When I met Bora Chung, it was in a small bar near Spice Alley in the CBD. I’d seen a lady there with a laptop out, speaking Korean on the phone, looking very prim and proper. In my incredibly nervous state, I downed a margarita in my bright yellow cardigan before approaching her. 

“Hello! Are you Bora Chung?”

“..Uh…No.”

Bora Chung was actually sitting outside the bar, in the lobby, which I’d had no idea even existed. I was very apologetic, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. Still, we were both quite frazzled. Neither of us had been in this bar before. We sat down at a table near the TV, where pub-rock-esque music played from the speakers, and there was a constant drone of footy commentators in the background. 

I told her I was a fan of her work, and she seemed to cringe a little bit. I suppose I’d do the same if someone said they were a fan of mine, but then again, my books don’t sell for 30 dollars at Kinokuniya.

I set up a voice recorder, settled down, and began to ask the reverie-inducing questions that I’d prepared.

You are influenced by a lot of fairy tales, Korean fairy tales, folklore, and stories like that. Is there any one fairy tale that influences you the most, or even just a favourite from when you were little?

Uh oh. There are so many!

As I get to talk about these things more often, I am rediscovering fairy tales because I go back to reading them to remind myself, and I rediscover a new favourite. 

These days, my newer favourite is this story from the 7th century (or 6th) when Buddhism was just entering Korea. There's no title really, but the title that the more modern people gave it is ‘Shoot the Instrument Cover’. So, there's this traditional stringed musical instrument, and they used to put it in a cover and have it stand against a wall. It's about 6 feet tall, you lie it down on the ground when you play it, but when you're not using it, you lean it against the wall. Theoretically, it's about a human’s size; the cover could fit a human being. 

The story begins with a talking rat. The talking rat is yelling, “Follow the crow, follow the crow!” The king is given the news that there's a talking rat in the capital city, and he is yelling to follow a crow. So, he sends two of his best men to follow the crow. And like – [laughs] this rat is running around, saying “follow the crow, follow the crow.” So they did, and in the middle of following the crow, they saw these two pigs fighting, like human beings, beating each other up. 

Yeah, it’s funny! So, they get distracted, and the crow ends up flying away, and they kind of don’t know what to do besides go back and report to the King. On the way back, they meet this strange old guy who says to shoot the musical instrument’s cover. So they're even more confused, you know, and this guy keeps saying this is really important. He says, “You have to tell the king that he has to shoot the musical instrument’s cover”. So, they returned with that message. And the king is also confused, so he asks the royal astrologer – because back then, they used to have these real fortune tellers in the castle – and the fortune teller said it means that if you shoot that musical instrument, there will be two people who are dead, but if you don't, there will be one person who is going to be dead. But that one person is more important than the two people. So the king decides, well, I'm the most important person in the world, clearly, so I'm gonna shoot that cover. 

So, he brings his archer and shoots it, and it turns out that – it's a little misogynistic here – his queen was seeing a lover, and they were having an affair inside that cover, they were holding each other in there, and they were shot to death.

I don't like the misogynistic part. But I do like how this story is so fast-paced, action-packed, and confusing to everybody. It has a very, uh, unexpected ending. And I like that structure. I want to try that. Not the misogynistic part, but I do like illicit love affairs, and I like these confusing stories. So, yeah, that is my new favourite. That was, I think, one of the most ‘spicy’ stories in the old history books from the 6th century. 

It sounds absurdist, almost. All this weird, confusing stuff in old fairy tales.

Even though this is a Korean story, I've also studied East Slavic literature – so Belarus and Ukraine, and what is now Russia, share old stories from before the 12th century. They have the same roots; they have similar structures. 

They have all these absurd events written in a very serious manner, as though they actually happened alongside realistic, plausible events such as wars, droughts, and good and bad harvests. There are very realistic events, like peace talks among feuding brothers, and then there’s some sorcerer coming along, right, [laughs], and there's now a bad harvest, and then, enter some legendary thief, and then suddenly the war ends. I have no idea what's going on, and there's no further explanation! 

So, there was this similar worldview among people before a certain era that always blurred the line between the real and the magical, and I just love that. I really love it.

