"Winter in Sokcho" by Elisa Shua Dusapin and translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins — Reviewed by Michelle Liu
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin and translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Reviewed by Michelle Liu
A French cartoonist named Kerrand arrives in the coastal city of Sokcho and asks a young woman to show him the “authentic Korea.” It’s a familiar premise: an artist seeks inspiration abroad and turns to a local to provide him with deeper insights. But Winter in Sokcho, first published in French in 2016, and translated into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, is distinguished by Elisa Shua Dusapin’s treatment of Sokcho itself, which she renders with details intensely personal to the narrator while skillfully using the setting to represent wider social themes of identity and alienation.
Dusapin’s narrator has returned to her hometown of Sokcho after studying in Seoul to work as a receptionist at an almost vacant hotel during the off-season. Her boyfriend is away pursuing a modeling career, and her mother, constantly concerned with the narrator’s future, works at a local fish market. Previously resigned to a life in Sokcho, where all she has known is waiting “for tourists, boats, men, spring,” Kerrand’s arrival prompts in the narrator a fresh attention to the details of her world as she considers how he might perceive it. For the first time she notices the reality of the hotel and feels compelled to “make excuses,” to tell Kerrand that she isn’t “responsible for the run-down state of the place.” As they travel around the city, she shows him the reality of Sokcho behind its tourist veneer. Sokcho, “in limbo” and a “constant state of winter,” is depicted as a “fleeting and impermeable” place. Dusapin’s fragmentary descriptions underscore this impression: “Late afternoon light. Skeletal remains of villages on either side of the road. Cardboard boxes, plastic waste, blue metal sheets.” When the narrator finds Kerrand’s drawings of the city, she is struck by his portrayal: faceless people walking in a place that appears to be dissolving.
What does it feel like, Dusapin’s novel asks, to experience a world that others can’t perceive, to be torn between appearance and authenticity? In a desolate landscape “entombed with frost,” the narrator and Kerrand visit the nearby North Korean border where she tells him, “Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could give way any moment.”
Dusapin uses the tight confines of Sokcho to represent larger issues in South Korean culture, critiquing its pressures towards conformity and its distaste for alienating imperfections. The narrator’s boyfriend and her family encourage her to consider cosmetic surgery. One of the few other guests is a young woman who retreats to Sokcho to recover privately from her plastic surgery, her “face neither a man’s nor a woman’s,” as she scratches her cheek and pale pink flakes fall into her food.
When the narrator discovers Kerrand’s sketches, she dips the ink across her face; during a charged encounter, she holds onto his ankle. At such moments of quiet intensity Winter in Sokcho manifests the spaces between connection and solitude, between reality and performance, and between permanence and change.