Between a Joke & a Prophecy

Same Bed Different Dreams, the second novel by the American writer Ed Park, opens with a question: “What is history?” A confusing thing to ask, impossibly grand, slightly ridiculous. Seemingly unanswerable—though for the rest of the novel various characters give it their best shot. “A litany of trackable moments, the realm of machines,” offers an academic. “From the same Indo-European root that gave us wit.” Another strains for poetry: “A message from a genius, ruined by the rain.” An “official transcript,” defined by what it omits. “A cure for insomnia.” Pick one: “(a) a vital lesson (b) amusement for the idle (c) the sum of symbols (d) a record of pain.”

Pain, recorded or not, is the predominant theme of the era with which the novel is most concerned, the period of Korean history stretching from just before the official Japanese annexation in 1910 to the 1953 armistice that marked the uneasy end of the Korean War. The first decade of the occupation was a time of particularly extreme violence and repression. A resistance movement sprang up, but within a few years it fractured along ideological lines. Some groups, led by leftist students and labor activists, decided to stay and fight for revolution on Korean soil. Others set out to build an independence movement from abroad. In April 1919 a collection of right-leaning nationalist organizations gathered in Shanghai to form a government in exile. They called it the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) and chose Syngman Rhee as their president. The enterprise was doomed from the start—largely symbolic, unrecognized by any major world powers, it was a band of infighting exiles issuing proclamations and pleading the cause of Korean independence from the fringes. The government dissolved after the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, having contributed little to the victory over Japan, its founding objective.

The KPG was “a historical footnote, nothing more,” concludes Soon Sheen, one of many main characters in Same Bed Different Dreams. But Park’s novel conjures a different reality, a dream of the twentieth century in which the KPG not only remains in existence but grows unspeakably powerful, a shadowy, tentacular force orchestrating world events. Its reach is comically expansive. The assassination of Itō Hirobumi (the colonial resident-general of Korea), the film career of Betsy Palmer, the founding of the Buffalo Sabres, the mysterious destruction of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the rise of social media—all are linked in some way to the KPG. The novel is broken into three plotlines: the present-day story of Soon Sheen, a middle-aged man living with his family in the Hudson Valley, where he works for a tech behemoth called GLOAT; a wandering history of the KPG; and an account of the life of Parker Jotter, a black Korean War veteran who later became a minor sci-fi novelist. These three narratives are interspersed in alternating chapters, echoing and contradicting one another, passing ideas and images like gossip from section to section, teasing meaning and spiraling outward in a fervid accretion of plot.

It’s all too much, an oceanic overflow of information, wordplay, uncanny doublings, rabbit holes, sly blurrings of fact and fiction. People have names like Loa Ding and Hans Um and D.M. Zephyr; multiple characters show up in T-shirts advertising The New York Review of Boobs. At times the novel reads like one big joke, a shaggy-dog story unfolding over some five hundred pages. “Amusement for the idle.” But there is another impression that slowly emerges, a voice coming through the static. A transmission at once more menacing and more hopeful, enumerating the wounds of Korean history and promising that they will one day be healed. A joke, a prophecy: these come to seem like two sides of the same coin, the tonal poles between which this extraordinarily ambitious novel moves. On the one hand, a parody of the paranoia behind the great conspiracy theories of the past century; on the other, an elaborate fantasy, the enactment of a totalizing and revelatory faith in the “optimistic moral,” as Soon describes it, that “everything connects.” Korea is at the center of everything, and within all that seems formless and unaccountable there lurks a deeper pattern, an intelligence. History has been one long march toward independence and reunification. Nam Buk Tong Il. South and North as one.

Same Bed Different Dreams seems like a departure, in subject and scope, from Park’s first novel, Personal Days (2008), a slim send-up of white-collar office life. That book was well received, though thanks to a regrettable accident of timing nearly every reviewer felt obliged to note its similarity to another, better-publicized debut novel, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007), mostly because both books used first-person-plural narration and made jokes about reply all and conference calls and employees’ fascination with the private lives of their bosses. The comparisons were natural, but Park’s jokes were funnier, and Personal Days carried a darker current of cynicism and dread, a sharper edge better matched to that moment of global financial free fall. The novel follows a handful of employees at the New York City branch of an unnamed company whose sole purpose seems to be warding off its own collapse through the proliferation of more and more spreadsheets and e-mails. The trials and machinations of the company are kept secret from the collective narrators, who see only an ever-cresting wave of pink slips. The employees are friends, sort of:

On the surface, it’s relaxed…. We dress like we don’t make much money, which is true for at least half of us. The trick is figuring out which half. We go out for drinks together one or two nights a week, sometimes three, to take the edge off. Three is too much. We make careful note of who buys a round, who sits back and lets the booze magically appear. It’s possible we can’t stand each other but at this point we’re helpless in the company of outsiders. Sometimes one of the guys will come to work in a coat and tie, just to freak the others out. On these days the guard in the lobby will joke, Who died? And we will laugh or pretend to laugh.

