The Invisible Hotel

By Yeji Y. Ham
Fiction/Atlantic/Hardcover/307 pages/$36.91/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3TBC08A)
4 stars

Yewon’s family has bones in the bathtub. Phalanxes, scapulas, collarbones. As long as Yewon can remember, she has had to help her mother wash these anonymous, blackened bones, which belonged to their ancestors.

This is not unique to her family. In the South Korean village of Dalbit, every family has a bathtub of bones.

In some households, the bones are just ash and have to be handled carefully so they do not wash away down the drain.

Women traditionally give birth in the bathtub, bearing a new generation directly onto the bones.

Generational trauma manifests literally and viscerally in Korean-Canadian author Yeji Y. Ham’s hallucinatory, haunting debut novel.

Though Yewon grew up with the bones, they did not use to affect her greatly beyond such mundane inconveniences as their rotting smell or the family’s inability to take a bath, resorting instead to washing in the sink.

The recent death of her father in a workplace accident has, however, cast a new and sickening light on living with grief.

Her sister has moved away to Seoul and become estranged from their mother. Their brother is doing national service at an army base near the precarious border with North Korea. Their mother has sunk into a deep depression and washes the bones all day.

Yewon’s reprieve from the stasis of Dalbit is an ad-hoc gig driving a woman called Ms Han to visit her brother in prison. These, too, are fraught voyages: Ms Han turns out to be a refugee from North Korea, whose escape came at a devastating price and who still suffers panic attacks from the memories of what she endured.

In Yewon’s dreams – and, increasingly, even while she is awake – she finds herself in a hotel. It is dim, dilapidated and impossible to find one’s way out of. She knows, however, that she has a key to a room in the hotel, and dreads the day she has to open that door.

In The Poetics Of Space (1958), French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores how perceptions of inhabited space shape memory and imagination through thought and dreams: “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.”

But where Bachelard sees the house as a timeless sanctuary from history, Ham constructs instead houses that cannot be homes, only spaces that literalise past trauma.

In these spaces, those who survived the Korean War of the 1950s pass their trauma down to generations who did not experience it first-hand, but who are nevertheless also forced to inhabit it.

The safe space of the house is repeatedly deconstructed into parts like a dismembered body. A woman hangs windows on a washing line. An old man builds a structure in the woods with a facade made entirely out of doors.

In the eerie hotel Yewon keeps returning to in her mind, red leather sofas sag, their ripped skin “beaten and bloody”. Mouldy carpets reveal stains like handprints, “as if someone once crawled their way across the floor”.

A hotel is meant to be a transient accommodation, but this hotel’s residents seem perpetually trapped.

“What should have been a temporary stay turned permanent,” thinks Yewon. “At the end of every wait, there was a door. We each had a room. All of us, waiting. What would come after?”

Quietly and devastatingly, Ham opens a door from the deceptively stable present into a dark past one would do well not to forget.

If you like this, read: Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Portobello Books, 2016, $21.80, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/4adsjCx), about the brutal massacre of students and civilian protesters during the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea and the torture of those arrested by the police in its aftermath.