The Disaster Tourist

by Yun Ko-Eun

  The child noticed Yona and stopped moving for a moment. Yona saw his expression briefly change to one of contempt before he was overcome with the sadness of someone who’d lost his mother. ‘Mum?’ he asked Yona. Earlier, his face and this question had made Yona want to hug the boy, but now she had the opposite reaction. Yona stepped backwards. When Luck came closer, the child disappeared.

  After the boy vanished, an old dog looked up at Yona and then lowered his head. When she’d been on the Jungle tour, even dogs had seemed like incarnations of disaster, but this dog just looked normal. The hammock the child had been lying in was now a fishnet, catching nothing but empty wind. The dog under the hammock fell asleep. Above, the blue fabric fluttered comfortably. At a glance, the hammock looked like a blue cloak coming up from behind the dog’s back.

  ‘I met a woman named Nam when I was here,’ Yona said to Luck. ‘Do you know her, by any chance?’

  ‘Nam is a common name. And Mui people only come to the homestay houses when there are tourists.’

  ‘Women with the name Nam are Unda, right?’

  Luck smiled slightly.

  ‘Unda and Kanu don’t really mean anything,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  Luck thought for a moment, then answered with the following.

  ‘Because now there’s a bigger divide.’

  Luck told Yona he was going to show her what a real Mui stilt house looked like so she could understand the division. Yona wonder what ‘real’ meant in this case. The motorcycle hurried onwards.

  After they passed the red sand desert and approached the ocean, countless houses on stilts rose up from the water. The number of them dwarfed the small set of homes Yona had visited in the white sand desert. The homestay village there was approved but fake, and these homes were unapproved but real. One third of Mui’s residents lived here.

  ‘About three hundred people live here,’ Luck explained, ‘but they leave in the dry season and then come back in the rainy season. They set their houses on boats and move them.’

  ‘Why did Mui ignore the real houses and make fake ones instead? Tourists don’t even know this place exists.’

  ‘This is an unlicensed area. These people aren’t really allowed in Mui.’

  ‘Are they Unda? Or Kanu?’

  ‘No one pays attention to that now. These people are just poor, so they can’t pay taxes.’

  A sign that read ‘crocodile caution zone’ rose up from the water, teetering to one side. Five-metre-long crocodiles had once made appearances here, but they’d disappeared; only the people in their unlicensed stilt houses remained. They trickled away during dry weather and returned to the sea for the rainy season. Problems arose when they returned. Paul wouldn’t give them residence permits. Even before Paul, they’d never got along with the government. Eventually, a set of unspoken rules had formed. Tourists stayed in Mui between Monday night and Saturday morning. From Monday at 8 p.m. until Saturday at 11 a.m., people living here weren’t allowed to go to the ‘tourist’ areas. The rainy season was the off-season, but even though Mui had no visitors then, the people here still weren’t allowed to pass through tourist destinations.

  Later, back at the resort, when Yona told the manager where she’d been, he warned her about the crocodiles. ‘In the rainy season, they come up to shore and it’s a real headache. Most animals don’t hunt if they’re full, but crocodiles are an exception. Crocodiles bite everything that moves, even if their bellies are full. Once they’ve started to bite, they won’t let go unless you poke them in the eye.’

  ‘It’s best not to go there,’ he added. ‘It’s dangerous.’ An enormous map of Mui lay unfolded on his desk. Yona had never seen a map of the entire island, but because this one detailed only a few features, it wasn’t very user-friendly. The manager circled five places in red pen and told Yona to include them in the travel programme. Among the five were the attractions Yona considered top targets for removal: the volcano and the hot springs.

  ‘The volcano isn’t even really a volcano,’ she protested. ‘It just puts a stain on the entire trip. Is there a reason I need to include it?’

  ‘You’re the expert, Yona Ko, so your opinion matters, but you should think about how locals might feel.’

  The manager put two lumps of French sugar in Yona’s coffee.

  ‘We consider volcanoes to be very sacred here,’ he said.

