Korean Pressures Explode in Mina

photo: www.Amazon.com (very low res, but the only one I could find)

Going to high school for 8 hours a day and then staying after for an hour or two for band practice and cross country was grueling enough. I can't imagine doing all of that and then going to a "cram" school at night to study more. I also can't imagine having a separate room just for studying, or living in an apartment building with a chandelier-ed ceiling.

Yet all of this is daily routine for Crystal, Mina, and Minho, the three main characters in Sagwa Kim's novel Mina.

Crystal and Mina are classmates and friends, but their relationship isn't that simple. Crystal is jealous of Mina's family's new wealth (acquired from winning the lottery). She thinks Mina is stupid and irritable, but she's obsessed with her at the same time.

Mina, meanwhile, finds Crystal annoying and sometimes darkly disturbing. Minho, Mina's brother, is perennially placid, and the new object of Crystal's affection.

On top of the pressure from school and their parents, the trio's inner relationships begin to shake. This is teen angst at its darkest. The pressure mounts, and Crystal loses control.

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This novel reads like an allegory, with Crystal, Mina, and Minho acting less as characters and more as personified elements of Korean society. Even the city where they live, P City, is a stand-in for Korea as a country.

It's a critique on Korean upper-middle class society and the constant pressure to succeed, wear expensive clothes, etc., often at the expense of empathy and true understanding. The emphasis on knowledge over wisdom is an especially prominent, cutting jab towards the school system.

Crystal writes perfect essays. Her grammar and syntax, even in English, are impeccable, so she loses no points, despite her arguments being flimsy and a central spark missing. She is the perfect student and considers everyone else below her, worthy to die because of their stupidity. Of course, Crystal never sees or understands that her perfect exam scores aren't true knowledge or understanding of the world around her. Rather, she believes that exam scores are the only form of knowledge that matter, and she has no desire to learn about other people or the world around her.

Minho is much the same way - he doesn't care to understand the people around him. He always smiles. He simply goes along with anything Crystal says or does, and in this way, they're the perfect match. Minho enables Crystal, making him just as faulty.

But Mina is different from her best friend and brother. She lays in her closet and listens to music for hours on end. When her old friend Chiye commits suicide, Mina is, understandably, shaken. Crystal can't understand Mina's reaction. When Mina transfers schools, her old classmates are constantly asking Crystal how Mina is. They miss her presence. Mina isn't perfect, but she doesn't care about following the straight path laid out for her. She entreats Crystal to love and find empathy. But when she does, it's already too late.

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I'm not afraid of disturbing books. After all, I made it through American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (which Mina is quite reminiscent of) and listen to podcasts about serial killers. Violence still affects me though, especially animal cruelty, which jumps through these pages. Mina gradually becomes more and more unsettling, so I would not read it if you can't handle disturbing scenes.

As I said, it felt like an allegory, useful to get at the underlying emotions and anxieties of a country, but aggrandized. I also understood where the book was headed when I was only halfway through. Too much predictability tarnished the experience for me.

It was extremely well-crafted, and one of those books that's fun to tease apart and think about the society that it's based on. Dark humor rippled, but I wanted something a bit more realistic. When it ended, I wanted some offering of what to do next.

6/10 📕