Imagine the world where everything is for sale, even human suffering. But, wait… isn’t our world already like this? Yun Ko-eun, the author of The Disaster Tourist, tries to answer this question with the help of black humour.
The Disaster Tourist makes us laugh, only to make us sad a moment later. The main protagonist, Yona, works at a travel agency, which specialises in tours to all sorts of places that can be associated with a catastrophe: cities annihilated by a tsunami, deserts, where rain hasn’t fallen in years, places where genocide had taken place (doesn’t it sound familiar to all of those, who have planned any trip anywhere? or to those who have heard about dark tourism?)
Everything in Yona’s (both private and work) life changes, when she has to go to on of the trips offered by her company and decided whether it should be continued. The destination? An island called Mui. The main attraction? A sinkhole which led to several deaths. Until the inhabitants (with a help of a large corporation) decide to take the matter into their own hands and cause a catastrophe huge enough to guarantee the stream of tourists for years to come.
The Disaster Tourist can be read just as a satire on late capitalism. It can also be understood as a critique of mass tourism, of the fact that we go to a certain place expecting that the people living there will fulfill our (orientalist) fantasies (especially our dream to be the “white saviour”).
But it is also a story about people, whose lives depend only on a whim of some random manager in a different country. You can find here the echo of issues talked about in books such as Convenience store woman or Układ(a)ne [eng. Stackables]; of the fact that we are so easily replaceable, of how in the eyes of those “on the top” our values have no value. And if Yona felt like that in Seoul, how are the people of Mui (for whom a contract with her company is a matter of life and death) supposed to feel?
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