  ‘But the customers are outsiders, and from a foreign perspective, the volcano doesn’t look like a volcano.’

  Yona had thrown herself into planning the Mui programme schedule, so there wasn’t room for the volcano unless she put it at the end of the itinerary. The manager’s insistence upon the volcano had nothing to do with its holiness or how locals felt. Yona didn’t learn this until later, when Luck surreptitiously told her, but Paul had bought up most of the land around the volcano.

  ‘Is Paul somehow connected to the red sand desert, too?’ Yona asked.

  ‘There’s a plot of U-shaped land surrounding that desert, and you can tell immediately that it belongs to Paul. It’s the only place over there that’s fertile. They don’t let just anyone into that area.’

  Yona remembered that the land by the ‘crocodile caution zone’ had also curved into a U shape. The land’s fruitfulness brought the residents there into constant conflict with Paul, because Paul wanted the fertile land they were living on. The area was like a pocket of sumptuous fat, butting up against acres of lean meat. After the planned disaster on the first Sunday of August, this land Paul had purchased would be covered with the golden eggs of tourist cash. Yona eventually decided to acquiesce to the manager’s demands and included the volcano in her itinerary. The more she was pushed around like this, the more it felt like she was being used to fulfil the interests of a few people rather than help Mui as a whole. This made her uncomfortable, but was there any job where you weren’t pushed around? Now Yona understood why the manager had wanted to plan the travel programme beforehand, why he’d entrusted this work to her, and the weight on her mind lightened. Even if only a few were benefiting from this, it seemed like she would be one of them, so she kept her mouth shut.

  Outside, thunder boomed uproariously, but they couldn’t hear it in the manager’s office. Yona suggested that they construct a restaurant or hotel next to the volcano’s crater. Staying at a site of potential danger for a long period of time would heighten visitors’ nerves, and make the volcano a more worthwhile attraction. The manager worried that the volcano wasn’t completely dormant, but soon he too was imagining the potential appeal of placing a tourist attraction right next to the crater.

  Apart from going to breakfast, the writer spent entire days alone in his bungalow, where he did nothing but work. Breakfast was the only time Yona ran into him. Every morning, he would show up, with eyes bloodshot and hair dishevelled, and order a single egg. Yona’s only opportunities to speak Korean came when the writer was around. Because he was Korean, he reminded Yona of the day-to-day life she’d left behind—of her entire past, beginning with Jungle. The writer called to mind everyday life. Maybe he felt the same about Yona, because he often used the phrases ‘us Koreans’ and ‘in our country’ when speaking with her.

  ‘Yona, do you know when disasters become issues?’ he asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Not all disasters catch your eye. The ones that become real issues are distinct. They typically have the following three traits. First, the intensity has to be over a certain threshold, depending on the scale used to measure that specific type of disaster. If it’s an earthquake, above 6.0 on the Richter scale. If it’s a volcano, above 3 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Even if the story’s all over the headlines, that might not be enough. The disaster has to be on a certain scale for busy people to take the time to sympathise and pay attention. The world is overrun with stimulation, so that’s just how it is. Interest has to be sincere. Secondly, the disaster has to take place somewhere new. Frequently repeated names are no fun. They’re ex
pected. Even if a disaster isn’t serious, people pay attention when headlines mention an exotic place. Think about it. You see a collapsing road on TV—but if all the road signs and traffic signals are covered with familiar words and letters, or, let’s say, the types of people on screen and the clothing they’re wearing are all too familiar, doesn’t it get a bit tiresome? Empathy can fade too. But if a new, devastated environment appears before you, previously apathetic cells in your body buzz with energy until you feel fresh pain. The last thing is most important: the story. When people browse through newspapers after a disaster, they don’t just want to see how terrible the wreckage is. They’re also looking for an emotionally resonant story, sprouting up from the pain—it’s easy to forget that.’

  The writer seemed intoxicated by his own words. His gestures grew as broad as his sentences were long. His hands repeatedly spun around him as he spoke, surging upwards and tangling together, until he knocked a fork off the table. The writer expected a resort employee to pick up the fork for him, but when no one did, and no one brought him a new fork, he got upset.