On that note, as a previous university lecturer yourself, how would you feel about your novel potentially being required reading or analysed? 

[Looks around nervously] I mean, I would like to have a talk with the teacher. Like – what are you thinking? Read Dostoevsky! What is the matter with you? It’d be a stern conversation.

I think it is important to read contemporary authors, though, right?

There's Han Kang! She won the Nobel Prize, read Han Kang! I love her; her work is wonderful. I mean, I consider myself a horror writer. I write genre literature for fun, and it should be read for fun. It should not be required; some of those things are torturous. People should not torture their students with my book. Like, torture them with some other book!

Oh, for sure. There are a lot of stereotypes about Russian literature that are really hard to get. And a lot of those are required readings.

Yeah, they kind of are. Dostoevsky is kind of like that because he was a gambling addict, and he was in all kinds of trouble, money troubles, all his life. So whenever he was writing, he needed the royalties. He had to write as fast as possible and publish just as fast. He’ll kind of open up his brain and pour everything into his work. So some of his sentences are really rushed, and some of the ideas – look, they are brilliant, but not very well thought through. But still, he’s great. The culture and history of that entire region are so different from those of the West or other English-speaking countries that sometimes they require long footnotes. Gets really tedious.

I think the stories they tell are very dependent on culture, and your stories have a very strong Korean cultural influence. Folklore, sometimes, the more politically charged share of it. Lately, there seems to have been an uptick in interest in South Korea.

In the West, yeah, because of that traitor. And the martial law! It's so embarrassing. He's a national embarrassment.

[Laughs] National embarrassment!! No, I-

International embarrassment!! [Puts her head in her hands]

I mean, I think interest has been building for a while, especially in popular culture. That movie Parasite swept the Oscars, and Squid Game is charting pretty much perpetually on Netflix. 

And you know, I didn't see either.

You didn't see either!? No way!

[Laughs] My husband loves them, but I don't want to be influenced in the wrong way. If I like the story, I will for sure be influenced because they're speaking my own language and they're from my own culture; I’m like a sponge. When I'm reading something in English or Russian or Polish, I feel that distance, so I’ll have to interpret whatever it is and make that conscious effort to make it my own. But when it is my own language and culture, influence just seeps in before I know it, and it can be very scary how I subconsciously recall certain words or scenes from Korean movies, Korean books.

I had this Russian professor in grad school. She was a great teacher. She could recite pages and pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and I was in awe every time. And now I think that maybe it's because it's her own language. For me, it would take about 20 to 30 times more of an effort than it would a native Russian speaker. Maybe she feels some kind of commonality or sympathy towards the author or the book. And that makes it seep into you. Not that she’s not great, she was still great.

How do you think Korean sci-fi and horror differ from those in other cultures, like the West and Eastern Europe? Have you noticed substantial differences? 

Honestly, you can't really lump them all together. But when it comes to American science fiction and Russian Soviet science fiction, much of it blossomed because of the Cold War. A lot of Soviet science fiction was state-sponsored and encouraged by the state, so there was pro-Soviet and anti Soviet. But American science fiction was just an absolute boom, and became very popular, especially after the televised moon landing. So science became popular, and science fiction became popular too.

I heard a Korean critic and scholar of Korean science fiction state that Korean science fiction is more introspective. It is more social criticism and less of a theme of space opera and planetary invasion because, well, Korea doesn't have a history of invading and colonising other countries. We don't embellish it or pursue it as some great goal. 

And South Korea is an especially technology-praising, small country. So when one person does something, everyone else follows suit. Like the current president, he's all into AI. Suddenly, everybody’s praising AI. There are some perks to it, too, like high-speed Internet everywhere and almost everyone in Korea having a smartphone. So the flip side is that everybody can, at least, feel how technology is influencing our lives. 

If you don't have a smartphone, you wouldn’t be able to get important notifications from your local government or the national central government. And it's ridiculous because everybody should get those notifications – at least by mail – but you have to have a smartphone and a certain type of messenger. So the government just assumes that everybody has a smartphone and can operate it.

