The Disaster Tourist: Excellent rendering of the extraordinary

“Authenticity” has become one of the most sought-after aspects of modern tourism. The quest is particularly important for those people who disdain the poolside holiday and seek instead an experience of which they will be uniquely appreciative.

But just how authentic can any holiday be? The mere act of going to a particular destination changes the nature of the place the tourists visit. They are soon looked on as a source of revenue by either impoverished locals or opportunistic businesspeople and their particular needs begin to influence the locale. Yet, that ache persists and many travel companies exist to cater to the needs of those jaded people who seek transcendence in the simple or tragic lives of others.

The questioning of any notion of authenticity is central to Yun Ko-eun’s excellent The Disaster Tourist, in which Yona, the main character, works for Jungle, a South Korean travel company that offers people the chance to visit areas of the world affected by natural disasters.

When we first meet Yona, she has been to Jinhae in the aftermath of a tsunami to explore its possibilities as a future destination for tours. Back in her workplace in Seoul, Yona begins to be sexually assaulted by her supervisor. Her reluctance to take any action, even when supported and encouraged by fellow workers who have been harassed by the same person, demonstrates a moral ambiguity which will later become more acute.

As a prelude to her expected sacking, Kim, the man who has molested her, sends Yona to an island called Mui, to evaluate the tour that Jungle has been running there for some time. The island purports to have a sinkhole in a desert and a volcano and to have had a vicious inter-tribal conflict, details of which they learn about from a woman said to be a relative of a head-hunting victim. “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.”

None of the other attractions is any more successful and the trip does not elicit the reactions that earnest travellers would expect to feel: “shock->sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort->gratefulness for their own lives->a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived.”

A mistake she makes on a train taking Yona back to the airport (an incident that can be enjoyed by the reader with vicarious consternation) leads to her return to the island and the beginning of a deeper, far more revelatory engagement with the nature of the island’s tourist industry and the people who run it, known, collectively, by the innocent-sounding name Paul. Now, it is as if she is visiting actors on their day off.

As she wanders into areas outside the zone assigned to tourists, she meets a man she had seen a few days earlier, playing an accordion and, apparently without legs, having lost them in the sinkhole accident. Now he stands on what look like legs, angry to be challenged by Yona. “ ‘Please.’ He said. ‘We need time off, too’.”

Once the manager of the resort learns that Yona is not, as he had presumed, a regular tourist but an employee of Jungle he begins to coax her into adopting an attitude to his plans for the island which compromise her position of influence. Given the uncertainty of her post within the company, this is not a great dilemma. But as ever greater commitments are expected of her, her entire position becomes fraught with uneasy, adjustments and a refusal to fully countenance the ramifications of the plans she is now a part of. When she asks Junmo Hwang - a writer who is also employed by the resort manager - if he is not uneasy about his manipulative role as a scriptwriter of sorts for highly suspect projects, his haughty answer is, “Unease is like a pair of shoes, allowing the artist to go where he needs to go.”

By now the level of intrigue and scheming – involving the exploitation of the most vulnerable local people – is at such an alarming scale that only nature can outdo it. Utter devastation awaits. The abhorrent past meets the despicable present. The debris of catastrophes on other islands meets at sea with that of the Mui disaster. Somewhere, people are booking a holiday to see what remains.

All of this is delivered in what might be said to be a familiar form of Korean writing, known to us now, thankfully, through many translations. An ostensibly detached style, using simple language. A plain rendering of the extraordinary.