  ‘It’s always like this here!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s no oversight, no oversight at all.’

  The writer brought a fork over from the next table. The room always had several tables set with utensils, but no one except Yona and the writer ever ate there.

  When preparing a disaster programme, you had to take pains to ensure that no matter how you divided up the trip, each part of it would still induce empathy and sorrow. Powerful images caught people’s eyes. Images controlled the essence of disaster, especially when you encountered the destruction indirectly. If you compared several disasters that had occurred at similar times and with similar intensity, you realised that the scale of harm wasn’t necessarily proportional to donations or public interest. Some ravaged cities appeared in newspapers as a few short lines of text before being forgotten, while others received extended interest and generous donations. Photos that recorded these cities’ destruction, and the human-interest stories that surrounded those photos, sparked attention. When readers saw people like themselves, they felt bad for them and wanted to help. To control the public’s emotions, you just had to reveal how much the victims’ lives were devastated; in the best cases, those ruined lives induced empathy. The writer was currently fleshing out every possible fact about Mui’s future victims. He didn’t need to be very creative, considering how eagerly people read stories like this, but he did have to decide who would die. The writer’s notebook contained dozens of predetermined casualties. A mother and son, an engaged couple, an elderly husband and wife who’d lived in harmony their entire lives, a family whose newborn baby was spared, a teacher who died saving her students, parents whose young child survived, an old dog that dashed into the chaos to save its owners.

  Yona had initially been told that they were going to use ‘mannequins’ to portray the casualties, but it turned out that the mannequins weren’t actual mannequins. ‘Mannequin’ was just the name; in reality, they were bodies. Six months earlier, Paul had set up a scheme where families in Mui could earn a fee by donating the bodies of their loved ones for medical research after they’d died. The bodies were called ‘mannequins’, stored in the local crematorium’s deep-freezer. The freezer currently contained about sixty bodies, which were all being preserved for the first Sunday of August.

  The mannequins would play the leading roles in August’s field day. That first Sunday of August, they would be thrown into the sinkholes. The writer was considering setting fire to the hellish pits afterwards to destroy trails of evidence. No matter how you looked at it, the plan had no relation whatsoever to ‘medical research’, but at this stage, Yona was beyond objecting.

  The mannequins needed names and stories, and the writer’s job was to create them. He endowed the bodies with stories. People who didn’t know each other, or did but weren’t very close, or had some other sort of connection, became co-workers and relatives and lovers. They lay silently in the crematorium’s freezer, awaiting combustion. The writer said that the mannequin method was used often when fabricating emotional stories.

  ‘You might say I’m killing a man twice, but I see this as more of a resurrection.’

  ‘Have most people on Mui donated bodies like this?’ Yona asked.

  ‘When they’ve been killed in traffic accidents, yes. Although traffic accidents are the most common cause of death here …’

  ‘Traffic accidents?’

  ‘The law in Mui doesn’t take vehicular manslaughter seriously. It’s more of a headache if the pedestrian is gravely injured. Then the perpetrator is responsible for the victim’s life. If the victim has a family, the person who hit him or her has to support the family members, too. Because the settlement money for a fatality is a little bit lighter, most people try and pay the fee for manslaughter.’

  Yona closed her eyes as she remembered the truck that had intentionally bulldozed the accordion man. She felt nauseous.

  ‘So they kill people?’

  ‘Most of the vehicles on Mui are trucks, so they can easily run over the victim and drive away. I was astonished, too, when I first learned this, but, well—in Korea, people sacrifice each other to save money, too, don’t they?’

  A honking sound came from outside, and Yona dropped her fork. She quickly picked it up, but she didn’t have enough of an appetite to warrant bringing over a clean one, so she stood up from her seat.

  Casualties weren’t the only things being prepared. There were injured and unharmed witnesses, too. Locals would be paid to act out a performance of survival. During the first rehearsal session, the actors were handed lines for characters with names like Man 1, 2 and 3, and Woman 1, 2 and 3. They began to read the lines aloud.

