Things aren’t helped by the prose, or at least the translation, which is both scanty and overblown. But she is less good at characterisation, relying heavily on physical deformities to make a character interesting. The disasters and injustices are all too familiar: persecuted migrant workers, global pandemics, squashed demonstrations. But one couldn’t find a clean, safe place without a job or money.”Ĭho is effective at using dystopia to highlight horrors from our own world. The Sahas exist in an economic and social catch-22: “The hospital said that she could have her job back as soon as she got a cleaner, safer place to live. Cho engagingly describes a world of unpleasant authorities and downtrodden individuals, where cleaning a festering supermarket is a good job (“One of the cleaners retched the moment they walked in”), and an advantageous marriage to an elderly man can’t be turned down (“Just think of the money”). The narrative follows them, and other Saha residents, as they struggle to survive and, later, to uncover a sinister government plan. Sahas Jin-kyung and her brother Do-kyung are nobodies, not “anyone or anything deserving of a category”. Town is run by the shadowy, unelected Council of Ministers, who have cemented their position through a period of brutal martial law, and who control the populace by means of a hierarchical citizenship system: you are designated L if you are a citizen, L2 if you have a temporary visa or Saha if you have no chance of either.
It is marooned within Town, “an odd city-state that was not quite company or country”. The eponymous Saha Estates is a fenced-off, left-behind housing estate populated by piecemeal workers with no legal rights. Saha is a dystopian vision of an authoritarian, hyper-capitalist country strictly divided along class lines.
In Saha, Cho has once again drawn attention to a quietly accepted societal ill: here, the exploited underclass that keeps the economy running. It was sharp-toothed and well timed, becoming part of the cultural kindling that sparked the South Korean #MeToo movement. S outh Korean author Cho Nam-joo’s novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was an international bestseller that highlighted the deeply entrenched sexism faced by women in South Korean society.
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