Park has a satirical cast of mind, rooted in an exuberant sensitivity to the habits and lazy rituals of people on autopilot, and even more so to the language they use—limp phrases, verbal tics, the sorts of lines at which one might laugh or pretend to laugh. The initial impression when reading his fiction is almost always of a writer at play. He has a charmingly self-delighted facility with puns. Empty phrases grow grim with meaning: “You are running out of memory,” one employee’s computer regularly informs him. “Are you sure you want to quit?” asks another’s. Corporate jargon is a favorite target. An employee who has been saddled with more responsibilities for the same pay is said to have received a “deprotion.” (In Same Bed Different Dreams, GLOAT employees gather at an “all-hands,” where they are asked, “Might a deeper understanding of history benefit the company, or is it to be avoided at all costs? Teams are told to blue-sky it, whiteboard pros and cons.”) These are jokes from one who knows: for three years starting in 2011, Park—who was previously the literary editor of The Village Voice and a cofounder of The Believer—worked for Amazon as an editor at Little A, an imprint in the company’s publishing arm.

He has also long been a prolific magazine writer and critic. Much of Park’s rangy nonfiction work seems motivated by an interest in how the pleasures of genre, of the lowbrow and subliterary, might be assimilated into a decidedly literary sensibility. (He also contributes with some regularity to this magazine.) The same interest may be said to underlie his novels, both of which make much of the fruitful slippages between literary realism and other genres—office satire and mystery in Personal Days and sci-fi and historical fiction in Same Bed Different Dreams.

All of this—errant high jinks, rowdy wordplay, a flair for genre, a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial, a vertiginous aesthetic built on an overload of information that aims to exhaust or encompass all the forces that shape the world—places Park’s work in the imposing tradition of the American systems novel, and particularly that of its high priests, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Park has admiringly described Pynchon’s style as “three parts laughing gas to one part subterranean profundity,” a recipe Park has followed in his own novels. His protagonists, like DeLillo’s and Pynchon’s, tend to be paranoiacs, people stifled by powers they only dimly perceive or understand, searching out meaning and patterns where they may or may not exist.

In Personal Days, the accelerating onslaught of firings drives the employees into a frenzy of speculation and mutual suspicion, and what began as a scathing romp about office culture devolves into something darker, more fretfully existential. The book is above all a portrait of the poses adopted by the powerless, who may be paranoid or defiant or resigned. Or merely clever. Clues abound as to the fundamental reality behind their predicament, the pattern that might connect every detail and reveal who will be fired next. “Has anyone noticed that the names all begin with J?” one employee points out.

But the truth has a brute simplicity: corporate efficiency will come for them all. This, too, may have been drawn from experience. In 2006, two years before the novel was published, Park was one of many editors laid off from The Village Voice after it was taken over by New Times Media. His work started to explore more melancholy themes: a persistent drift toward tales of waste and folly, the suffering of the individual under the sweep of a faceless and mutilating force.

In Same Bed Different Dreams that force is history itself. On one level the novel functions as a sort of primer on Korea’s subjugation, particularly in the decade leading up to and following the 1910 annexation, those early years of Japanese rule when colonial authorities squashed any perceived dissidence and imposed bans on political organizing and Korean-language publications. Park dwells at length on the history of Korean resistance. Student groups, Christians, Buddhists, adherents of the indigenous Cheondogyo religion, progressives, conservatives, elites—all began to unify against the degradations of the regime. Woodrow Wilson’s call for universal self-determination in his Fourteen Points speech fueled hopes for the movement. Korean nationalists abroad lobbied foreign governments for support; Syngman Rhee—the future first president of South Korea, living at the time in Hawaii—traveled to Washington and wrote personally to Wilson, whom he had known while studying at Princeton, but received no answer.

In January 1919 Emperor Gojong—the deposed last ruler of unoccupied Korea—died suddenly in his palace. Poison was suspected. Bitterness over the past decade of domination and bloodshed spilled over. On March 1 a group of Korean activists in Seoul signed a declaration of independence, sparking the Samil movement, a series of protests by some two million people across the country. The response was swift and vicious. Japanese troops fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing, by some estimates, over seven thousand people and arresting more than 45,000. In one village they locked between twenty and thirty people in a church and set it on fire. People were tortured in public. The international community shrugged. “It is a shame,” remarked the German consul, “but no one I think will send a gunboat.” These are the wounds to which Same Bed Different Dreams returns again and again. The events are replayed as if on a loop, but the track is getting warped. Every repetition marks a revision, introducing coincidences, conspiracies, lies—cracks in the narrative for the paranoid to one day uncover.

