THE FEELS!!

My Thoughts on Yi Suchong, 易蘇崇 (Lee So-sung / 이소숭, 이수총)

One of the things I found fascinating after getting into BioShock was the fact that there was a character who was Korean—well, Joseon-Korean, just like me. The work that resonated with me so intensely had a character of the same nationality in it. I found that strangely delightful.

But there was something odd about him. What I mean is, the historical and cultural accuracy was a complete mess. (Not that I expected much in the first place, but still.) His name was strange from the get-go.

In Korea, he is generally called Yi Su-jong (이수종). People have essentially corrected the pronunciation on their own. But I think that is going a little too far in the name of consideration.

The Chinese characters used for his name do not produce the Korean pronunciation "이수종" when read in Korean. Instead, they produce the bizarre pronunciation I wrote above: I So-sung (이소숭, Lee So-sung).

And, for that matter, why was the pronunciation chong attached to his name in the first place—a sound that inevitably brings to mind an offensive racial slur?

(Perhaps Asian people who felt uncomfortable with Harry Potter's Cho Chang will understand what I mean.)

Still, well... it was a work from 2007.

So I basically chalked Yi Su-jong, Yi Suchong... (at this point I do not even know what I am supposed to call him) up to the usual stupidity of an oblivious Western world.

I don't like BioShock anymore, but this was a world that understood me at a time when even I didn't understand myself.

After passing through those two long, beautiful, brutal worlds, what the work ultimately wanted to talk about was compassion and the sorrowful bond between parent and child. Looking back, I think I may have found myself somewhere inside this work.

And perhaps that is why I sometimes found myself deeply confused when I encountered the East Asian characters in it.

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Yi Suchong is a very important character to the story.

Along with Tenenbaum, he contributed to Jack's creation, and he was a genius scientist who conceived and designed some of the most important elements of the setting, including the Big Daddy program and various Plasmids.

As a Joseon man who had lived through colonial exploitation (plunder, ethnic cleansing—genocide), he apparently absolutely hates Japan and the Japanese, while simultaneously displaying the shrewd, merchant-like side of someone willing to sell opium to them for profit.

What I especially liked about him was this:

Even in a meritocratic place like Rapture, he was someone who had no reason to shrink himself down. He was in a foreign land, speaking a language that wasn't his own, and yet he never seemed intimidated for even a second. He was shamelessly confident, with his nose held high.

In other words, Suchong was extraordinarily confident in his own abilities.

And wasn't he recognized for them, even in that insane world?

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But the work did absolutely nothing with these genuinely excellent character traits.

Or... was it simply unable to?

I'm not talking about some one-dimensional "I dislike Suchong because he's a bad person" argument.

A bastard can still be an incredibly compelling character.

(Fxxxk foxxxine, for example...)

What bothers me is that even the random audio-diary characters who pass through for a moment have more depth and personality than this Asian character, despite all the wonderful material they had to work with.

He is so flat and fragmented that there is barely any opportunity to become interested in him at all.

The closest thing to a "character trait" Suchong is allowed to visibly display is the use of his bRokEn eNgLiSh for comic relief or to relieve tension.

Do I really have to explain what kind of shock that caused me?

The reason it is "funny" is not because Suchong himself is a humorous person.

The humor comes from his accent, his stubbornness, the confusion caused by cultural differences—in other words, from watching him, observing him, judging him, and laughing at something that Suchong himself is not even consciously trying to make funny.

Isn't that obvious to everyone?

And why?

Surely it wasn't simply because he was Asian, and the writers had absolutely no idea how to handle an Asian character, so they just turned him into a joke.

Was it?

Because I felt that possibility, piece by piece, throughout the entire game.

Especially the way he poured out his hatred toward Japan—the very country responsible for the oppression of his homeland—felt strangely insulting to me in its own right.

(At 47s~, this is basically what it feels like watching it.)

To me, Suchong was a Joseon Korean who overcame the language barrier and earned recognition in Rapture through sheer ability.

To the writers, however, he was reduced to an Asian comic-relief character who spoke ridiculous English. They stuffed him full of whatever exposition they needed to move the plot along, and then killed him off.

Whether their purpose was to be "PC," to serve the work's message, or simply to give the setting some kind of special distinctiveness—

(And yes, in 2007, choosing a Korean character rather than a Chinese or Japanese one was certainly a relatively unusual choice.)

—I can still feel the stereotypical Western gaze toward East Asians coming straight through the character they created.

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So, isn't Suchong basically a Korean in a kimchi refrigerator?

Maybe I'm being too harsh on a work that came out in 2007.

But why shouldn't I apply standards to it?

And why shouldn't I talk about it?

More than anything, I think Ken Levine should have paid more, not less, attention to Suchong, precisely because he went out of his way to invoke the colonial suffering of Joseon Korea in the first place.

The scar left by colonialism, still healing a century later, cannot be supported by a handful of fragmented words like imperialism, colonization, exploitation and massacre, or genocide.

What we lost.

What was severed cleanly at the waist and never grew back.

The wounds buried so deeply that perhaps even we ourselves no longer know they are there.

Perhaps I expected a little more depth from Ken Levine because he himself is Jewish.

Maybe I thought he might understand something about this differently.

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And perhaps that is why Tenenbaum's letter to Suchong has remained, for me, an endlessly moving—and, secretly, utterly exasperating—part of the game.

The message may never have reached Suchong himself, but it reached Elizabeth.

That part is moving.

And, in its own way, it is also Infinite.

At the same time, I couldn't help giving a bitter little laugh at the way they took an Asian character, refused to give him enough room to develop any genuine charm, flattened him completely, and then used him as plaster to hold the story together and make their self-projection character shine.

I thought Koreans were the only people obsessed with efficiency, lol.

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(Another East Asian character killed off for the sake of moving the story forward.)

I have a lot more to say about the Chens, too, but I feel like it would just be repeating the same argument all over again.

So I'll leave the baton here, passing it into some unknown future where, hopefully, someone like me—only Chinese—will say the rest.

May his next work, please, feature East Asian characters who are actually built up as characters.

🙄

It was her responsibility as a mother to ensure that Ada didn't turn out like her father;

Fundamentally, the thing that was wrong with Lord Byron is that he was a poet; and

The opposite of poetry is math.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

I was very amused that both character's sheets seemed to be in black and white, so I just took a chance and attacked two more people.

(one more thing on artfight remained, but you will see it later)

Ademar - @snake1eyez

Reposting this, because my other blog got sent to the shadow realm

Inspo under the cut