“Excavations” by Hannah Michell

Excavations: A Novel, Hannah Michell (One World, July 2023)

It’s 1992 and Seoul’s tallest skyscraper has suddenly collapsed, killing thousands and bringing to light just as many questions as to why it happened and who was responsible. This is the backdrop of Hannah Michell’s latest novel, Excavations, an ambitious thriller that is just as engrossing for the whodunnit as is it for the historical milieu. Besides the physical excavation of the building ruins, the main characters also find themselves digging for the truth behind family secrets.

When the building collapses, a former journalist named Sae worries that her husband Jae has perished in the rubble. He is an engineer working on a rooftop swimming pool on Aspiration Tower, the fictitious building that collapsed. Sae and Jae have two young sons and Sae works diligently to keep the worst from them until she can figure out what happened to Jae. She turns to her former newspaper boss, Tae-kyu, to investigate. The story flips back and forth between 1992, the mid-1980s, and the mid-2010s.

 

In the mid-1980s, Sae is a student protestor calling for the end of the current dictatorship and the end of decades-long US influence. She brings Jae into the movement and the two become some of the boldest protestors.

 

What had burdened them as students was the discovery of a system of power that held back key unsavory events in their history. They had come to the country’s best institutions to further their knowledge, only to question what it meant to know it all. Part of their rebellion was a commitment to the reclamation of a more honest past.

 

And part of this past was a close relationship between business conglomerates like the fictitious Taehan Group in the story and the government. Sae knows about this relationship from her student protest years, her work as a journalist after graduation, and several years later while she’s trying to find Jae’s whereabouts after the building collapse.

 

The building was constructed to coincide with the start of the 1988 Olympics, which Seoul hosted to show the world that it was no longer poor. This did not sit well with university students like Sae and Jae and they were the first to go out onto the streets to demonstrate in the mid-1980s. The protests gained momentum and soon workers and others joined the students. There are parts of the novel set in 2016 narrated by the chairman of the Taehan Group as he reflects back on those days.

 

Over the years it had become evident that the bid for the Olympics had been ambitious, wishful thinking, the desperate punt of a nation wishing to be recognized that it had become a member of the industrialized world.

 

Elsewhere, the story involves a hostess lounge madam named Myong-hee and her connections to Taehan’s business dealings with the government. Business leaders and government officials meet at her lounge and Myong-hee informs the Taehan chairman of interesting tidbits overheard on her premises. Sae will eventually turn to Myong-hee in her investigation. Myong-hee explains how she got into the business.

 

I started at the American military barracks. I thought it was the best way to earn money fast and in dollars, too. Believe or not, the government encouraged women like me to do that kind of work; anything that would bring in American dollars. We were such a poor country then.

 

As Sae uncovers the causes behind the Aspiration Tower collapse, she learns more about Jae and wonders if she has ever truly known her husband. She also believes that she can return to investigative journalism and search for the truth, all while providing a safe home for her two young sons with the help of her mother. But it’s not that easy and Sae learns that the corruption she and her fellow students protested is just as strong in the 1990s as it was during the height of the demonstrations in the mid-1980s.

Today’s Seoul is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world and Korean culture, from K-Pop to K-Drama to award-winning films, is popular across the world. Korean beauty standards are also emulated in countless countries. Michell’s story shows that it wasn’t so long ago that real people like Sae and Jae were out in the streets, enduring teargas and brutal arrests. With novels like Excavations, the past will not be easily forgotten—as it shouldn’t.

 

Author Hannah Michell contributes to the Asian Review of Books.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.