#litbc analysis

Once again I find myself without an original essay already floating in my head, so shout out to @bengiyo for the discussion questions. They are a life saver! 

I find the question about I maintain effective distance from a narrator when the story gets heavy, but I am not sure that that is something I know how to do. In my day to day life I often feel cut off from emotions. I process my emotions through media, where putting myself in the experiences and feelings of the characters can be used like armor as I turn to face my own. I fail time and time again to maintain effective distance from my characters, because my characters are how I maintain effective distance from myself. I suspect Mr. Young and I have that in common. 

I’m glad for these essays because last week’s made me really have to think about Young, what he was like, why he was like that, how his friendship with Jaehee broke down when Young wasn’t able to be serious. Because I feel like Part Two is proof for me that my initial read was correct. But just like in Part One, where Young mentions his own problems almost off-handedly, his suicidality being a single sentence sandwiched somewhere in a paragraph. Here too, Young is rather distanced himself when he recounts his traumas. 

He does not linger on the fact he spent his summer in a psychiatrist facility because his mother saw him kiss a boy. He merely bluntly gives the details, but doesn’t really mention how he felt about it. At least not until closer to the end of Part Two. His boyfriend is the same, in some regards. Beyond the dickmatization of our narrator, I think the initial draw for Young was that there was another gay with mommy issues who was willing to talk about them. I think sadness speaks to sadness and that can call people to one another. The failing here is in the difference in their courage. 

Young has suppressed his sexuality as much as he could in places where he knew it might get him hurt (the military as an example). But even after suffering what he did in that psych facility, he left it with the knowledge that his mother was the one who was sick, not him. Young’s boyfriend, however, grew up in a different generation. Ben’s right, in BL we usually root for reciprocal couples to get together, and here we are watching a relationship fail. But I am not rooting for these two to be together, because that relationship was not balanced in what it gave and what it took. Young and his boyfriend stood on different ground from the beginning, both in what they wanted out of it and in how they navigate the world. 

I am not someone who thinks everyone needs to be out of the closet, I think it is quite rare that we get a closeted and out couple where their need to hide their relationship does not impact their relationship (shout out to Cooking Crush yet again for defeating that trope!) Young does not seem like the kind of person used to be looked at and he’s in a younger generation. He isn’t closeted, and does not at least outwardly appear to fall victim to internalized homophobia, he wants to hold his boyfriend’s hand in public, he does not give a shit what elders think. But he is with someone that is deeply ashamed of his queerness, to the point where he tortures himself with the news. Young is right to be upset after he finds the articles on his boyfriend’s laptop, it would be horrifying to find out that’s what your boyfriend thinks of you. 

But I don’t think Young mentioned, and he definitely did not reflect on the fact this has less to do with how he feels about Young and more to do with how he feels about himself. I love that this book got in to the complexities of activism. Now, I know someone did some very incredible work on the Korean history timeline, I just did not have an opportunity to finish it. So I’m not sure about the politics at play for what those students were activists for, but if I know one thing, it is that activists are never perfect. In the US, for example, racism existed within the women’s sufferage moment, homophobia existed in black liberation movements, and transphobia exists in the feminist movement and in queer communities as well. 

If Young’s boyfriend and his classmates were activists together, got arrested, fought against whatever it is they fought against and the boyfriend had respect for them, it would be a massive thing to internalize to find out they are homophobic. Hell, when we met that couple at the park, the husband said he believed that queer people existed as if there was a time when he didn’t think homosexuality was real. Young’s boyfriend ranted a lot about the American Empire and the influence of Western culture on Korean society and Young made a point to emphasize religion as a part of that. 

Korea has a pretty decent Christian population, and as we saw from Young’s umma that evangelical nature resulted in massive punishment for Young out of his mother’s fear of his sins. And she’d been a Christian for 25 years. I think every character we meet is really supposed to be some sort of reflection for Young, a way to show us alternate futures for Young. Jaehee is what his life could never look like because he was gay in a country that does not have gay marriage rights. But at the very least, Jaehee got serious when Young could not, and she got a serious boyfriend, and entered a serious relationship. Young and Jaehee were so similar for so long, that I do think Young would have been able to maintain a longterm relationship if he could actually emotionally commit to one. 

In Part Two, Young’s boyfriend is his mirror. The anti-American imperialist that pays attention to flags versus the kid who does not even pay attention to the symbology he is wearing. The former activist versus the passive kid. The internalized homophobe and the one who rebelled against that. I said it already but Young was tortured for being queer, and the first thing his mother did when the therapy failed was to hand him fucking scripture. Young could have ended up just as disgusted and ashamed as his boyfriend, but he didn’t. 

I think the author intercut Young’s relationship with his mother and his boyfriend in this part because they act as catalysts, they change Young, they show him what his weaknesses are, and the pain he will suffer when he bites his tongue…and when he doesn’t. His relationship with his boyfriend implodes when he starts saying more of the thoughts in his head, he waits for his mother to die after he cannot bring himself to ever tell her he wants an apology. 

I think so much of this part is about being let down by the people around you, which I think is how Young felt when he realized Jaehee had left him at the end of Part One. We get the homophobic activists as an example, but we also spent a significant amount of time with Young talking about his boyfriend who was the first to make a move, and the first to sit and listen, and how that turned out to be an act, his boyfriend was deeply stuck in his homophobia and stopped really listening to Young early in to their relationship; Young talked quite a bit about how stubborn and strong his mother used to be. The force of her. And he spends this entire part just watching her wither away to skin and bones. He describes how long she kept up the act, that he’d help her use the restroom and then ten minutes later you couldn’t even tell she needed help.