Soon Sheen is Park’s paranoiac, a Korean American man trying and failing to live an ordinary life a century after these events took place. He’s a lapsed writer. Fourteen years have passed since he published his first and only book, which his publisher bewilderingly advertised as “Alice Munro meets H.H. Munro.” Soon had a rough go of it:

A debut story collection, barely distinguishable from the six other debut story collections that launched the same day. It’s bad taste to say “…and that day was 9/11,” but that day was 9/11. It was hard not to see that as a sign.

Like many before him, Soon left New York City for the Hudson Valley and abandoned writing for something more ethically dubious and lucrative. In his case this involves coming up with potentially viral acronyms (“AWAM”: “and what about me?”) for GLOAT to disseminate on social media. He’s a corporate drone. “I’ve been meaning to email,” he says upon reuniting with an old friend, before realizing that this sentence “constituted a true statement I could say to anyone—that, in fact, could stand as a motto of sorts.” His boss is an AI bot, a hologram of a cigarette-smoking French woman.

History hounds him. In an early chapter Soon returns to the city to attend a boozy literary gathering hosted by his publisher. He’s there to celebrate the new English translations of an obscure Korean writer’s novels. The writer’s name is Cho Eujin, shortened and scrambled into “Echo” in a marketing ploy for an American readership. Soon has never heard of him. “Think of a cross between H.P. Lovecraft and, ah, L.P. Hartley,” the publisher says. Echo is apparently a legend, the “Scourge of Seoul,” his books banned for political subversion in South and North Korea—and, the rumor goes, wildly popular on the black market in both. His new book is a piece of historical fiction: Same Bed, Different Dreams. (“We might lose the comma,” his translator tells Soon.) Early readers are said to have “gone mad after just a taste.” Soon gets drunk and leaves with the wrong bag, in which he later finds a galley of Echo’s novel. “Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government,” the subtitle declares.

He reads. It’s an odd book, neither straightforward history nor really a novel, a mix of bleak factual summary and garrulous digressions. It begins in the early twentieth century, with a bitter recitation of the “many outrages that necessitate the birth of the Korean Provisional Government.” Foremost among these are the numerous interventions in and betrayals of Korea by foreign governments. Particular attention is paid to the original treachery that preceded the occupation: the secret 1905 agreement in which the US acknowledged Japan’s claims on Korea in exchange for an unchallenged American sphere of influence in the Philippines.

The book goes on, detailing the dying dreams of the Samil movement, the failed efforts of Korean resistance in the 1920s and 1930s. There are the escalating crimes of the wartime occupation. Much of this is well known. The labor conscriptions, the eradication of Korean names. The violence faced by untold numbers of “comfort women”: tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women and girls forced by the Imperial Japanese Army into sexual servitude. Then, after several years of smaller-scale hostilities, the Korean War officially begins in June 1950, the exact midpoint of the century. Another heap of horrors. Nobody comes out well. General Douglas MacArthur is an “egomaniac,” Syngman Rhee a “corrupt egomaniac.” Echo’s book lingers over the war with unflinching, plainspoken clarity. The images are searing, almost hallucinatory in their intensity. There is the memory of an American POW waiting to be killed by firing line: he “kneels without being told. He’s second to last: number thirteen. Smell of soil. Quiet except for the birds, and then it starts.” Or this, of a group of North Korean villagers taken captive by Southern troops: “Men are stripped and marched away, hands on head. Their genitals swing morosely.”

So far Echo’s account of these atrocities matches the historical record, the “official transcript.” The tone is that of an indictment, slashing and direct. But elsewhere in Echo’s account, truth and fiction bleed together—and this is where the fun comes in, the mess, a bit of froth. The narrator is a conspiratorial we, flagging divergences from accepted history in chatty asides:

By most accounts, the Korean Provisional Government quietly shuts down after World War II. Its main goal, the liberation of Korea from Japan, transpires on August 15, 1945, seemingly without the KPG’s help. (We said seemingly.)

The conspiracy expands. In the second half of the twentieth century the KPG’s membership includes not just Syngman Rhee but Kim Il Sung, the first leader of North Korea, and his descendants. Its headquarters are located underground, beneath the DMZ. It has a secret president, a psychiatrist named Dr. Inky Sin, who leads an otherwise quiet existence in Buffalo, New York (where Park himself grew up). Some members aren’t Korean; some don’t even know that they’re members. There are “anticipatory members,” too, those who unwittingly supported the efforts of the KPG before the Japanese occupation even began. Leon Czolgosz, an American anarchist, may have had different motives in mind when he shot William McKinley in 1901, but he was paving the way for the KPG’s ascendancy.

