Korean Literature Review – A Toy City

There is a peculiar moment in the opening pages of Lee Dong-Ha’s novel, A Toy City, in which the narrator and his classmates are reprimanded by their teacher for breaking out in laughter during their rehearsals for the school play. It is not the fact of the reprimand that comes across as strange but rather how it is phrased. ‘It’s the audience, not you, that should laugh’, the teacher says, before adding, ‘Not a single thing would be accomplished in this world if everybody laughed and cried whenever they felt like it.’ It seems an unnecessarily ponderous reproof until one considers that the statement is doing double duty – serving not only as a piece of dialogue but encapsulating one of the story’s key themes. In life, as on the stage, one’s efforts should not be directed toward satisfying one’s self.  Rather they should be offered up for the sake of others.

Though it is given surprisingly light treatment in the vignettes that make up A Toy City, the relationship between the narrator and his father is clearly of primary significance. The series of calamities that shape the boy’s early years come about as a result of his father’s shortcomings and indiscretions. For instance, it is the father’s failure as a provider that necessitates the relocation from the family’s ancestral village to a shanty district on the outskirts of an unnamed city. Similarly, it is he who deepens the family’s peril by accepting a job delivering contraband – a decision that will eventually lead to his arrest.

Among the most moving of the story’s vignettes is that which details the family’s failed street vending operation. A valiant effort to scratch out a livelihood from selling cold drinks and bungeobbang does not yield the expected rewards. Indeed, instead of being a license to print money, as the father predicts, the venture ends with the family being forced to nightly consume their own unsavory produce. This failure is mitigated, however, by the fact that the bungeobbang prove useful in bribing the thuggish monitors that police the classrooms and corridors of the narrator’s school.

Despite the seemingly endless string of hardships, the narrator’s tone never becomes self-pitying or maudlin. On the contrary, the episodes he relates are lightened by a youthful willingness to accept his knocks (whatever they may be). As the title suggests, he views his surroundings not as wasteland of poverty and depression but as a playground on which to pursue his adventures. In the end, it is this optimism that keeps the reader engaged throughout what might otherwise descend into a tedious litany of bad breaks.