Memory is a tricky thing and sense making of the past is important. What is remembered of a particular event, how we remember certain friends and why - they are our ways of navigating through the landscapes of our mind. Sometimes these are places we do not want to revisit. They can be horrific events.
The Korean comic book, Bad Friends by Ancco, awarded the Prix Révélation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2017, is a horror story. There are no ghosts or monsters to contend with. Just terrible situations involving really bad friends. But what makes these friends so bad that parents, teachers and society are constantly warning you about them? What has happened to them that turned them so bad – family, circumstances and wrong personal choices? And if you ‘wake up’ and abandon them to better yourself, does that make you a bad friend to them?
Some of us experienced these situations, such moments of survivor guilt when you have to let go of your buddies to move on with your life. Friendship and loyalty is a theme much explored in books, music and movies like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) where the character of Charlie (Harvey Keitel) was dragged down by his friend, Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro), which explains the opening line, “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”
Bad Friends tells a similar story from a female point of view, situated in post-Asian financial crisis Korea in the late 1990s, and a slightly different ending. Pearl (Ancco’s alter ego in the story) meets Jeong-Ae, a bad friend. They had lots of fun, getting into fights and giving the finger to the world. They only have each other. They are physically abused by the men in their lives, their fathers and boyfriends. If their mothers and siblings try to intervene, they are beaten up too. It is not a good situation. But in the end, Pearl survives better than Jeong-Ae. Pearl becomes a comic book artist like Ancco in real life. Jeong-Ae disappears and Pearl wonders what has happened to her best friend and how she is doing. She is plagued by questions and survivor guilt.
I will be moderating a panel on The Power of the Graphic Memoir with Ancco as one of the panelists at the Singapore Writers Festival on 3 November and I will be engaging her about Bad Friends. But Ancco asserts that the story is not her autobiography. She told me:
“I mixed many episodes into one story for it to be understandable for the readers. There are parts which I made up as well. I thought it is not important how much of it is based on my life. The important thing is how does it makes the readers focus on the story. I wrote every single characters with my friends in my mind.”
Ancco, whose real name is Choi Kyung-jin and born in 1983, is the first Korean comic artist to win a prize at Angouleme, and Bad Friend was picked up by Drawn & Quarterly, the Canadian comics publisher, for translation and publication in 2018. I am curious why Ancco wrote and drew this book and I did an email interview with her.
Why did you write this book?
I have been constantly thinking that I should write this story since I graduated from high school. Back then, after I became friends with school mates who were known as ‘bad friends’, I started to have a different view of them. When I visited and saw where and how they lived, I felt as if I found where their ‘badness’ came from. Their lives seemed so hard and inappropriate for a teenager. I didn’t mean to advocate for them and their lives, but I just wanted to tell what their lives are about.
There is a lot of guilt in Bad Friends – survival guilt, that we have survived better than some of our friends. Does that necessarily make us bad friends?
For those of us who survived, it doesn’t mean we are ‘bad friends’. But it is true that Pearl (my alter ego in the story) felt guilty about Jeong-Ae. She turned away from Jeong-Ae. That is the choice and reality for some of us.
Another side of the story of Bad Friends is how female friendship can help us get through bad times. Korea is known sometimes for its toxic masculinity, the need for boys and men to be macho. In your opinion, is it true? How bad is it?
I don’t think anyone is forced to be uber masculine and to be macho. Even if the older generation did so, but it is not so now. The men in my comic are in unusual situations. They are also victims of their home situation, their parents, and by extension, of our society. The story is about the darker side of our society. But the men ‘Bad Friends’ cannot be generalized.
You are born in 1983. You grew up as a child during the period of the Asian Economic Miracle when Korea was one of the Four Asian Tiger Economies. Asian values were celebrated. But the bubble burst in 1997 when the Asian financial crisis happened. Would you say your book is a critique of those times – overconfident capitalism and its problems? (the irony is that the other friend of Pearl who survived now worked in a bank)
I didn’t mean to write about social problems consciously. But I thought it is important to be careful to share the background of the story without distorting the facts. I grew up and lived through that period, I would have been influenced by the environment of a recession struck Korea in the late 1990s. So I thought if I tell the facts, it would work in many ways. And the readers would interpret the story as they like.
For tourists who visited Korea, they may only have a K-pop view of the country and its people. But when I watched movies like Parasite (Bong Joon-ho), I get a very different story. It is the same for manhwa. In 2014, Korea was the Market Focus at the London Book Fair. I attended a presentation by Yoon Tae-ho and the audience associated Korean manhwa with popular webtoons. But reading your comics gives me a very different picture of Korea. What is the truth?
No one vision of Korea can be the truth. There are various forms of life in Korea. I met so-called bad friends in high school. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known about their lives and existence either. This comic is about the lives which we cannot see easily in our daily life.
In Bad Friends, the characters did not have a good time in school. Is there something about the school system that we should change?
The problems of school system in ‘Bad friends’ have changed and have largely disappeared now. Korea is changing very quickly today. But it doesn’t mean that everything has cleared up. There will be other problems that we have not encountered and we still have to solve.
How do you work with the translator, Janet Hong, on the English translation for Drawn and Quarterly?
She has worked more with novelists than with comic artists. As far as I know this is the first time she has translated a comic book. The publisher D&Q requested for her to translate ‘Bad Friends’. I didn’t have to do much for the translation though. When she was trying to come up with an English name for the character of ‘Pearl’, she contacted me and I gave some of my opinions. She understood the comic and the story very well. It was very lucky for us to have her as a translator.
Did winning the prize at Angouleme change your career?
It is almost the same as before actually. As a matter of fact, this kind of serious comics is not popular in Korea. To win the prize at Angouleme as the first Korean comic artist to do so has helped somewhat to let the Korean public know there are such heavy comics like this. And personally, it was meaningful.
What are your new projects?
I am preparing a new project. I was full of darkness when I was working on Bad Friends. After I finished this chapter of darkness, I began to learn what is the brightness in my life. About the brightness which defeats the darkness is my new project.
Finally, did you find out what happen to Jeong-Ae?
My ‘bad’ friend who inspired the character Jeong-Ae? She went through many adversities but she has become a great mother of two children now.
You can look up Ancco’s programmes at SWF here:
https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/author-speaker/Ancco.html
You can read parts of Bad Friends here:
https://pen.org/bad-friends/
Here is an interview with the translator of Bad Friends, Janet Hong:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2019/05/14/interview-with-janet-hong-graphic-novels-in-translation/
No comments:
Post a Comment