But my mother-in-law, for example, can only make and receive calls. She doesn't use those apps. So when there's news, she’ll hear the announcements second-hand, and then I have to inform her. So we Koreans are leaving certain people out of that rat race very actively, mean-spiritedly, and that is very disrespectful. And that is one of the things the Korean science fiction writers are focusing on. Because we will eventually get older, and if our society is moving in this direction, what's going to happen to us when we are old and frail? If robots are going to do end-of-life care, then what's gonna happen to human relations? What are the children and grandchildren gonna think, and how are they gonna react to the robot's decision? And that’s a real short story that won the Korea Science Fiction Literature Prize.

You use a lot of body horror, particularly female body horror, in your stories, as what I understood to be critiques of the patriarchy. Is that politically charged at all? What do you think of horror as a political genre?

Horror is always a very political genre. Last year, I visited a university in Indonesia to see its Korean department. When I’d asked the professors for their favourite ghost stories, they told me about the Japanese ghosts from the Second World War. So, these are Japanese soldiers from the war who died in the Indonesian mountains without knowing that the war was over. In certain regions of Indonesia, people still believe that there are ghosts from the Second World War, and they are still fighting, and they are very malignant. That has to do with historical trauma. Some stories became ghost stories because, for some reason, people could not express them directly, or, in certain cultures, it's believed to be unsafe to talk about those things. In a superstitious sense, if you talk about bad things, bad things will come to you – that kind of reasoning. 

And there was another ghost story from Colombia, to do with the conquistadors, the Spaniards, killing somebody’s baby to find out where some gold is, from the 16th century. So horror stories are always political. It is always very political. And in regard to female body horror, I think women were, and are, often not allowed to talk about what men do with their power. And that is why we have ghost stories and body horror. And that's why most ghosts in these stories, like La Llorona, are women. And that's why women tell these stories.

Ghost stories like that influenced your newest book, right? I really liked reading that. I read it on the train. 

I do remember seeing a previous interview with you in which you described liking ghost stories because they portray realms beyond human understanding, consciousness, and activity. Are there any reasons besides the exploration of unexplored realms? Are there any other reasons that you like it, and do you think that it's changed at all after you wrote your own ghost stories?

I think that I write those stories with a purpose. Like, now, I ask people about their favourite ghost stories, or famous cultural or historical ghost stories of where they’re from. And the results are very interesting, and it helps me understand the world and how people there think. As an Asian person, I am very sad in the process of finding out that the Second World War had a very similar impact everywhere in Asia - in Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan, and even in New Zealand! I didn't really hear a ghost story, but I went to their War Museum, and realised I didn't know that New Zealand fought Germans and the Japanese! It's such a small country! The impact and the trauma are very wide and very deep. And a lot of that trauma is expressed through ghost stories. And I'm still in the process of finding it out.

You're a published author, and many students struggle with procrastination and disorganisation. And I know you mentioned struggling with the same thing. What are some of the things that make you actually sit yourself down and write?

OK, so writing fiction, especially something like ghost stories, is very different from a university’s coursework. That’s very different, very diverse. And different majors may require different approaches.

When I was teaching Russian, I used a test devised by a professor in New Zealand. That professor believed that people are roughly 4 different types of learners, and nobody's 100%. We're like 20% this, 30% that. So it's visual, audio, reading & writing, and active learning. We all have parts of each other.  

If you're a visual learner, then you need colours and photos. You’d learn better from videos than from just looking at words; you need visual stimuli. If you're an audio-lingual learner, then the photos might distract you. You need spoken words; you need to listen to them and repeat them. It's better if you repeat them. So this works better with learning vocabulary, I suppose. But it could still be applied to other things.  

Reading and writing are things we are trained to do in formal school education. So in any culture that has standardised school education, you're trained to be a reading-writing type of learner. But that doesn't mean you were born into it, and that doesn't mean you're not going to change. You will change. Even in uni, you can change depending on your major or focus. As for the active learner, they need to be moving around. Sitting down may not work for them. That’s the most problematic type of learner in our usual standardised school environment. But if you're out of high school, then you have some autonomy. You don't have to sit yourself down. It may not work for you.  

