I Met Loh Kiwan

By Cho Haejin

Translated by Ji-Eun Lee

2011, translated 2019

University of Hawai’i Press


Cho’s I Met Loh Kiwan is a fascinating study of displacement, loneliness, heartbreak, and death. The narrator is “Kim chakka,” or Kim the writer. She is an ethnic Korean working in Paris as a writer for a weekly television show that investigates and reports on individuals who are in crisis. She is reeling from the recent ending of a long romantic relationship with her producer and a devastating discovery in their ongoing reporting on the fate of a 17-year-old girl, Yunju, who has retreated from the world because she suffers from a disfiguring facial tumor. Reflecting deeply on her work, she questions every element of her relationship with her supervisor and the anxious paralysis that prevents them both from giving their hearts fully to one another and sharing their true self. Full of self-doubt, she excoriates herself for making a living that exploits the suffering of others, offers a thin reward of empathy and social responsibility to viewers who otherwise care not at all for their fellow citizens, and meddles with facts and images to manipulate both her audience and the subjects of her reporting. She stops going to work and retreats to the darkness of her apartment, where she eventually catches a brief interview with a man, “L,”  who claims to have fled North Korea and is trying to find shelter and work in Europe. Something he says in that brief clip strikes a chord in Kim’s heart, and she decides to find him. She contacts the man who conducted the interview, a native of Pyongyang who managed to flee to the south before the division of the peninsula. He became a doctor in Paris, and because of his knowledge of the Korean north, representatives of the police and immigration officers consulted him whenever a person arrived who claimed to be fleeing from North Korea. The doctor is retired. He remembers “L” very well, having been deeply affected by his efforts to make a meaningful life for himself. He reveals that the man is Loh Kiwon and provides Kim with a picture of the man as well as a diary he kept from when he first arrived in Belgium. The writer commits to using the diary to retrace Loh’s path from the streets of Brussels to France, wandering the same streets and visiting the train stations and hostels where he slept, all the while trying to see the world through the eyes of a man who had no family and no home, could not speak the language, and who was carrying an almost unbearable burden of grief and guilt. All the while, Kim chakka ruminates on her own ethical failings and her broken love affair. She reveals more and more about her relationship with the patient Yunjo and her medical and psychological ordeals, and shares how she becomes a friend and confessor to the doctor who led her to Loh. Cho does a magnificent job of interweaving her multiple storylines, creating characters who are vividly real. Her mastery of creating an air of loneliness, isolation, self-doubt, and yearning is sustained and beautiful. I Met Lo Kiwan is essential reading for anyone interested in the Korean Diaspora, reportage, and the yearning to make meaningful connections with others.

“I may convince myself that Jae’s thoughts on pity are wrong, but I can’t stop missing him. For five years we were almost perfect partners at work and something more in private. But never did we write or produce a scene that might reveal our feelings to each other. We were obsessive about being truthful, and perhaps we considered words too fickle and limiting. Truthful feelings are not created in a moment but emerge as a shared promise made with memories over time. Concrete events, prepared with care, must unfold though that time. Neither of us believed the word “love” was capable of encompassing all that; declaring we were now lovers would have felt childlike. I took comfort, rather, in the kind of mutual trust that only time can produce, in the relief you feel when you realize the person you’re with is the one, and in shared tasks and routines that needed no explanation. 

And yet. 

After five years, I still didn’t know the true face of this person I worked with and saw almost every day.”