500 dogs barking: Autofiction in and out of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Dog Days

In the three weeks that I worked on farms in South Korea, I never got used to the sound of dogs barking. Stepping out from a tunnel greenhouse to see again how the tree-covered mountains faded toward the horizon, I would hear the cacophony in the distance. It was outside of my vision, but I could tell that it was somewhere between me and those mountains. I would think about the strange confluence of interests that had brought me to stand in this disconcerting canine sound bath 25 kilometers outside of Gwangju: an enthusiasm for early 2000s Korean cinema; four years of vegetarianism combined with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma resulting in a curiosity about WWOOFing, a program for working on organic farms; a 24-year-old’s desire to see the world backed by little more funds than what could secure plane tickets. I anticipated that organic farming would involve pruning watermelon vines and harvesting cucumbers, and that perhaps I’d spend time feeding cows and chickens. I would do that, though the chickens or cows were comparatively quiet creatures. The other noises I heard were an alarm that wouldn’t stop going off, a distress call I couldn’t answer.

Ten years later, when Yuna, the protagonist of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Dog Days, moves from the urban center of Seoul to the rural Ganghwa Island, she hears something else.

Yuna and her partner Hun see their move to the countryside as a benefit for their new welsh corgi, Carrot. He’ll have some space to run around, and he’ll be safe from the din of the city that aggravated his anxiety. They recently bought him from a pet shop, and they’ve been enamored with him. They keep pretending they need to go to the bathroom in order to go see him in his cage. They can’t stop staring at him, at his tiny legs and elongated body for which he’s named. Panel-less, sketchbook-like pages replicate the pleasures of admiring a cute little guy.

But after they’ve lived in their new home for a while, Yuna too begins to hear the sound of distant dogs. “I tried to push these thoughts from my mind,” she narrates. “Yet, every morning, it felt like I could hear the desperate howls of dogs being dragged away to be slaughtered.” Dog Days is the story of Yuna’s encounters with dog farming, a topic Gendry-Kim expresses reluctance to write about in the book’s afterword: “My greatest concern while writing this book was the risk of racial discrimination against Koreans or Asians abroad due to its content, a fear stemming from my own past experiences. I’ve experienced comments like, ‘Don’t you eat dog? Go back to your country…’ The last thing I wanted to do was to reinforce those stereotypes.” But Gendry-Kim feels compelled to speak about it, at least in part because it’s something that she has seen firsthand. As I recall my time in Korea, so too is Dog Days a record of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s own experiences.

Yuna is not Gendry-Kim’s name, but Carrot is the name of Gendry-Kim’s real dog. Potato and Choco are also real-life, additional dogs that Yuna acquires over the course of Dog Days while on Ganghwa Island, the place where Gendry-Kim also lives. The marketing on the back cover of Dog Days calls the book Gendry-Kim’s “first foray into contemporary autofiction,” a genre that explicitly breaks French academic Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, the promise that the narrator, the author, and the protagonist are one and the same person. Assigning Dog Days the category of autofiction, which is primarily associated with the novel, could be seen as an attempt to authenticate the work by tying it to a more culturally prized medium. That may be the case, but the term does, nevertheless, suit the book. However, the assertion that this is Gendry-Kim’s “first” autofiction seems inaccurate measured against her original work to date. In fact, Gendry-Kim’s biography can be told through her bibliography, a bibliography that explores the potential and the limits of autofiction to express our ambivalent feelings about the cultures we inhabit.

In Le chant de mon père (The Song of My Father), Gendry-Kim’s first graphic novel, she is Gusoon, a child who bears witness to her parents’ class struggles as they move from the countryside in the south near Gwangju up to Seoul. When Le chant de mon père was published in 2012, Gendry-Kim referred to it as “mon histoire romancée,” or “my fictionalized story,” blurring the boundary between the truth and fiction of the work, a core feature of autofiction. The book’s frame narrative depicts Gusoon as a late-20s woman whose mother has come to visit her in Paris, where Gendry-Kim lived after studying sculpture at l’Ecole Supérieure des Arts-Décoratifs in Strasbourg. Struggling financially in Paris afterwards, Gendry-Kim took a part-time job translating Korean comics into French which inspired her to start working in the medium herself. Gusoon is struggling with fertility, a topic Gendry-Kim explores further through her counterpart, Bada, an artist, in Demain est un autre jour (Tomorrow is Another Day). In the untranslated 이방인 (The Stranger), Jisoo and Frederick each separately experience the lives of immigrants as they live together in France and Korea, much as Gendry-Kim and her French partner first lived in France and then moved to Korea.

