Graphic Fiction by Kim Han-min

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang and Sora Kim-Russell

Influenced by video games, the graphic novel Kafe Limbo takes place inside a dystopian future, as a group of renegades desperately searches for a new home and a mythical life-saving "Mirror." Below is one chapter from the book.

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First published in English in the February 2015 issue of Words Without Borders: International Graphic Novels: Volume IX.

for Tell Me Where to Go
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/tell-me-where-to-go

Kim Han-min

Kim Han-min is the author of several graphic novels, including Dear Euripides, Comet Study, Fairy of Places, Kafe Limbo, and The Book Island. He has also written and illustrated storybooks for children such as Tip Toe Tapir, My Amphibian Dream, and Ungo and the Pink Dolphin. He contributed comic strips to the Daily Hankyoreh and worked as editor in chief of the quarterly culture magazine I/n, where he experimented with half-fictional interviews adopting graphic narrative forms. He lives in Portugal, working on his new book and translating poems by his favorite poet, Fernando Pessoa. Most recently, he translated The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa.

Jamie Chang (translator)

Jamie Chang is a translator. Her works have been published in Azalea, ASIA, and The American Reader. She lives in Denmark.

Sora Kim-Russell (translator)

Sora Kim-Russell's publications include Kim Un-su's The Plotters; Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, Familiar Things, and Princess Bari; and Pyun Hye-young’s The Law of Lines, City of Ash and Red, and The Hole, which won the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. She lives in Seoul.

Links available online only

Meet the Author

Blurb: "[N]ot being a part of the problem wasn't enough.” On Facebook, find out how Kim Han-min starting working as a quartermaster on the “Sea Shepherd,” and what happened to the totoaba fish that they found one night in an illegal gillnet.

Then, explore Kim Han-min’s personal website. Make sure to press the "about" button in the top right corner, and keep pressing the “switch" button in the center to view all the panels.

Meet the Translators

Jamie Chang. Courtesy of Korean Literature Now, the world's only free English-language quarterly of Korean literature.

"Tell Me Where to Go" is not the first time Jamie Chang has used the word "roach" in a translation—read an interview in which she explains why she used the term "Mom-roach" in her translation of the novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.

Then, find out why Chang "ditched . . . medical school" in a piece she wrote for the magazine Words Without Borders.

Next, visit Sora Kim-Russell’s website (in English and Korean—the two non-English headings say “Welcome!” and “Nice to meet you!”).

And watch a video clip in which she talks about the "visibility" of Korean literature outside Korea.

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Korean terms in this story, read aloud by WWB Campus graduate intern Olan Munson.

“Exiled from their own land”

A page from Kim Han-min's Kafe Limbo

Read a summary of the dystopian graphic novel Kafe Limbo, from which this chapter was excerpted. In the novel, members of a renegade group called Limbo "undertake three missions: strike the Roaches as hard as possible, secure an escape route, and find the Mirror." (There are a few typos in the text.)

A Scholar's Notes

Read Brother Anthony of Taizé's description of this story in his introduction to Korean literature:

. . . [A] variety of science-fiction tale set far from Korea or any everyday reality. The fantasy world it evokes may be understood as a satire of the enthusiasm Koreans have developed in recent years for travel. Despite discomfort and danger, Koreans have been traveling to every remote corner of the world and becoming experts on the negative things awaiting them there, although “Cockroachification” is not usually mentioned. But perhaps after the current pandemic it might be?

"Tell Me . . ." might also be understood as an indictment of immigration policy. Korea is a very closed society, notorious for a refusal to welcome immigrants—asylum-seekers, in particular. Many young men from Southeast Asia come to Korea to work in small factories for low wages, but they are not allowed to stay for long, and certainly not to settle for good. In recent years, reporting on immigration has sometimes employed the term "Fortress Europe" to refer to highly restrictive policies on that continent; "Fortress Korea" may be equally apropos.