Echo’s writing works on Soon like a slowly enveloping dream, a seductive scrambling of all he once knew about Korea. The effect on the reader is similarly disorienting. Echo’s book is that rare thing, a novel-within-a-novel that is as engrossing and powerful for the actual reader as it is purported to be for the characters. Soon sees parallels to the book everywhere. Echo describes the life of a midcentury sci-fi writer, the aptly named Parker Jotter, who flew fighter jets in the Korean War. Jotter, like Soon, sees “connections where there aren’t any, or connections that don’t matter.” One of his novels is called The Louse, which also happens to be the repulsive name of a new GLOAT-manufactured sex toy Soon and his wife have been experimenting with. Louse, Soon realizes one night, is also an anagram of Seoul.

What could possibly be the significance of this? Another Jotter novel features a character named “Greena Hymns,” an anagram of Syngman Rhee. Jotter flew an F-86 Sabre jet in the war; the NHL team in Soon’s hometown of Buffalo is called the Sabres. The team was founded by two brothers, Seymour and Northrup Knox; the brothers’ initials are S.K. and N.K.—South Korea, North Korea. This is clearly meaningless, a fluke of order in a disordered world. But these little accidents proliferate. The book traces the unruly passage of real people, objects, messages across the decades until it all begins to coalesce around Soon’s own life, his family, his work. Writing him into history, rewiring his sense of reality. Recruiting him.

Same Bed Different Dreams (Park’s novel, without the comma) is a meticulous construction, the product of Park’s staggering depth of research and knowledge. The inevitable response to all this, for the reader, is bleary astonishment, mingled with a gnawing uncertainty as to what it all adds up to. The novel is in one sense the manifestation of a promise made good: “When the two halves finally reunite—when that day comes, whatever the public explanation, it will have come about through the unstinting efforts of the KPG.” For all its power, the KPG has effectively accomplished nothing after all these decades; but all this suffering will not be in vain. Korea will one day be made whole. This is the final hope, the revelation waiting at the end of history, and the novel derives suspense and emotional substance from its perpetual deferment. “There will be things to show soon,” the KPG promises. “Do not despair.”

But despair is inescapable. It lurks beneath the jokes and pulpy thrills, growing more apparent as the story progresses. There is a revealing moment late in the novel, on an ordinary night in February 1983. Dr. Inky Sin sits at home with his family, watching—like a hundred million other people—the last episode of M*A*S*H. It’s a famous episode, more somber than the rest of the show. Hawkeye Pierce, played by Alan Alda, has had a nervous breakdown in the final days of the Korean War. He’s being treated at a psychiatric hospital, though he insists that he’s fine. Finally he opens up and tells the doctor about a night he remembers from the start of the war—as recounted in Same Bed Different Dreams:

He and some villagers were hidden in the back of a truck, stopped by a North Korean patrol. Some hayseed had brought a chicken on board, which proceeded to squawk. Pierce hissed at her to keep it quiet—a matter of life and death. But the bird wouldn’t stop, and at last she smothered it into silence. The patrol passed without incident. Everyone lived.

With the help of the army psychiatrist, though, Hawkeye pieces together what actually happened. It wasn’t a chicken. It was her baby.

Inky mulls over this hair-raising episode, this return of the repressed. It changes everything. It means that through all the many seasons of the show, one of the most popular programs in the country, the main character has been using his nonstop wit as a defense mechanism. A way of denying and forgetting the horror.

This is Park’s gambit, too. As the KPG’s conspiracy grows more and more ubiquitous, the political dream it invokes comes to seem overinsistent, absurd, reductive. The KPG glosses over ideology entirely. What would it mean for the leaders of North and South Korea to be secretly working together toward reunification? What would such a reunified country even look like? The KPG’s ranks swell to include Philip Roth, Maxwell Perkins, Marilyn Monroe, Douglas MacArthur, and Ronald Reagan, to no avail. Jesus Christ is revealed as an anticipatory member—but still Korea is divided. By the end of the novel Soon Sheen is a member of the KPG, an agent working in the shadows to take whatever the next step might be in this ever-expanding master plan. He has some role to play and will surely succeed. But in the face of real history, real atrocities, this no longer reads like a reparative dream or even a dark joke. It is instead a faltering attempt to keep hope alive, a frenetic fantasy grinding itself into exhaustion.

It is this undertow of despair that finally elevates Same Bed Different Dreams above all the antic gags and false doors. Park is after bigger game, something more desolating and strange. He offers a vision of the twentieth century as an airless crypt, reverberating with frightful dreams, stale memories, the chatter of the dead. Here everything connects; revelation is just around the corner. But it does not arrive, because history is a nightmare, and you will never wake up.