Gendry-Kim’s stand-ins are the protagonists of those books. That’s not the case for her books in English translation prior to Dog Days. But even in those comics, versions of Gendry-Kim appear in the framing stories and narrate from the first-person. The Harvey Award-winning Grass focuses primarily on the character of Granny Lee Ok-sun, a Korean comfort woman during WWII. Gendry-Kim’s character first appears within the panels as she interviews Granny Lee. The stand-in later steps in to begin narrating as she describes meeting Granny Lee, expresses concern about how she’s going to tell Granny Lee’s story, and travels to Yanji, China to find where Granny Lee had been held by the Japanese. In The Waiting, the writer Jina, who is drawn exactly the same as Dog Days’ Yuna, tells a story about her mother, Gwija, and her mother’s attempt to reconnect with long-lost family in North Korea. This story is inspired by the life of Gendry-Kim’s mother. As Jina tells Gwija’s story, she struggles with the fact that she’ll be leaving her mother in Seoul as she moves to Ganghwa Island.

No matter the Gendry-Kim stand-in, Korean history and culture is always at the tale’s forefront. Grass and The Waiting focus on WWII and the Korean war, periods where her stand-in has to rely on other narrators as witnesses, while the other books convey the impacts of economic and cultural change in post-division Korea. The government-led industrialization led by the dictator President Park Chung Hee starting in the 1960s causes a rapid wave of urbanization, and Gusoon’s family is swept up in these changes in Le chant de mon père. The genre in which Gusoon’s father sings is pansori, a traditional Korean style of musical storytelling, one that he stops practicing when her family loses their local community in their move to Seoul. Some cousins who stay in the south are killed in the Gwangju Uprising, the student protest against the military coup that followed Park’s assassination. Korean history has a smaller presence in Demain est un autre jour, but the examination of Bada’s relationship to the nation’s culture is just as pronounced. In an interview in 2021, Gendry-Kim spoke to the kinds of pressures that the character of Bada would feel as she tried to have children within Korean culture when talking about why Gendry-Kim herself left to study in France: “Elders would tell me that since I graduated from university, the next step for me was to get married, have children, do housework, and support my husband. I wanted to be recognized as an artist, confident, living my own life. I wanted to leave the patriarchal society of Korea, go to a completely unfamiliar country, and cultivate my life and art.” Much of Gendry-Kim’s work then examines her relationship with Korean history and culture through the genre of autofiction.

Autofiction hasn’t had a significant presence in comics discourse. The genre’s rise in popularity in recent decades has been in prose fiction, propelled by the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, and Chris Kraus to name but a few. The permutations of autofiction’s definition are equivalent in number to the total people who have tried to define it, but I think a productive way to form a loose definition is to describe what these works tend to have in common. They use a protagonist modeled after the author; events of the author’s life are partially mirrored by events in the fiction; the protagonist may be named after the author; and the creation of the work may be depicted in the work itself. The works consistently blur fact and fiction, a strategy often indicated by an assertion from the artist, rather like Gendry-Kim’s “histoire romancée,” or else made evident by the biographical information publicly known about the artist.

The availability of that information in the age of social media can help explain not just the increased popularity of the genre but also its increased identifiable presence. In an interview about her novel No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood says, “I think we're in a position to better be able to tell when something is autofiction because people's lives are more online. You can go back through my timeline and see where the real me is experiencing things that eventually make it into the novel.” That artists feel compelled to turn their lives into public entertainment via social media flows naturally from how publishers often prefer artists with established audiences; consequentially, artists who are talented at this sort of self-promotion may be more inclined to create work that promotes the self. Even the commonly cited conception of the term “autofiction” in Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils comes from a piece of marketing, a blurb by the author on the back of the book, where the distinction he stresses is that autofiction is for the low-profile subject:

Autobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important people of this world, at the end of their lives, in a refined style. Fiction, of events and facts strictly real; autofiction, if you will, to have entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside of the wisdom and the syntax of the novel, traditional or new.

Thinking of the term as marketing is one way to distinguish Gendry-Kim’s oeuvre from comics that might otherwise be categorized alongside it. The genre isn’t new, and it’s easy enough to name comics from the past that could have been categorized within it, such as Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken. In “For Sale: The Personal is Political,” Annabel L. Kim argues that “[w]hat makes autofiction seem new, then, is not particularly its much-vaunted hybridity, but rather its capitalization on the capacity for representations of the self to bring said hybridity into relief as a primary selling point of the text. In other words, the novel has always been hybrid, always blurring boundaries and combining and integrating all kinds of discourses, but it’s in autofiction that we get a kind of breaking of the fourth wall, where the text signals, very self-consciously, that this is what it is doing, and that this is something that the reader should be drawn to.” It’s then the combination of this marketing’s established success and the cultural desire to read texts with sufficient traits to fall into this proposed category, at least in part produced by the marketing itself, that reify autofiction.

