Though our pop cultural imaginations often associate travel with selfies at the Eiffel Tower and piña coladas on the beach, contemporary Korean authors demonstrate that travel as a literary theme can take on the complicated experiences of living in a globalized world.

In the four works below, authors consider international travel from the late nineteenth century to the present. Consider picking up these books to think more about border crossings, national identities, cross-cultural encounters, personal transformations, and the social ramifications of travel.

The Court Dancer by Kyung-Sook Shin (trans. Anton Hur)

Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer is a work of historical fiction that begins in late Joseon Dynasty Korea. In the novel, Yi Jin, the protagonist, has been raised in the royal court and is a trusted confidante of the queen. She is also an entrancing dancer.

When Victor—an art collector and the French legate to Korea—sees Jin perform the Dance of the Spring Oriole, he falls for her. Through subsequent court intrigue, the queen convinces the king to allow Jin and Victor to marry. Afterwards, Victor takes Jin back to Belle Époque France.

Once she’s in France, Jin is exposed to a new world. She finds herself interacting with Parisian literary society and mingles with the likes of Guy de Maupassant. Here she begins to translate Korean literature into French, but throughout her stay, she’s treated like an exotic outsider.

Jin’s alienation from French culture offers her a unique vantage point from which to examine her surroundings. For one, Jin observes the dehumanizing colonial spectacles present in the metropole, from artifacts and works of art that have been wrested from other cultures to other human beings on display in colonial exhibits.

Since Jin can sense others gazing at her like a curiosity as well, she begins to feel that she, too, is treated like one of the objets d’art collected by Victor. Feeling out of place in France, Yi Jin ends up returning to Korea, where further tragedy awaits her.

Author Kyung-Sook Shin, the winner of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, wrote The Court Dancer inspired by real historical figures and documents. This would be a great book for readers interested in aesthetics, modernity, and intercultural encounters in Korea and France at the cusp of the twentieth century.

The Passenger by Chaney Kwak

In 2019, the cruise ship Viking Sky experienced an engine failure during a violent storm off the coast of Norway. The power cut out, the ship was rocked perilously from side to side, and heavy furniture slid dangerously from one side of the ship to the other. Among the nearly 1,400 passengers and cruise staff trapped onboard the ship was the travel writer and memoirist Chaney Kwak.

In The Passenger, Kwak writes about his experiences on Viking Sky as well as the transformative existential crisis they triggered within him. Mixing journalistic reporting with personal anecdotes, Kwak uses this reflective opportunity to approach multiple subjects.

He watches with cynicism as the cruise ship’s plight becomes just another spectacle on the news and on Twitter. Within the ship, Kwak also observes the absurd racial and class dynamics that play out between the wealthy passengers and the cruise staff. Even when all of their lives are in immediate danger, the staff continues to soothe and cater to the passengers. 

Conscious of his mortality throughout this event, Kwak reevaluates his life. He questions his career path as a travel writer, which is what brought him to the cruise in the first place. He revisits his relationships with his parents and their own experiences in Korea and Japan. He also reconsiders his relationship with his partner of sixteen years.

When Kwak gets safely back to San Francisco, he decides to make some big changes in his life. Read The Passenger for a short and gripping memoir that offers excitement, danger, and a frank look at what it takes to change course in life.

Princess Bari by Hwang Sok-yong (trans. Sora Kim-Russell)

Hwang Sok-yong’s Princess Bari is a novel about one woman’s perilous and mythical journey to survive the dangers of the world and become a healer. As the title indicates, the story is a retelling of the Korean shamanic myth of Princess Bari.

Like her mythic namesake, the Bari of Hwang’s novel is born the seventh daughter to disappointed parents hoping for a son. Her mother abandons her as a newborn in the forest, and she is only saved by her dog and her grandmother. When it comes time to give the child a name, her grandmother suggests the name “Bari,” meaning “abandoned.”

Even when she’s young, Bari exhibits a spiritual acuity that allows her to communicate with animals and see into other people’s lives. Bari learns to develop and apply these skills as the novel progresses, but they do not come without a price.

Throughout the novel, Bari endures terrible suffering and hardships. In the original myth, Princess Bari must travel to the underworld to retrieve a magical elixir to save her parents’ lives. In Hwang’s novel, Bari starts in 1980s North Korea, flees to China, and ends up in England, where she becomes a healer and a member of London’s immigrant community.

Princess Bari integrates a classic Korean myth into the multicultural, globalized world. It would interest readers looking for a novel about suffering, survival, border crossings, and a bit of magic.

The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun (trans. Lizzie Buehler)

The Disaster Tourist is a thrilling novel that skewers the idea of ecotourism and volunteer vacations. The protagonist of Yun Ko-eun’s novel, Yona Ko, works at Jungle, a travel agency with a troubling business model: it sells vacation packages to locales that have been devastated by natural disasters, poverty, and climate change.

While at work in Seoul, Yona is sexually harassed and assaulted by her boss, and she tries to quit her job. Instead of accepting her resignation, her boss convinces her to take a trip to Mui, a fictional island near Vietnam. There, Yona is supposed to strategize how to make the unpopular destination more exciting for Jungle’s clients.

Owing to her work, Yona is keenly aware of how to market the company’s packages to tourists by manipulating their desires. She knows, for example, that tourists want to feel comforted by the privilege and comfort of their own lives when confronted by the impoverished lives of others.

So when Yona ends up actively planning a disaster with Jungle to attract more interested tourists to Mui, she knows that they’re going to have to have some casualties. A cold rationale blankets over the moral bankruptcy of this plan: if some on Mui are going to live from the money they make from the disaster, some will have to die.

The Disaster Tourist recently made news for winning the 2021 CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger, an award for crime novels translated into English for UK publication. Check out this satirical novel for a searing take on globalized, late-capitalist exploitation.