Where to Go? Seeking Asylum in the Real-World "Kafe Limbo"

In the dystopian world of this graphic novel, the members of "Limbo" race through a world of closing borders, desperately trying to find a country willing to take them in. What's it like to do this in the real world, today?

First, watch this TED Talk by a young man from Afghanistan who undertook a dangerous journey in the hopes of finding asylum in Australia.

Then, get some basic terms and facts from the U.N.'s factsheet for World Refugee Day, and find out eight facts about immigration from the Anti-Defamation League.

Finally, find out why refugees today "spend longer and longer periods in limbo" in a short article from The New Humanitarian.

One reason behind the longer times in limbo is a change in U.S. policies around refugees: the chart below shows how many refugees the U.S. used to take in, compared to today.

A chart from MPI Data Hub showing how many refugees the U.S. took in each year, from 1980 to 2020.

Background on Korea

Street painting in Seoul. By leifbr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.

New to learning about Korea? Read a short profile of modern Korea from the BBC, or a more detailed profile from the Korean Ministry of Culture.

Links available online only

More from the Author/Artist/Translator/Activist

The book cover of Tiptoe Tapirs.

Read about a jungle that is not as peaceful as it looks in Kim Han-min's children's book Tiptoe Tapirs (click on the cover image to use the "Look Inside" feature).

Then, find out how Kim Han-min's drawings connect to older Korean artwork in a review of Tiptoe Tapirs.

Next, look at pages from his Korean-language book Moving, which asks, "Why Leave? Why Move? Why Mobilize?"

Combining graphic narrative and activism, the book tells stories of migration (among fish as well as humans) and imagines an encounter between journalist Marie Colwin, who died covering the war in Syria, and migration activist Jerome Rodriguez.

In addition to being an author and artist, Kim Han-min is also a translator. Watch a Facebook clip of him reading aloud from his Korean translation of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

In the clip, Kim reads a line that Pessoa wrote in a letter to his friend Adolfo Casais Montero. Translated into English, it reads: "Since childhood I had the tendency to create around me a fictitious world, surrounding myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed.”

Fernando Pessoa. Template: Cavalão, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

(For more on Pessoa, read Richard Zenith's short article "The Poet of Many Masks" and look at his work on the Poetry Foundation website. To find out why "you will never get to the bottom" of Pessoa, read an article by Carmela Ciuraru.)

Author as Activist

Explore Kim’s personal website. Keep pressing “switch” until you find his “Organizes” page. Here, you can explore some of Kim Han-min’s activism work.

Then, learn more about the direct-action ocean conservation movement called the Sea Shepherd, where Kim Han-min worked as a quartermaster.

A pair of vaquitas. By Paula Olson, NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For more on the “totoaba” fish, and what it has to do with the endangered “vaquita” (a type of porpoise), listen to this 5-minute NPR story.

(For Korean speakers) Listen to Kim Han-min talk about his experience on the “Sea Shepherd,” where he describes himself working as a “non-violent pirate.”

More from the Translators

Read Jamie Chang's translation of a chapter from the YA fantasy novel The Wizard Bakery and Sora Kim-Russell's translation of the memoir-essay "A Meal of Solitude for a Restless Heart," both available on this site.

For more about The Wizard Bakery, check out the trailer below.

Then, read "I Am a Communist," a different graphic story on which Chang and Kim-Russell collaborated, about a man on the run between North and South Korea when the country was being divided. They write about what it was like to translate the story in an essay, also published in the magazine Words Without Borders.

Finally, check out a short comic about "wild times" in a translation workshop. Sora Kim-Russell wrote the story and artist Yerong drew the illustrations.

From "Wild Times in Translation Workshop, Part 1" by Sora Kim-Russell (story) and Yerong (artwork). Courtesy of Korean Literature Now, the world's only free English-language quarterly of Korean literature.

Kafe Limbo on Stage

Watch a clip from a Korean experimental theater's production of Kafe Limbo. In this scene, the Limbo members dissect a Roach, commenting on how small its brain is.