Choosing to market Dog Days as autofiction also separates it from comics’ established autobio genre, one which has long achieved mainstream cultural cachet in books like Fun Home, Persepolis and Maus, as well as canonization in underground comics by cartoonists like Harvey Pekar and Julie Doucet. It would have been easy enough to categorize the book within that overall tradition, and, with marketing still key to the categorization, many autobio comics could be declared by their creators as autofiction. It can be instructive, while also still emphasizing the ambiguity of the autofiction genre, to look at more recent comics on similar subject matter as negative examples to justify Dog Days’ distinct classification as autofiction on its aesthetic approach.

Uncomfortably Happy by Yeon-sik Hong, published in 2017, also tells a story of the book’s creator moving with their partner from Seoul to the countryside. There are even more story overlaps with Dog Days: the protagonist’s desire to leave the hubbub of the city, the appearance of pet dogs, and a guest appearance in-panel by Choi Min-sik as Oh Dae-su in Oldboy. On the other hand, the story is told in a third-person limited perspective, rarely dipping directly into Hong’s thoughts. There’s no indication that fact and fiction are being deliberately blurred, and the deployment of an unhealthy amount of self-loathing gives it the flavor of comics autobio. Another comparison could be made with Banned Book Club, a 2021 release by Ryan Estrada, Ko Hyung-Ju, and Kim Hyun Sook which tells Hyun Sook’s story of joining a student group that fights against the censorial government in the wake of the Gwangju Uprising. While the book mixes fact and fiction to construct its narrative–Hyun Sook’s real-life friends, who were interviewed for the book, inform but aren’t the same as the book’s characters–the story differs from the autofictional approach by depicting many scenes outside of Hyun Sook’s perspective. The book also crafts a smooth narrative trajectory of Hyun Sook’s radicalization that climaxes in a confrontation with dictatorial authority, and this storytelling contrasts with the autofictional tendency toward a kind of meandering recitation.

In Frederic Jameson’s review of the final novel in Knausgaard’s series My Struggle (one of the poster children for the autofiction genre,) he terms Knausgaard’s style “itemisation,” which makes no attempt to “‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways,” where no observation appears elevated above another until the fictional world is commoditized into a simple list of items. Critic Anna Kornbluh identifies a similar phenomenon, “archipelagic prose,” when discussing Jenny Offill’s Weather, a novel composed of very short paragraphs. Meanwhile, journalist Tanjil Rashid describes the structure of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a “driftless recollection, like a photo album, haphazardly assembled and reshuffled.”

This semi-plotlessness manifests in its own way in Gendry-Kim’s work, particularly those where her stand-in stars. Le chant de mon père is more of a series of vignettes than a tale that builds toward a comprehensive conclusion, told with a framing narrative that provides little intersection with the family memories. Though these stories are arranged in chronological order, and though the individual tragedies that befall each of her family members and friends are each compelling and upsetting in their own way, they all feature little mediation that might bind them together thematically or into some larger narrative. Similarly, while there is some degree of escalation and successive revelations in Dog Days, there is minimal build of character or plot across its chapters, producing a feeling that each slight story is its own island. A dog appears and then it’s gone, and the nearby chestnut tree isn’t going to fill us in on what happened.

But it’s hard for a witness to convey the story as well. “When I shared these stories with my friends in Seoul,” Gendry-Kim writes in her afterword to Dog Days, “none of them believed me.” This was the experience I, too, had when I returned to Seoul, when I told my couchsurfing hosts what I had seen in the countryside. Even another WWOOFer I met, a Korean-Canadian who was moving there to become a naturalized citizen, had managed to remain unaware. When I asked him if he had seen any dog farms, he professed to not know what I was talking about. Gendry-Kim’s work tackles subjects that are hard to look at directly, hard to depict, and maybe hard to reconstruct into clean narratives. The disjointed narrative of Dog Days reflects the struggle of making sense of something so awful, so close, involved with victims who can’t speak and people you can’t understand.

When Yuna and Hun have settled into their new home, they introduce themselves with the custom of sharing siru-tteok (시루떡), a steamed rice cake, with their neighbors. They meet Mr. Han, an older man who wears a hat that says “New York” on it. He says he also has dogs. Later, Mr. Han reciprocates their act of hospitality by offering them some of his land for gardening. Yuna and Hun have just been hassled for their attempt to grow green onions on land that seemed unused, and Mr. Han’s lending them a field he isn’t using is a touching act of kindness.

