A major shopping mall in your district collapses completely. You are frantic because your spouse or partner works in the building. As the search for survivors continue for days, your loved one’s body does not turn up, dead or alive. What do you do? Do you sit in turmoil near the site and wait breathlessly for days, hoping against all hope that your partner is alive, or do you take the matter into your own hands and do your own investigating to figure out what is going on?
Excavations, Hannah Michell’s second book, takes on a literal and figurative meaning: while emergency rescue teams try to excavate through the rubble to find survivors, Sae, the book’s main protagonist, excavates for the truth about her husband – his whereabouts, his work, and his past – all while trying to be a good mother to her two children, Seung-min and Hoon-min.
Michell draws from three main eras and events that happened in modern Korean history: the student protest movement during the 1980s against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store in 1995, and the Sewol Ferry tragedy which caused the death of 250 high school students who were on a school excursion to Jeju Island in 2014.
Excavations is a mystery about truth and corruption that weaves all these backdrops together, but unlike other stories that might tell this from the perspective of a man due to Korea’s patriarchal society, Michell brings women’s perspectives to the fore.
Michell, who grew up in Seoul and is currently a lecturer in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview with Electric Literature, a nonprofit digital publisher, that she had originally planned on writing an intellectual story with an “unreliable narrator who was a chairman of a company, someone who paralleled the growth of the Korean economy.”
“As I continued writing, I realized that it was a mistake just to privilege only his point of view because Korean patriarchy has meant that economic development has only been associated with men’s work. Women’s contributions to politics and the economy have been totally invisibilized,” she said. “I also wanted to show the struggle in critiquing patriarchy because in writing these women’s stories, it became so stark to me that patriarchy really forces women, especially single mothers, to make impossible choices.”
She also wanted to include a female perspective on sex work because Korean patriarchy stigmatizes women who have sex outside of marriage or are involved in sex work.
“In most films, dramas, or novels which represent these spaces, women are either completely invisible or objectified,” she said in an interview with Asian Review of Books, “so I was really curious about what it would feel like to see these spaces through the lenses of the women who work there.”
Excavations’ present moment takes place in 1992 when Aspiration Tower, a behemoth of a building, collapses without warning. The protagonist switches between two people: Sae, whose husband Jae works in Aspiration Tower, and Myong-hee, the proprietor of a “room salon” or karaoke bar in Seoul.
As Sae searches for her husband, she realizes how little she knows about her husband’s past or his family. Sae first met her husband in 1986 when she was actively protesting against the South Korean dictatorship as a college student. Since then, she was always in pursuit of the truth. Before becoming a stay-at-home mom, she used to be a journalist on The Seoul Daily. As Sae searches for her husband’s whereabouts, she suspects her husband’s past is somehow linked to Aspiration Tower and starts a full-fledged investigation into Taehan Group, the company that owns it.
While looking out for the safety of her employees, Myong-hee is also on the look out for valuable information. Her clientele is usually men wanting to blow off steam from their demanding corporate jobs, and she does what she can to gain these men’s trust while using the information she extracts to leverage her own reputation as a valuable source of intel in the business and finance industry as a way of settling her own debts. She had also been a mother of two, but she had given them away for adoption, which sometimes plagues her with regret and guilt.
Michell’s engrossing novel is about the search for truth and its consequences – the toll it can take on one’s personal life and the way it can unravel one’s life completely. As Sae soon finds out, the truth will not always set people free. Though the overall story is about the mystery of one man’s origins, Michell’s compelling novel is driven by two women who are often overlooked and underestimated by Korean society. It is about the circumstances they are put in and the decisions they need to make to protect themselves and their family.
Excavations simmers with suspense and intrigue. Readers will very likely find themselves rooting for Sae and Myong-hee while seeking the capture of the corporate thugs represented in this book that seem so prolific in modern Korean history. It will also have them thinking about corruption and how government and businesses often go hand-in-hand with that process, as well as the uncomfortable decisions women might be left with as they fend for themselves within a male-dominated world. Readers are sure to enjoy this book if they enjoy reading mysteries about corruption and family secrets.