Korean Writing and Film About Outsiders

Watch the trailer for Dear Pyongyang, a documentary in which the director, Yang Yonghi, tries to find out why her father sent her three brothers to live in North Korea.

Read Yu Miri's novel Tokyo Ueno Station, a "deeply felt depiction of the lives of Japan’s most vulnerable people." (Yu Miri, like Yang Yonghi, is a Japanese-born Korean person.)
Read a review of Princess Bari, a myth-based novel about a young woman fleeing North Korea by Hwang Sok Yong.

More Walls

"Every country has walls. The essence of a country is its walls, not what lies beyond them."

Do you agree with this idea from "Tell Me Where to Go"? To get some perspective, read "When Is a Border Just a Border? Almost Never" from the New York Times.

Then, watch a trailer for Ay, Mariposa, a documentary about butterflies and the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Does it remind you of these lines from "Tell Me Where to Go"?

But people are animals, not plants. And animals never stay in the same place. It stands to reason that a cornered being will seek to broaden its territory.

For a short history of US-Mexico border issues, take a look at a seven-minute film explaining "How Walls Ended Up Along the US-Mexico Border" from the New York Times.

Unsafe in the U.S.?

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2020, a Canadian court ruled that the U.S. is no longer a safe place for returning migrants, citing "cruel and unusual" conditions that place the U.S. outside "the norms of free and democratic societies."

Get a sense of how this happened in the articles below, published in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Humanitarian:

Sept. 2017: Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees
June 2018: The Government Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families It Is Tearing Apart
March 2019: U.S. Continues to Separate Migrant Families
June 2020: At the US-Mexico Border, Asylum Chaos and Coronavirus Fear
Oct. 2020: Trump Virtually Cuts Off Refugees as He Unleashes a Tirade on Immigrants
Oct. 2020: ‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said

A Country For Those Who Don’t Belong

The narrator of "Tell Me . . ." asks:

Why hasn’t anyone invented a country for those who don’t belong anywhere?”

Many others have asked and tried to answer the same question:

Read director Ava DuVernay's thoughts on the imaginary land of Wakanda in her film Black Panther. She says that “Wakanda itself is a dream state . . . a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” Watch the trailer to get a sense of Wakanda.

Look at a drawing of of "La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán" or "The New Land in Aztlán," and read about its role in the Mexican American civil rights movement.Ink drawing on a handkerchief by Manuel Moya, 1986. From the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Read about the Guaraní indigenous myth of the "Land Without Evil" and then read the contemporary poem "Serpent," which possibly refers to this myth. (Guaranís are indigenous people living in what is now Paraguay and in neighboring countries.)
Take a look at Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which imagines a Jewish homeland in Alaska.

"We identify with . . . "

Henry Spira. Via Wikimedia Commons, fair use.

On his website, artist Kim Han-min captions an illustration from Kafe Limbo, entitled "Tomb," with this quote from the animal rights activist Henry Spira:

We identify with the powerless and the vulnerable, the victims, all those dominated, oppressed and exploited. And it is the non-human animals whose suffering is the most intense, widespread, expanding, systematic, and socially sanctioned of all.

Learn more about the life of Henry Spira, who led the first successful campaigns against medical testing on animals in the U.S., in his New York Times obituary.

More Dystopias**

In Words Without Borders:

Scandorama: another graphic-fiction dystopia set in a futuristic Scandinavian country where "It's almost impossible to get in, but getting kicked out is easy."
Death Fugue: a young man begins to see beneath the surface of a seeming utopia

Elsewhere:

Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
1984, by George Orwell
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood; also a television series; the scene below shows a country welcoming an asylum-seeker from a fictional dystopia.

Defining Dystopias

Find out the "blueprint for dystopia" in the TED-Ed video "How to recognize a dystopia"
Read a detailed definition from the National Council of Teachers of English, or NCTE.

**For Teaching Idea 2

Reading Grade Level(s): 5, 6, 7 and up

Key Points
1. Welcome to "Limbo"
2. What Makes a Dystopia?

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

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