I arrived in South Korea with little more knowledge of the language than a phrasebook and the capacity to vocalize Hangul, so when I stumbled into the countryside, I was in frequent need of kindness. The bus driver knew where to let me off because a ticket seller had given me a note written from my perspective: 도곡에서 내려주세요 (“Please drop me off at Dogok.”) We reached the bus stop at night, and so the only illumination was a single street lamp. In the darkness around me, I heard dogs barking. I attempted to call my host, Hyun-woo, and though he answered the phone, his English wasn’t at a conversational level, and I didn’t know enough Korean words to communicate my location. An old man happened to walk by the bus stop and saw this curious young foreigner in distress. When I showed him the written address I wished to find, he said the name of the street and pointed in its direction.

However, he was pointing directly into the darkness, not down a street but straight into the howling. I shook my head, called Hyun-woo again, and this time I gave my phone to the stranger. He obliged by having my conversation for me. Soon after, a car arrived, driven by another old man. He exited the car and revealed himself to be much taller than the first man, with eyes set beneath a heavy brow.

“Hyun-woo?” I asked. I didn’t yet know that Hyun-woo was the young son of a farmer.

The helpful first man nodded and pointed at the other saying, “Hyun-woo papa.”

I met Hyun-woo himself the next morning. Sporting rectangular glasses and a square jaw, Hyun-woo was maybe a year or two younger than me. We shared a banchan breakfast with his younger sister and his wife. Hyun-woo and his wife then led me to his truck, commencing an excursion wherein I delighted in having no idea at any point what was going to happen next: a trip through a market in Gwangju; a three-hour stop for a series of lectures by professors of KNAC (the Korea National Agriculture College), which the students flagrantly ignored and which took place at the Hampyeong Butterfly and Insect Expo, a place with giant bug sculptures; an overnight stop at a cabin with two dozen other KNAC students, all sons of farmers, some who practiced English with me; a trip I was told would be mountain climbing but turned out to be a forest walk to a Buddhist shrine and the site of a Korean War battle, commemorated with steel helmets, canteens, and rifles bolted into the face of a rock wall. 

Thirty-six hours later, we returned to the farm. While I was expected to work for the shelter and kimchi with which Hyun-woo provided me, he also gave me leisure time. I mostly spent this time communicating the only way I could—by drawing. I drew portraits when it rained and everyone had to stay inside. I drew their cows and the beds of roses in the greenhouse where Hyun-woo’s mother worked.

Hyun-woo’s family also had a dog. He was white with pointed ears and a tail that curled onto its back. He might have been a mutt, but those characteristics fit those of a Jindo dog, a native breed named for its island of origin, which, like Gwangju, is in South Jeolla Province. Like the dogs at many farmhouses that I saw, this dog was permanently attached to a four foot lead near the entryway. I grew up with hunting dogs (though their only prey was frisbees and tennis balls), and my fondness for those dogs as childhood companions left me dismayed at the sight of this Jindo dog’s restricted freedom. I played with him for a few minutes every time I passed, and he was consequently euphoric at the sight of me. He bounded along the edge of his perimeter whenever I came near.

Dog Days presents a version of this in Blackie, the focus of the book’s fourth chapter. Blackie is ignored by her owner, fed by a neighbor, and visited by Yuna on walks with Carrot and Potato. It’s in part of her chapter that the narrative breaks briefly from Yuna and Hun to adopt Blackie’s perspective. In one of the book’s most affecting sequences, Blackie waits for the return of her owner, a shadow who will pay her no mind, and watches the sun set through the trees until the world becomes a blur of circular afterimages. In Gendry-Kim’s other recent works, Grass and The Waiting, she gives the narrative over to a person capable of telling their own story, but here she takes on the challenge of witnessing for a being who can’t witness.

There’s a sincerity to Gendry-Kim’s work that also positions it as part of autofiction’s response to postmodernism. Little levity or playfulness alleviate the misery. Her dogs’ food-based names seem like darkly ironic choices until you learn that they’re just real names. Autofiction’s advocates argue that the kinds of societal traumas that Gendry-Kim’s work addresses, like the atrocities of Japanese imperialism, and present-day emergencies, like the resurgence of fascism and accelerating climate change, demand not grand fictional narratives employing pastiche and parody but, instead, real witnesses. Myra Bloom writes in “Sources of the Self(ie)” that “[a]utofiction’s methods—metatextuality, fragmentation, formal experimentation, and narrative hybridity—are cribbed from the postmodern playbook, but its earnest existential and ethical investments signal a renewed faith in the possibilities of personhood. Where postmodernists made use of these techniques to destabilize both the subject and the mimetic abilities of narrative, the writers of autofictions, conversely, use them to create reality effects that better capture the complexity of the subject’s inner and outer worlds.” These complexities don’t necessarily act in service of a social media era egocentricity but can instead speak to the experience of an individual within some broader community.

