Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pachinko, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival and Family
Imperialism, Resistance, and Compromise
Identity, Blood, and Contamination
Love, Motherhood, and Women’s Choices
Summary
Analysis
Sunja wants to marry Hansu and is soon pleased to discover that she’s pregnant. After Hansu returns from a business trip, he surprises her with a gold pocket watch from London. When Sunja proudly tells him she’s pregnant, Hansu tells her that he has a wife and three daughters in Osaka. He explains that he will take good care of Sunja, but he cannot marry her.
Having no frame of reference for any other possibility, Sunja has innocently imagined that she and Hansu will marry and establish a home and family together. She has never envisioned that Hansu is leading a completely separate life elsewhere. This moment shows just how sheltered Sunja is and how greatly Hansu has taken advantage of her.
Themes
Hansu, meanwhile, is excited about the possibility of a son, and he gives Sunja money for her food cravings. He thinks happily about having a wife and family in Korea; he has “come to depend on [Sunja’s] innocence and adoration.” He offers to buy Yangjin’s boardinghouse so that the women no longer have to work. But Sunja drops Hansu’s money on the beach, realizing how foolish she’s been and how disgraced she now is; the boardinghouse will be “contaminated by her shame.” She thinks about Hoonie, her beloved father, and how she’s betrayed him by failing to respect herself. She tells Hansu she’ll kill herself if he comes near her again.
Hansu’s motivations regarding Sunja have been self-serving; he only thinks about what he can gain from her, and he can afford to do what he likes with her. He imagines she can be content to be his mistress, kept and supported by him. But Sunja feels completely insulted and disgraced by his intentions, knowing this isn’t what her father raised her to be.
Themes
Hansu doesn’t understand why Sunja is upset. He assures her that he will honor his obligations and that she is “someone [he] would marry.” Sunja suddenly feels clear about everything—“she expected him to treat her the way her own parents had treated her.” She knows they would never have wanted her to be some rich man’s mistress. Sunja wants to know what Hansu will do if she gives birth to a son with deformities like her father. Hansu asks if Sunja was trying to get him to marry her “because you couldn’t marry a normal fellow.” Sunja runs home.
Hansu doesn’t understand Sunja’s feelings, because he’s so accustomed to thinking about his romantic relationships in terms of what suits him. He thinks classifying her as “someone [he] would marry,” hypothetically, is an honor, but to Sunja, it’s cruel—all that matters is that he won’t marry her. She was raised with straightforward love and respect, so his behavior is foreign to her, and she was manipulated into thinking he’s something he isn’t. Hansu also shows how cruel he can be with his comment about Sunja’s beloved father.
Themes
