Is It Appropriation or Radical Empathy?

by Yoojin Na

I’ve been preoccupied with this question as the American Dirt debacle continues to unfold. It’s difficult to look away from the media attention—Instagram photos of author Jeanine Cummins’s “barbwire manicure” and border-themed centerpieces, reviews from The New York Times expressing divergent opinions, and now Oprah’s two-hour TV special.

My instinct leans towards dissent. The reasons why my own family chose to immigrate illegally are so complex and personal. How could someone who has not shared this fear or uncertainty know our estrangement, let alone write about it?

What perplexes me further is the lack of outcry against other Caucasian writers who have assumed a minority perspective. Of them, Adam Johnson stands out as a notable example. His 2012 novel The Orphan Master’s Son, set mainly in North Korea, follows an orphan’s rise from a low-level spy to Kim Jong Il’s rival.

Johnson’s interest in North Korea grew after reading Kang Chol-hwan’s memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang about Kang’s youth in the North Korean labor camps. He states his aim in writing The Orphan Master’s Son was to explore “the personal dimension” of those “huddled under repression,” to “capture” rather than “create a single character that felt fully human.”

Johnson never claimed that he was trying to give a visage to a faceless mass. Instead, he borrowed the words of his friend, a Korean executive-turned-scholar Dr. Joseph Man-Kyung Ha: “He said no one is trying to do this and, by that, he meant trying to project the humanity of North Korea.”

With the help of Ha, Johnson was able to visit Pyongyang, but the carefully curated tour deprived him of any spontaneous interactions. The intimate glimpse into daily life he traveled so far to attain still eluded the author. Later in an interview, Johnson told David Ebershoff: “I really wanted to bring a citizen of Pyongyang to life… I faced many challenges in building this portrait, though. People in Pyongyang tend not to defect and therefore don’t bring their stories to the outside world, so how they live is a greater mystery… So I had to invent the most for this character.”

Johnson and Cummins both wrote what they do not know and cannot know. Yet one was awarded the Pulitzer and praised by Michiko Kakutani while the other had to cancel her book tour. Why was there such a discrepancy? Have we become that much more politically correct in the past eight years? Or was it because Johnson is a man and a professor at Stanford?

I wondered all this aloud to a friend, who then brought to my attention a point that I had not considered, “Maybe, there aren’t as many North Koreans reading The Orphan Master’s Son and getting offended.”

I am not a North Korean, but I was born and raised in Seoul, in uncomfortably close proximity to the DMZ and Pyongyang. Thus, North Korea, to my young mind, was not a distant and imagined place but a part of my national identity. Early on, school teachers ingrained in me that we are one nation, that reunification is just a matter of time. I grew up watching reunions on TV of family members separated by the sudden rupture at the 38th parallel. It shocked me that even these reunions were not forever. After a few hours of crying, hugging, and exchanging presents, they went back to their respective sides.

Also in the background of my childhood, were yearly pissing matches between the North and the South. Every Spring, American and South Korean fighter aircrafts performed a “military training exercise” called Team Spirit in order to demonstrate their prowess. The North would usually respond by shooting missiles into our side of the Yellow Sea and sometimes into the Sea of Japan. Then, the North would broadcast propaganda to their citizens about American aggression. And the South would show the same propaganda broadcast to its citizens to mock the North.

It’s difficult to say how much such tension brought about my family’s migration. Perhaps, it was only a small part of the equation. Nonetheless, as a Korean and a formerly undocumented immigrant, I felt a personal stake in reading both of the aforementioned novels, and read them in hopes of gleaning a deeper insight into identity politics in fiction.

I read American Dirt first. After all the scathing reviews, I was sure I would hate it. And what surprised me was that I didn’t. The book opens with Lydia and Luca holding their breath in the shower of their bathroom while gang members find and murder their family. Then, the story moves quickly as the two leave Acapulco for the US border.

On the sentence level, Cummins is unpretentious. She also seems to understand innately what should be told, what should be shown, where to start the story, and what should be a flashback. Regardless of my personal feelings about her endeavor, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the competence of her craft. And for the first couple of chapters, I was so absorbed by what happens next that I found myself turning page after page. But then, in chapter five, I discovered Lydia’s romantic involvement with Javier, the gang’s kingpin and the one responsible for her family’s murder. Javier quotes Love in the Time of Cholera even as he’s threatening to make her suffering brief. Suddenly, the grist and gravity of previous scenes turned into a telenovela trope.

What troubled me more as I read on was not the farcical plot but my own inability to form an emotional connection to the protagonist. Lydia is a small-business owner, a grieving widow, a loving mother, and precisely the kind of character a reader should feel for, yet I could not bring myself to care. This mild discomfort grew into a physical sensation of nausea.

The problem with Cummins’ portrayal of her heroine is that it’s two-dimensional. Though Lydia has moments of introspection, the main driving force of the book remains external. Chainsaw-wielding thugs are coming for the innocent, so they must find low-profile transportation from town A to town B, then from town B to town C. All the while, the book leaves no doubt for its audience: they should pity Lydia and Luca. Hence, all the gory details come at the readers like emotional blackmail.

Unlike Cummins, Johnson plays with his hero’s moral complexity. Jun Do, who is marred by the kidnapping of his mother and the subsequent unraveling of his father, finds himself becoming the perpetrator of the same sin. Yet he doesn’t run away because defection would eliminate any hopes of reuniting with his family. He’s an orphan who makes orphans out of others so that he can escape being an orphan. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about such a character, but Johnson doesn’t force his readers to decide. He doesn’t even tell us how Jun Do feels. Rather, he describes in subdued and matter-of-fact language the reality of what his protagonist sees and hears.

In one particularly memorable scene, Jun Do and his colleagues kidnap a young Japanese woman for practice. She says something to them that Jun Do doesn’t understand.

. . . though Jun Do could speak no Japanese, he knew it was a raw, imploring confession, like “I’m a virgin.”

They threw her over the rail. She fell away silent, not a word or even the snatching of a breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though—it wasn’t fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they’d never know what became of her.

He learns later that she was confessing she can’t swim.

Johnson leaves an asterisk, a section break, at the end of that scene. In that small yet ever-expanding space, I felt the weight of all that wasn’t being told.

From then on, I cared not whether he was culturally sensitive or historical accurate, whether his intent justified the means. What mattered was the glade he left for the reader to practice their own empathy and imagination—a path towards a deeper truth.

Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.