So you can combine these different learning strategies. Whatever works for you! If you're a visual learner, try using different-coloured pens or highlighters. If you're audio-lingual, then you need a place where you won't annoy other people by talking to yourself. Repeat after the material. If you're an active learner, then jog while you listen. So you do not have to sit down and work. 

See, I like writing by hand, and I need the right kind of pens. The right weight and the right yield. I found my pen. So, I have to use my favourite pen. I write on a piece of paper, whatever comes to my mind. And then, when I get bored, I do the dishes, clean the apartment, move around, and write down the ideas. And when I think I have an opening scene, that’s when I sit in front of a computer. So it is all part of work. I used to be a language teacher, so I don't know about other subjects, but I do know language. If you're trying to memorise something, memorise vocabulary, memorise grammatical points, et cetera, you should learn to study for 15 minutes, go around, do something else for 10 minutes. So 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes. That helps your memory more than sitting for two hours. So a lot of these things go against what you think of as studying hard. But your brain is not built to sit down for three hours, two hours and cram. So, try different things.

But now that you’re in Sydney for the Writers’ Festival, are you looking forward to reading anything by any particular writers? Perhaps someone who’s also going to the Festival?

I am translating Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities. He won the Miles Franklin Award with that, and he’s moderating my session, and I’m translating him. So, as of right now, I’m not reading anything else. That's the downside of being a translator and writer. You don't get to read for fun. You get to read for work, and you have a deadline.

So, I know you're gonna be talking about it a bit at the festival, but I did want to ask you my own questions about your most recent book, ‘Midnight Timetable’. With the environment of your book, the Institute, when I was reading it, I felt like environments can be characters, and the Institute definitely did feel like a character, with all those corridors and the supernatural events. Did writing it like that allow you to explore writing horror differently at all?

In terms of exploring in a more spatial way, I guess so. But I had a dream, maybe a year or so before I started writing Midnight Timetable, and in it, there was a building with a door that opened only when the resident ghost appeared. So that resident ghost lived on the 8th floor, even though the building usually had only five floors. There were a lot of things going on in that building, but it was a dream, and I forgot most of it. But I did remember bits when I woke up, and I thought it was an interesting concept. What happens to the 6th and 7th floors? So I decided to use that. 

The institute itself is also actually based in the lecture hall at my university, where I used to teach. During COVID, Korea didn’t have strict lockdowns, so we had to go to work. All the classes were online, but I still had these very boring admin meetings, and I would have to go to school once or twice a month. I would just go to my lecture building, and all the classrooms were open. There's this hallway: on one side is the window, and on the other are the doors. And there are rows and rows of open doors, and the classrooms are all empty. There's nobody in the building. And it was scary. It really made me think – will my students ever be able to come back? Are they safe? Are their families safe? Will they continue to be safe? What's gonna happen when they graduate like this? This is not proper education. What's gonna happen when they finish? Will they be safe when they finish and go to work? All these worries. And it was very scary. I needed to express that so that I could come to terms with it. So that's why I have that building in my story.

What's so interesting, I think, with COVID, is that a lot of people kind of just want to wipe out that section of their lives from everything, even their artwork. But it was an insanely important event that happened in so many of our lives. Like, I was still in high school at that point, and it was like it changed my life. It changed my friends' lives, everything.

For some people, it’s too much of a trauma. Whether some people suffered from mental breakdowns or domestic violence, it was very hard. So if people don't want to talk about it, that's fine, but for me, as a horror writer, it was a different kind of real-life horror. And I needed to express that in order to get away from it.

At the end of the interview, I almost tripped over my skirt as I got up. She told me she was going to Turkey in November, and asked for advice on winning the cats’ favour there. I’m not sure I was much help; I get so excited when I see cats that I end up scaring them off. I kind of just ranted about how cute cats are to this esteemed author for the last three minutes of our meeting. I didn’t even get to ask for her picture.

Next time I see Bora Chung, rest assured, I will not make that same mistake, and I will get a selfie with her, so I can be like, “Look, everyone, here’s the lady I gave awful advice on cats to!”

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Jasmin Ada is someone who loves to write, ostensibly. She spends more time with her daydreams than with people, citing Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration for her character. 

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