This pleasingly off-center novella by an American professor at a South Korean university comprises sketches and prose poems; it's an East-West swap meet of linguistic anecdotes, word lists, news clips, film and book reviews, TV cartoons, an account of plastic surgery, advice to the lovelorn and Korean erotica. The setting is the cohabitation of a poet and a prostitute who engage in a lively exchange of cultural oddities, nearly all of them rooted in the body. The punning title links the country's name with both a sexually transmitted disease and a spasmodic tic. The Korean word for a woman's breast, which translates as "milk room," prompts images of her body as a house with corridors. Recipes for home medicaments and food can be viscerally revolting, or comic--as when a woman unleashes a stream of "scolding" invective against a pot of boiling clams because the recipe instructs her to "scald" them. Perchan interjects pithy observations on the varieties of Buddha, e.g., Edgar Allan Buddha, "on the edge--or in the Pit"; and Buddha, M.B.A., "on the path of Tao-Jones." A persistent reference to the culture's demeaning treatment of women runs through the book's wealth of serious fun.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Although the Chinese Ch'an meditation masters liked to remind disciples that "The lowest class of monk is the one who indulges in literature," Robert Perchan in Perchan's Chorea (Wichita, Kansas: Watermark Press, 1991), for all his Rabelasian rauchiness and flesh-haunted wit, comes across as something of a monk as much as a poet in his travelogue on his perverse nights and days in South Korea. The bald, pudgy and minoxidil-dropping Buddha figure shadowing this cross-cultural journey into Pusan and Seoul has pitched his poetic mansions in the foul-rag and bone shops of a whore-loving heart. Recounting his ill-fated loves across language barriers and cultural blinders with three women named "In-Ja," "Mi-Ja," and "Un-Joo," Perchan is looking for love-- and the Buddha, and the muse of poetry-- in all the wrong places, like his beloved Korean goddess Un-Joo scolding the clams ("YOU GODDAM CLAMS! YOU ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING! I WORK MY FINGER TO A BONE AND YOU COME HOME STINKY OF SOJU AND YOUR PANTS IS FILTHY!") when she should be scalding them. This Korean version of Madame Butterfly ultimately will stomp the American dreamer.
Perchan's "Chorea" creates and choreographs its own venereal world elsewhere, compounded of fact, word lists, linguistic anecdotes, news clips, fiction, cartoons, balderdash, an account of plastic surgery, vision, advice to the lovelorn, Korean erotica, private fragment. Choreatic, extreme, the sketches and prose poems of an American professor lost and found in Seoul, nobody would accuse Perchan's Chorea of being politically correct nor even mimetically faithful, amid the warfare of post-orientalism, despite Perchan's excerpts of Korean Herald items and ill-written love letters chunked into the text. Still, this mixture of narrative, cultural commentary, and lyric fragment comprises a stupendously funny, gutsy and funky, language-tuned, and quite touching portrait of "eros and exile" in South Korea.
As creature and creation of cultural sadomasochism, Perchan cuts through sentimentality, cant, and cultural piety towards revealing the class brutality, male exploitation of women, and commonplace misery that remain in this Asian NIC. Given the tragic and conflict-ridden history of Korean people in the twentieth century, it is risky to compound any Korean problem by exposing it. Further, "To injure [Korean] national pride, no matter how minimally," writes Nagisha Oshima in "Korea As I Saw It," "is unforgivable," and this social touchiness remains a problem some twenty years after the Japanese film director himself found the chance for redemption amid the reconstructed rubble and furiously human energy of Seoul.
The result of Perchan's comic journey into otherness turns into a fractured jewel of a book, a homage to Korean women as the exploited heart and soul of this strong country. Like the anthropologist friend categorizing Korean women by their pubic hair, Perchan is admittedly one of the American exploiters, fallen, abused, lost somewhere in the pits and on the edges of redemption. But the honesty may just save him.
Finally, as in Im Kwan Taek's cinematic portrait of Korean spiritual life in modern times, Mandala, the Buddha of Korean zen is not found in temples and groves but in beer houses, train stations, makoli parties, whore houses, the love of orphans, bastards, the dispossessed. The quest remains a male- centered story of selfish contracts and broken loves, expressed without bitterness or rage. Perchan's Chorea registers a story of compounded fragments and lyric insights well worth savoring.
