I’ve kept a close eye on South Korea throughout this journey into works by women in translation. Bolstered by state-funded initiatives like the Literature Translation Institute, South Korean novels have staked a strong position in the English-language publishing market. Furthermore, South Korean female novelists have risen to international prominence in recent years, including Man Booker Prize winner Han Kang, Kyung-Sook Shin, and Han Yu Joo. Yet this week’s selection may come as a surprise: Chi-Young Kim’s translation of Ji-Min Lee’s The Starlet and the Spy, critically derided as cliché-ridden and convoluted.
The premise of The Starlet and the Spy (also published as Marilyn and Me) is certainly compelling; in the grim aftermath of the Korean War, a traumatized woman named Alice J. Kim serves as Marilyn Monroe’s translator during her USO tour. Yet Monroe’s appearance feels like more of an occasional cameo as episodic flashbacks reveal key aspects of Alice’s life, from studying art in Japan to an ill-fated love triangle with a Korean Communist and an American agent. Observing how this latter story arc irritated reviewers compels me to ask: Can clichés ever be used effectively in a novel?
South Korean films and television dramas have been a longtime interest of mine, so I was surprised to discover that author Ji-Min Lee is a screenwriter who’s worked with prominent actors like Gong Yoo and Lee Byung-hun. Portraying tropes like doomed love, revenge, and family discord against a high-stakes backdrop—the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Korean war—is a common move in South Korean films, a way of accessing complex historical events. Lee’s application of these clichés to both Alice’s character and the Korean War is worth a second look. Her failed affairs illustrate how the conflict poisons everyday life with inauthenticity, while her trauma at serving as a propagandist confronts the relationship between the artist and the state.
After living through the horror of a refugee camp and near starvation, Alice looks back on her prewar naiveté with self-deprecation. She recalls walking through “the streets of Seoul that were brimming with memories of colonization” on the way to meet her lover. Finding herself in the jaws of history, Alice reveals grim parallels between a romantic tailspin and chaotic interplays of Cold War ideologies. Her lover, a married man named Yo Min-Hwan, is “a Communist working for the American military government.” As he becomes more invested in Communism, he remains unable to perceive Alice’s artistic and linguistic talents, regarding her only as “ruled by animalistic instinct.” Despite her insistence on their true love, Alice admits that “he wasn’t aware that I was secretly filled with strong artistic opinions and positions.” Oddly, her predicament seems to echo that of Monroe, whose resentful new husband does not accompany her USO tour.
Tired of being a middle-aged man’s dirty secret, Alice betrays him with Joseph Pines, an American agent fronting as a missionary. When they encounter each other again during Monroe’s tour, she realizes that he was using her to learn Korean; both feel formal and detached despite their prior passion. “Even though we had loved each other, ‘we’ never existed; everything had been based on falsehoods.” Alice acts a part, seen as the silly girl or the wronged woman while the men in her life use her for their own ends.
The Starlet and the Spy shines through a key aspect that many reviews gloss over. Alice’s art plays as much of a role in her disillusionment as her disappointment in love. She works as a propaganda artist prior to the war, producing posters that “valued a concise, economic line and a balanced composition.” Any hopeful illusions are destroyed after she’s forced to develop propaganda for the Communists during the war. A “loyal dog with a talent for drawing,” she draws dozens of Stalin portraits for the People’s Army until she cannot draw ever again. In one respect, her predicament aligns with Monroe’s lighter plight, determined to be a serious actress while the troops revel in her sexpot image. Yet this connection between artistic identity and ideology has been an ongoing theme in notable novels about twentieth-century Asian conflict, including Nobel laureate Kasuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Don’t be too quick to dismiss the clichés of this novel, as they contain hidden depths.
Photo Credit: Marilyn Monroe on her USO tour via Pixabay.
Ji-Min Lee, The Starlet and the Spy, trans. Chi-Young Kim (Harper, 2019)