But whose individual experience? Distinctively, though not uniquely within autofiction, Gendry-Kim writes autofictional stand-ins who, despite their presence, tend to fade from view. Their alternate names are rarely used. The Yuna of Dog Days is referred to only once by name. It’s not difficult to find readers and reviewers of The Waiting publicly remarking that they didn’t realize the work was semi-fictional until reaching the book’s end, as Jina’s name is only mentioned a few times. The protagonist of Grass, very reasonably assumed to be Gendry-Kim herself when her other work isn’t taken into consideration, is never referred to by name. That she’s Gendry-Kim at all and not another stand-in is left blurry, though there is a drawing of Granny Ok-sun holding one of Gendry-Kim’s untranslated works, the first book in a children’s series which appears to be about growing up in a large family in rural South Korea, a family that later moves to Seoul.

 

Gendry-Kim’s stand-ins usually don’t experience the primary point of conflict either. Even in Le chant de mon père and Dog Days, they are primarily observers of a dear one’s misfortunes. Fictionalizations point toward decisions to place her stand-ins in slightly altered proximity. In The Waiting’s afterword, it’s revealed that Gendry-Kim’s mother was seeking to reunite with a North Korean sister, whereas Jina’s mother seeks to reunite with a lost child. This repositioning creates consonance with Jina’s anxiety about moving away from her mother by repeating a similar parent-child relationship. It’s her mother’s story, but the construction of the comic is to emphasize that this story is also Jina’s. Even as she increases the distance, there’s no real getting away from the pain of her loved ones. The argument here isn’t about some equivalent claim of victimhood, it concerns, rather, how past horrors remain present in the people who survive them and a burden for the people who live in their wake.

But while the focus in her works may be on this adjacency, the autofictional form restricts what’s on the page to what her fictional stand-ins can hear or witness. This runs counter to the clear didactic activism that Gendry-Kim’s works intend. “I published Dog Days as a deliberate act of resistance,” she writes in the afterword. “I dreamed of changing the world.” From the text of Dog Days, the impression the reader gets of the dog farming industry is that it’s akin to home gardening. As one neighbor might plant beds of peppers and basil to spice up their salads, another neighbor might keep a few dogs around in case they need a special meal for a valued guest. While this is a real practice, it omits the industry of dog farming and the people who participate in it. The narrow perspective limits the view of the whole.

One slow morning, Hyun-woo had little work for me to do, so I walked back to the bus stop. I brought my point-and-shoot camera, though I worried that I might be seen documenting something that someone wouldn’t want documented. Across the street from the bus stop, I could see sunlight glinting off the corrugated metal roofs of the long rows of cages. Supports elevated the cages two feet off the ground. Cinder blocks, buckets, and tire treads littered the ends of the rows.

The howling had come from a large dog farm. Many dogs were confined to shared cages, sometimes as many as six in one. I approximated five hundred dogs in total. Their coats ranged from pure white to ochre, and their size varied little from that of a Labrador. Some of these may have been Nureongi (누렁이), a yellow breed with pricked ears and the most common livestock dog. A few larger dogs had the distinctive, darker muzzle of Tosas, a Japanese breed of mastiff. They all barked at me, more loudly as I approached, some propping themselves up by pressing their front paws against the cage bars. Standing nearer, I could see, in the shadows beneath the rows, piles of feces that had fallen through gaps in the floor of the cages. I took a few photos and then recorded a single video as I walked quickly along the exterior to try to capture the scale of the farm while also speeding away before I got caught. Rewatching the video as I write this, the compression and poor quality of my camera made the visuals a blur of chain link fencing and beige-colored digital artifacting. All that’s clear is the sound.

