Reviewed by Alice Stephens

In modern times, nationality is as intrinsic a part of identity as age and sex. Names can change and so can spouses, professions and addresses, but not one’s country. Nevertheless, nations are not permanent. Some die, some are born, some divide into two, some are devoured by others.

I have been to Rhodesia and the U.S.S.R., countries that no longer exist. I have visited a Hong Kong that was British and a Hong Kong that was Chinese. I was born in a Korea that was twice the size just two decades earlier. I have walked the zócalo in the Yucatán city of Mérida and bought a hammock from a man with the angular face of a pre-Columbian carving. I have climbed Temple I of Tikal in the moonlight and imagined the jungle tamed and teeming with Mayans at the height of their civilization.

For Koreans at the turn of the 20th century, the proud nation to which they belonged was vanishing. Out of touch with the rapid changes brought about by the industrial revolution, the weak aristocracy, whose “bloodline gave them nothing but demanded much — a curse rather than an honor,” was toppling under the relentless pressure of the Japanese. The Korean imperial military system was reformed by the colonizers, and soldiers had to choose whether to join the collaborationist forces, seek another profession or flee. The peasants, who had long been hard used by the upper classes, saw their land taken from them by their new masters.

On April 4, 1905, the Ilford set sail from the port city of Chemulpo with a cargo of 1,033 Korean passengers from all strata of society. Among them were a cousin of the Korean emperor and his family; a Catholic priest; a band of ex-soldiers, including one named Bak Jeonghun; a palace eunuch; a thief; and an orphan boy called Kim Ijeong. Their journey to the Yucatán in southern Mexico, and ultimately to the abandoned Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, is the story that South Korean novelist Young-Ha Kim tells in his historically inspired novel Black Flower, which is ably translated into English by Charles La Shure.

We meet the cast of characters as they board the ship that will take them to what they expect to be a better life in the unknown country of Mexico. The ominously named Continental Colonization Company is paying for their voyage and will give them jobs upon their arrival. None of the passengers know they are destined to work in henequen plantations. (Henequen, resembling “upside down demons’ toenails,” is a prickly agave that was a major cash crop for the Yucatán.) Most of them imagine they will return to Korea with money in their pockets. None of them do.

Spliced into the saga of the emigrants’ voyage and the indignities of their new plantation lives are the factual details of events surrounding the fall of the Korean empire. Likewise, the author introduces lessons about Mexico: “The Yucatán Peninsula is roughly the size of South Dakota. To the east, it is separated from Cuba by the Yucatán Channel, which joins the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream flows rapidly northwest.” At first these history lessons feel like jarring, graceless intrusions upon the narrative. As the novel progresses, however, such passages, which explain the roots and chronology of the Mexican Revolution, intertwine seamlessly with the story.

As the years advance, the story dwells less on the human details of the emigrants’ lives and more on the historical events that the characters are swept up in. Kim Ijeong becomes a soldier for Pancho Villa; Bak Jeonghun finds himself appointed General Álvaro Obregón’s barber and later fights side by side with him. In their homeland, the Koreans were pawns of history, but in their new country they become active participants. And yet, the further they drift from the memories of their homeland, the less they resemble characters in a novel and the more they become figures in history. By Part Three, which tells the tale of the founding of New Korea by Kim Ijeong and some of the other Ilford passengers among the Mayan ruins of Tikal, it seems as though the novel has evolved into a nonfiction narrative.

Black Flower offers exquisitely detailed stories of its varied characters and their struggle in the New World. But some readers may feel a little cheated, for after such fine writing and storytelling, Young-Ha Kim shifts to an abrupt climax — the high drama of the founding of a new state and its subsequent demise — all packed into the last 24 pages of a 320-page book. At times, what the author calls his “postmodern” style, or the mixing of genres, is wearying. Despite these flaws, Black Flower is a deeply engaging work by a highly regarded South Korean writer.

In the author’s note, Young-Ha Kim writes that “there is no such thing as a black flower; it exists only in the imagination. In the same way, the place that the characters in the novel hoped to go to is a utopia that does not exist in reality.” The Mexico of their destination was a country in name only, fought over and picked apart by a number of petty despots. The country they fled soon ceased to exist too, annexed by Japan. And the country that Ijeong and his fellow mercenaries founded in 1916 among the splendid ruins of the great Mayan civilization was also just a momentary mirage.

The idea of country that most of us hold dear can collapse in an instant and be swallowed up without a trace by the insatiable jungle.

Alice Stephens is a regular contributor to The Independent.