SPENCER DODD is a PhD candidate in English at LSU and a perennial associate editor for NDR. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dickens Studies Annual, Victoriographies, and Global Nineteenth-Century Studies.
An chang joon’s debut short-story collection God-Disease presents some monumentally disquieting meditations about the Korean diaspora and downward mobility lived through the motifs of food, family, and pain. These insightful stories exist within a continuum of all-consuming exhaustion that calls to mind Theodor Adorno’s aphorism that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”. The collection resists reductive, specific diagnoses of the world’s wrongness in favor of irreconcilable pairs (which often prove to have been more or less than pairs the whole time) and desperate, exhaustive efforts to fill unfillable voids. For joon’s protagonists, the origins of these aporias prove frustratingly oblique, untraceable contradictions whose cause and effect can barely be made knowable through narrative synthesis.
For example, the narrator of “God-Disease” only achieves temporary peace from the titular ailment (the shin-byeong of the uninitiated) by confronting the reality of her mother’s disappearance through a surreal, violent encounter with a god in the form of a severed beetle’s head. She also clashes with the parasitic but oddly helpful past-self who Sun-bin might have been, had she never left exurban Korea. Sun-bin has returned to Municipality J on an “absurd quest” for answers about her mother and the progression and origins of her own life, and to curate the insectary of the crumbling local museum. This is a tall order, for “... it took painstaking and careful effort for a now-empty thing to continue looking like an insect” while specimens that can’t be preserved are incinerated to spare them from the “slow, lingering rot” that has hollowed the city out so intensely that “J Municipality no longer felt like an unoccupied place”. Evidence of life persists, but the vitality (like the money) has departed, leaving only “a vacancy that suggested abandonment, rather than possibility”. Amidst the museum’s crumbling collections, Sun-bin faces the torturous task of preserving what’s salvageable in a world going through the motions, where form and content have become irreparably severed. As Sun-bin explains the birth of her interest in entomology:
"... it was never really about the insects themselves, or at least not solely about them. It was the change that captivated me. Because a larva and chrysalis rarely looked similar—and what emerged from within looked entirely different... the idea of such change was both thrilling and haunting: to become unrecognizable, even to oneself.”
Her mother helps Sun-bin solemnly bury her first beetle, entombing her childhood disappointment that its death entails not another productive transformation, only decay. Sun-bin’s need for “neat little answers” within the entropic continuum of life cannot hold. As the beetle god puts it: “... who knows what’s lurking inside you? Who knows what you’ve inherited? What lines the inside of your guts?” Finally severed from this nexus of accumulated trauma and alienation, Sun-bin is left “hollow and serene”. You might be wondering how the parasitic past-self plays into this, but (like Sun-bin) you really need to read and process this catharsis yourself.
“Kuleshov Effect” presents another protagonist haunted by a fragmented, irreconcilable past. The medical, societal, and emotional traumas eating Jung-ha are so entwined to be difficult to pin down. Her predicament stems from the trauma of her son’s death and her husband’s attempted revenge; she continuously falls into a “vertigo, familiar and unbearable” as her memory and executive function fade. What remains of Jung-ha’s memory is “fixed, unmoving” but “what sank through that sieve that sieve” disappears forever. We are surrounded by evidence of Jung-ha’s oscillation between permanence and oblivion in forms ranging from the “printed eyes austere and unseeing” of the ancestors who lined the walls of her childhood home, to the grainy footage of unremembered hypnotherapy sessions which still evade the answers she needs. Joon sketches Jung-ha’s painful liminality with equal parts care and surreal, unhinged vehemence. As Jung-Ha’s aunt suggests in the end, the certainty of personal guilt and despair often proves more comfortable than ambiguous, senseless loss.
On that note, “Separation Anxiety” dramatizes Gwi’s attempts to run an ethical dog farm in his hometown when his erstwhile classmate Ee-oon returns to dispose of his abusive father’s house. This story dwells on the uncomfortable proximities and progressions beneath the surface of modern life; the messy pipelines and supply chains sustaining our misery. Though Gwi “ran a clean shop as far as dog mills went” he can’t completely mitigate this, for “There was too much life in too small a space. And it was this muchness that caused the smell. It was impossible, Gwi learned, for life to be odorless”. The miasma of his unresolved relationship with Ee-oon proves similarly inescapable. They return to old haunts and eat and drink to try to fill the nostalgic voids left in themselves and their silent, dwindling city. In one poignant moment, Ee-oon extracts a large oxtail from his own food and drops it into Gwi’s soup: Ee-oon still dislikes separating meat from the bone. Like the ethical facades that fail to mask the reality of Gwi’s dog farm, some betrayals leave behind irreconcilable divisions.
The collection’s penultimate story “Autophagy” follows a gastroenterologist exiled from near-prominence to a wetter, lower place in the food-chain/national digestive system. Relegated to a dysfunctional regional hospital in H City (the H could stand for “humid” or “hog”) after reporting a rival’s embezzlement, P’s prospects quickly stagnate. Here, joon’s interest in our collective insides goes hogwild, as the general situation in H City quickly devolves into its final form: “Pigs that ate pigs that ate pigs that ate pigs”. P’s wife Seona struggles to complete her dissertation remotely under a hostile committee. Soon, their relationship frays to the point that she departs to live with her parents, only to disappear into chaotic societal runoff. P watches a streamer eat “sickening amounts of raw fish” and stares “at the man’s teeth, slippery and red with gochujang”. Like J Municipality before it, a crisis of circulation kills H City: “There’s just no more money to be made,” a patient says, even as the livestock virus that will transmute this struggling backwater into a true nightmare realm emerges. P begins botching simple operations, unmoored by omnidirectional guilt and confusion. The government begins culling infected hogs but quickly gives up; local farmers burn, gas, and intern their livestock in open pits. Pigs never fly and Seona never reappears, but dead and dying pigs fall from the sky and sprout from the earth, filling P’s lungs and blotting out the world.
“Structural Failures” closes God-Disease with a story about the unimaginable scale of “human error” built into the neoliberal structures of our world. He-jin has recently passed her civil service exam and joined the Department of Architecture at Municipality K but still lives in a crowded goshiwon. Caught between the cramped desperation of her student days and the shameful reality of the position she sacrificed so much to achieve, He-jin doesn’t have the heart to tell her only friend Jin-ee that she passed while Jin-ee has not. Her first day on the job begins with a revealing ritual; over a washbasin-sized bowl of galbitang, her boss Sak-hee questions her motives for joining the department and says, “It's good to care, I guess, but that’s not what you’ll do here” before publicly accepting a bribe from a major developer. Exhausted by her “pale half life” in the goshiwon and the arrested, uneven development that similarly characterizes Municipality K, she seeks out companionship through people-watching but this only inflames her awareness of contradictions. Reflecting on her desperate past and the exhausted future, she resolves to confront Sak-hee but discovers that the disgusting middle-manager is just another pawn. And, by this point, it’s already too late to save something meaningful from the coming collapse.
Well, that exhausts about all I had to say about these stories, so it’s time to end this review before it mutates further. God-Disease ruined my life for a few weeks, and, for the low price of $18.95 (plus shipping), it could ruin yours, too! I highly recommend it. Signing off...
God-Disease. An Chang Joon, Sarabande Books , 2025. 240 pages.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Spencer Dodd