The Korean Association of Edible Dogs, a group that represents breeders and sellers, asserted last year that there were 3,500 farms raising 1.5 million dogs in South Korea. Though the Ministry of Agriculture reports numbers half that size, the animal rights group KARA (Korea Animal Rights Advocates) claims a range of numbers closer to those of the industry group. The two most prominent ways dogs are consumed are as gaesoju (개소주), a health tonic, and as bosintang (보신탕), a dog meat stew. When the Summer Olympics came to Seoul in 1988, the government banned the sale of dog meat at markets and the serving of bosintang at restaurants. International pressure against eating dogs, in the form of news articles and athlete activists, has consistently surfaced in recent decades during major sporting events, and the government wished to reduce the level of negative attention. Of course, the ban was temporary, and restaurants avoided it by giving other names to the dish like 계절탕 (seasonal soup.) The pressures to end the industry have not been exclusively external with advocacy coming both from below (grassroots organizations like KARA) and from above (multiple First Ladies have urged banning the practice, including the inaugural First Lady, Austrian-born Francesca Donner Lee in the late 1940s, and Kim Keon-hee, the wife of the recently impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol.)

Eating dog meat has been prevalent enough in rural Korean culture that the subject comes up in the narrative of Uncomfortably Happy as well. When Yeon-sik Hong adopts Oakie from a humane society, he learns that Oakie’s mother was being raised as livestock.

Hong doesn’t express explicit judgment, but he is frustrated later by dog meat-eating neighbors who arrive to party in a restricted area, a valley near Hong’s rental home. The neighbors are seemingly there to celebrate one of the days of Boknal, the three hottest days of the year, when bosintang is traditionally consumed in the belief that it will counteract the impact of the heat. The consumption of dog meat is sometimes justified with assertions of health impacts like this, with particular claims of its impact on virility. These Boknal revelers leave behind a lot of garbage.

Later in the book, there’s an ambiguous moment where the owners of the home return to see how Hong and his wife are taking care of it. The owners comment that they “also raised dogs here.” It’s left unclear if the owners meant that they had pet dogs when they occupied the house or if they think that Oakie is being raised to be eaten.

The owners are drawn older than Hong, and internal conflict over dog farming in Korea has a significant generational component. Younger generations are much more inclined to see dogs as companion animals which has caused a rapid decline in dog meat consumption over the past two decades and the closure in 2018 of the country’s largest dog meat venue, Moran Market outside of Seoul. Gendry-Kim describes the generational difference in her afterword to Dog Days: “For the older generation, dogs have been food for consumption at times, since they lived through times of poverty and hunger.” Gendry-Kim has depicted this period before, though her particular depiction also includes a dog as a companion animal. The fifth chapter of The Waiting, “My Home in the North,” presents a glimpse of Jina’s mother Gwija’s youth in North Korea in the late 1930s. The title page for the chapter shows Gwija embracing her dog Sockie, an image referenced from a photograph of Gendry-Kim with Carrot later published in the back matter of Dog Days.

Gwija’s family is poor, but they’re lucky enough to have meju (fermented soybeans dried into bricks), fish, and rice flour to eat. Gwija eats enough to be able to squirrel away some table scraps to give to Sockie. Her neighbors are less fortunate. Gwija overhears them complaining about the monotony of eating porridge every day. One day, Sockie goes missing. She can find no sign of him until a season later when she finds the bell from Sockie’s collar on the floor of the neighbor’s front doorway.

While animal rights groups and dog farmers may agree on the scale of dog farming, they debate whether or not consuming dogs as food is a core part of Korean cultural history. Eating dog meat has waxed and waned, allowing both sides to select preferred periods and claim those as distinctly Korean. Eating dog meat was uncommon during the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392) when Buddhism became the state religion, but when the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910) embraced Confucian ideals, the practice returned to prominence. Feelings about the practice also have a strong basis in rejecting foreign influence, and KARA argues that the Chinese influence of the Chosǒn Dynasty makes the increase in dog meat eating then not truly Korean. The negative attention from the Seoul Olympics resulted in a nationalist sentiment about dog meat that persuaded even those who didn’t eat it and provoked an increase in the amount of dog meat consumed in the following years.

Strong responses like this against foreign intervention form part of an explanation for the generational gap in attitudes. Anthropologist Julien Dugnoille, author of Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities, argues that “this perceived suppression of Korean culture reminded South Koreans of the painful episodes of foreign imperialism (especially under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945), during which many Korean cultural traditions were erased.” In Grass, Granny Ok-sun talks about ways in which this suppression was carried out:

Dugnoille cites South Korean scholar Chu Kang-hyǒn, who wrote about dog meat and cultural imperialism and the response to the Seoul Olympics, as well as a similar uproar when South Korea hosted the World Cup in 2002, saying that Chu “contended that it could be seen as an attempt by the West to implement Western livestock and pet industries in South Korea.” As attitudes have changed with younger generations in Korea, the conflict older generations have with the outside world has become an internecine conflict. A poll commissioned by the Humane Society International/Korea in 2022 found that more than half of the people in their 20s who ate dog meat in the past year did so under social pressure, usually from family members or coworkers.