  ‘All of a sudden, I saw cracks in the floor and the walls. I couldn’t shut the door or windows all the way, either. They’d seemed like they didn’t fit into their frames for a while, actually.’

  ‘I kept seeing cracks in the ground that looked like the age rings on trees. I thought it was, well, strange. But I didn’t expect the ground to collapse like this.’

  ‘I heard a terrible boom and went outside to see everything crumbling. A hole opened up beneath my feet. My older sister got sucked inside, but I couldn’t do anything. It all happened in an instant.’

  Already, they were practising the lines they would need for post-disaster interviews. The payment for saying a line or two equalled six months of an average Mui salary. Lots of people volunteered. The mannequins readied themselves to be casualties, and the living readied themselves to survive.

  Yona walked out to the beach. The horizon wrapped around Belle Époque like a wall. At first, this atmospheric border had calmed Yona, but now it seemed constraining. Yona said to herself that this place was nothing more than a large theatre. An empty theatre on the ocean, floating like a buoy, never sinking and never stable.

  Yona had seen the crematorium before, from Luck’s ‘celebration’ motorcycle. Despite being a facility that burned bodies, smoke hadn’t come out of it for the past six months. Uniformed employees bustled in and out of the building, making it look more like a large supermarket than a crematorium. They all wore yellow vests and hats bearing Paul’s logo. They moved busily within their assigned zones, like they were receiving new inventory. Several bodies seemed to have just come in; the workers carried cargo covered with blankets, transporting them here and there. It was hard to believe that the objects being moved before Yona’s eyes were once living beings. They looked like merchandise.

  The back of Yona’s neck grew chilly, and soon thick rain fell from the sky. Luck grabbed a parasol lying in front of the crematorium’s entrance and held it up like an umbrella. It was large enough to cover both Yona and Luck, and underneath it everything quieted.

  ‘Luck, do you know what I’m doing in Mui?’ Yona asked.

  ‘You’re reorganising the travel programme, right?’

  ‘I’m worried I’ll leave something out, so if you
know of any potential attractions, feel free to speak up. You know, if you’ve got information about Mui that’s useful for a disaster trip itinerary.’

  She felt wary calling her project a ‘disaster trip’. Luck was a Mui resident—maybe the phrase made him uncomfortable. But his response surprised Yona.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t even know what kind of disasters Mui has experienced. Before tourists started visiting, there wasn’t much on the island. We had nothing at all, and nothing’s not exactly a disaster.’

  Yona didn’t know what to say. Maybe only outsiders thought Mui was poor. Perhaps it was arrogant for foreigners to describe Mui as a disaster zone. Soon the streaks of rain tailed off, and after several last droplets hit the parasol as noisily as a flock of birds in flight, the rain stopped.

  The sun lowered in the crimson sky. Palm trees absorbed the last sunlight of the day. They resembled the totem poles that marked the entrance to a traditional Korean village. There seemed to be faces in the bark: Halloween pumpkins, with eyes, noses and mouths alight. When Luck asked where to go next, Yona replied with her own question: ‘Where’s the place in Mui that you’re most afraid of?’

  Luck singled out one spot. Night came quickly on the island, and as everything came to a halt, the day’s last destination appeared. The place was covered with enormous animal-like trees. Luck told Yona that trees possessed so much strength, they had to be fed growth suppressants. They were called ‘strangler fig trees’, and they could crush solid rocks between their wild branches. The broken rocks at the base of their trunks looked like cut-off heads.

  ‘I’ve seen this kind of tree before,’ Yona said. ‘They grow at Angkor Wat, too. Apparently they can even eat up buildings.’

  Yona looked up at the trees as she spoke. Luck tapped one of them.

  ‘This one’s a little different,’ he said. ‘It’s unique. There’s a legend surrounding it. When I was young, my mum told me that if I stood in front of this tree, I would see ghosts. So whenever I caused trouble, she threatened to hang me upside down from its branches.’