The Guest

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WHEN SMALLPOX WAS first identified as a Western disease that needed to be warded off, the Korean people referred to it as “mama” or “sonnim,” the second of which translates to “guest.” With this in mind, I settled upon The Guest as a fitting title for a novel that explores the arrival and effects of Christianity and Marxism in a country where both were initially as foreign as smallpox.

As smallpox reached epidemic proportions and began sweeping across the nation, shamanic rituals called “guest exorcisms” were often performed to fight against the foreign intruder. The Guest is essentially a shamanistic exorcism designed to relieve the agony of those who survived and appease the spirits of those who were sacrificed on the altar of cultural imperialism half a century ago.

This twelve-chapter novel is modeled after the Chinogwi exorcism of Hwanghae Province. The ritual consists of twelve separate rounds. As is the case during an actual exorcism, the dead and the living simultaneously cross and recross the boundaries between past and present, appearing at what seem like random intervals to share each of their stories and memories. My intention was to create an oral discourse in which a type of time travel provides the latitudinal coordinates of the story, with the longitude provided by the individual characters’ first-person narratives, revealing a wide range of experiences and perspectives.

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