Gendry-Kim depicts this conflict within the pages of Dog Days, where the people who come into conflict with Yuna and Hun are noticeably older. One neighbor is disgusted with the siru-tteok they brought him, complaining that “young people these days have no manners” and that, when introducing themselves properly, they should “bring some meat and drinks, not just some measly rice cakes.” The woman who turns her dog into soju is clearly of a previous generation. One rainy day, Yuna is out walking Carrot and Potato, and she passes Mr. Han’s home when he’s not expecting her. She then discovers what he does with his dogs.

A couple days before the end of my stay with Hyun-woo, I was given some of the usual, simple tasks I could manage, those that could be taught through pantomime. I brought boxes of unwanted peppers and tomatoes to feed to the cows. I performed a task I couldn’t quite comprehend, cutting open large bags of unexplained content, possibly rice seed, stacked on a forklift to combine into a pile below. I moved trays from the barn to a greenhouse. As I performed this task, I heard barking again, but this time it sounded surprisingly nearby. I walked toward it, around the back of the barn. A chicken from the barn followed me, circling my feet. I rounded the corner, and there I saw four dogs, all in elevated cages. They were notably smaller dogs than the ones I had seen at the large dog farm, but the situation was unmistakably the same. I watched them bark at me, and I just stood there, uncertain of how to react. I flew out of myself, and I began narrativizing what was happening, as though what I was experiencing was a story happening to someone else, a story I imagined myself telling to other people. When I returned to work, I found Hyun-woo.

“Are those dogs yours?” I asked. I knew as I said it that there was no good answer to this question, that nothing would satisfy me beyond a denial so impossibly powerful that it could negate the reality of what I had seen.

Hyun-woo first nodded, then paused in thought, and then redirected his head into a shake.

“No,” he said. “Papa’s.”

In the concluding chapters of Dog Days, Yuna and Hun coax out of a neighbor’s elevated cage a dog they name Choco. Yuna asks Choco’s current, neglectful owner about the dog and learns that she has passed through several owners. As Yuna narrates, Choco had been “adopted only to be abandoned again.” Dugnoille’s book, Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities, focuses on this movement. He documents dogs passing through being companions, hunting dogs, watch dogs, and food. These last three categories are described in Li Ki, the Chinese Book of Rites, which proponents of dog farming will use to support their position. Dugnoille clarifies that not only are the distinctions drawn in Korea between which dogs are food and which are not actually very blurry (mutts vs purebreds, large dogs vs small dogs,) but also that specific dogs can, throughout their lives, move back and forth between singularization and commoditization. These blurry distinctions create circumstances like dog farmers who, themselves, have pet dogs, and family dogs that, when deemed unwanted, are sent to slaughter or even consumed by their owners.

To outsiders new to the subject, this is likely surprising, but even in countries like the United States, where eating dog meat is universally condemned, it is not the case that dogs are singularized for all of their lives, nor does singularization necessarily mean that they are treated well or responsibly. A dog may still be commoditized when sold, and though this number has significantly declined in the last fifty years in part due to spay and neuter campaigns, around 415,000 dogs and cats are euthanized in animal shelters annually. It’s also easy to identify in Western countries animals that experience a similar fluidity of stature as dogs in Korea, where they may be filed into categories such as food, companion, pest, or laboratory subject, including mice, rabbits and horses. The conditions under which the commodified animals are kept or slaughtered also varies widely, as in another grisly detail of Korean dog farming: dogs can “attract a more expensive sale price if their adrenaline levels are high as they die,” achieved by hanging them with a rope or beating them with a stick.

Dog Days is published in a world where access to the haunting details of dog farming is widely available. You can find full-color evidence of everything I’ve been talking about far faster than you have read about it here. There are photos of dogs crammed into cages no larger than their bodies, dogs with mange and fighting wounds, and a documentary on YouTube where a dog screams as it's electrocuted. You can load Google Maps, scroll around to South Korea, and search for 보신탕 to find the many still existing restaurants in urban centers that serve dog soup. It’s a curious choice to make Dog Days a didactic work that omits details like these, the more vivid but by no means extreme or unusual evidence, to leave you with only what a neighbor might notice. But then, we are already in a world where we are inundated with modern horrors. Gendry-Kim renders in Grass the Nanjing Massacre from famous photographs, making ink drawings out of grainy, black and white photographs. Today, we watch genocides committed in live video, in full clarity and sound. For an alarming many, this isn’t enough to change their hearts. Maybe we hunger for reality, but reality too no longer feels real enough. Our ability to believe that awareness will change anything, that anyone can be persuaded of anything through argument or appeal, is at its lowest. It doesn’t feel like it’s been enough to witness for a long time.

