massive task, with ostracism pervasive and neighbours often hostile to the construction of new special schools. Togani continues to be relevant to the conversation about how society treats the disabled, a decade after it was published on one of Korea’s most popular internet platforms and adapted as a box-office hit film. It has subsequently prompted official measures, including the closure of the Gwangju Inhwa School. Perhaps this new translation might itself inspire its readers to take action too.
How to cite: Greenberg, Jack. “We Fight for Causes When the Odds Are Stacked Against Us: Togani (The Crucible).” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 May 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/05/29/togani
Jack Greenberg resides in Seoul where he is pursuing a master’s degree at Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies as a Global Korea Scholarship recipient. He is a former management consultant and originally hails from Toronto, Canada. Jack regularly contributes to KoreaPro, an online subscription resource that provides objective insights and analysis on the most important stories in South Korea. His writing has also been featured in The Korea Times and Asian Labour Review. He is interested in housing issues and urban development and enjoys documenting changing cityscapes through photography in his free time and travels abroad. Follow his work on Twitter at @jackwgreenberg. [All contributions by Jack Greenberg.]
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