“I don’t consider myself a historian at all,” Gendry-Kim says in an interview with K-Comics Beat while discussing women who have lived through war, like her mother and Granny Lee. “I don’t want to say too much about the role of the artist. But when you meet these people, or you have relatives who have lived through it, or you have lived through it yourself, as an artist you can’t remain silent.” Gendry-Kim does offer one explanation for why she lightly fictionalizes their tales. In The Waiting’s afterword, she writes, “The Waiting is a fictional story that is based on my own research and the testimonies of my mother, Grandmother Lee, and Grandfather Kim. I chose to create this work as fiction, rather than non-fiction, because I didn’t want to unintentionally hurt those who shared their stories so vulnerably with me.” But for these works that she is compelled to create, this only explains why she opts out of strict non-fiction. To lock the reader in the mind of the fictionalized observer, her but not her, impelled by horrors beside her and just out of vision, is its own choice. Why does Mr. Han eat dogs? What does he think about it?

Hyun-woo was proud of where he lived and eager to show me around. The afternoon of the day I found the dog cages, we got into his truck to go see some local landmarks. We walked around hundreds of fossilized footprints of carnivorous theropods at the Dinosaur Tracksite of Hwasun. We went to the Gasa Literature Collection which featured poetry inked onto broad canvases, etched into pine trees, and molded into stamps. A crowd of high schoolers on a field trip, entertained by my unusual presence, asked to take photos with me outside of the Hanok-style hall. I was happy to be their curiosity.

When we returned to the farmhouse, Hyun-woo walked into the Jindo dog’s circle and disconnected its lead from its collar. With its sudden freedom, the dog tore off, running far out of sight. I wondered for a moment if he would ever return. The next morning, I found him there again, reattached to his short lead. He stood up on seeing me, but he kept one front paw raised off the ground. I approached, and he hobbled toward me. He had clearly injured his paw during his time away, but the wound was invisible to me on inspection. Each time I passed him that morning, I complained to him to stop, as he always tried to come greet me, and it obviously hurt to do so.

At midday, Hyun-woo and I crossed paths in front of the farmhouse while we worked. I saw him approach his truck. Just before he got to the door, he noticed the dog's injury for the first time. I watched him walk over and sit down with the dog. He petted the dog for a bit and spoke to him, and though I couldn’t understand what he was saying, he seemed to be reacting to the injury. He spoke quietly, and his voice was soft, as though he imagined he was cautioning the dog about the dangers of overexertion. Suddenly, he smacked the dog on the back of the head, and the dog made one of those peculiar, strangled yelps that dogs make. Then Hyun-woo petted him some more. I thought when this happened about how I understood the exchange little more than the dog did. I thought about the time I had spent with Hyun-woo’s family, living so close to them, sharing every meal with them, and how very little I understood of any of it. They had been so kind to me, giving me food and shelter and entertaining me, and for so little in exchange, and in the end, my comprehension of their interiority had been so limited, and so many years later, I’m writing about them in the context of something they participated in that I found so appalling. When I left, I gave Hyun-woo’s mother an ink study of her roses with "Thank you for your hospitality" written in Hangul. I have forgotten almost all their names.

Dog Days, as a comic, is not optimistic about change. It’s bookended by moments that thematize that no lessons will be learned, that what seems like change is under threat of reversal or repetition. A dog may be most comfortable in the pet shop that’s supplied by a puppy mill. A rescued dog may run back to an abusive owner. Even if a dog is rescued, their spot will be filled by another commoditized dog. But Dog Days’ afterword was written in January 2024, two and a half years after the book’s original publication in South Korea, and such a substantial change took place that month that the afterword has a tone incongruous with the comic itself. The National Assembly unanimously passed a ban on selling, breeding and slaughtering dogs for human consumption. The law comes into effect in stages, with a two-year period remaining as the government extends financial aid to farmers to shut down their operations and as the Korean Association of Edible Dog protests and files complaints. In light of this, the afterword is filled with optimism about the possibilities of change, asserting how it can come faster than you think, and praising how modeling behavior can influence your neighbors. What was once a departure into tackling a contemporary issue has become, like much of the  rest of Gendry-Kim’s work, another ghostly tale, recalled in the minds of those who lived through it, still present enough in the community to haunt the future.

 

The post 500 dogs barking: Autofiction in and out of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s <i>Dog Days</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.