Early in Pachinko, teenaged Sunja chats with a seaweed seller in the Busan market. The lady tells her, “A woman’s life is endless work and suffering […] It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life—but no matter what, always expect suffering.” This quote encapsulates much that happens to female characters in Pachinko as they go through life—engaging in sexual and romantic relationships, having and relating to their children, and making choices for themselves and on behalf of others. Sunja’s experiences are emblematic for the book as a whole, since her choices help determine the paths for subsequent generations; she never passively submits to her circumstances and continually fights for herself and those she loves. By portraying Sunja as the novel’s heroine, Lee demonstrates that, though it might be true that “a woman’s lot is suffering,” women have the ability and agency to respond to suffering with hard-won strength and wisdom.
Sunja’s decision to be Hansu’s lover, but also her self-respecting decision to reject the role of being his lifelong mistress, sets in motion the rest of the novel’s events and reveals how women have the power to act with wisdom and strength in the face of hardship. When Sunja and Hansu become lovers, naïve young Sunja doesn’t have a category for their relationship. In her experience, men and women are not supposed to be friends, but Hansu isn’t her “sweetheart,” either; she assumes this because he never approaches her mother for permission to marry her—“his interest in her did not always make sense.” Nevertheless, his desire for Sunja thrills her, and his stories of foreign travel widen her horizons. She is happy to discover she’s carrying his child.
From Hansu’s point of view, Sunja can simply be his kept woman, enabling him to maintain families in both Japan and Korea. But Sunja can’t accept this and is grieved and insulted when he hands her some cash to buy food for herself and the baby: “She had believed that he loved her as she loved him. If he did not marry her, she was a common slut who would be disgraced forever,” and her child would simply be a “bastard.” She remembers the way her humble father, Hoonie, had cherished her and her mother, and she can’t imagine contenting herself with a pseudo-marriage with Hansu. Based on this self-respect, she rejects his offers, fully knowing how few opportunities she’ll find elsewhere, especially being “disgraced” by a pregnancy out of wedlock. Despite the painful circumstances she finds herself in, Sunja responds with strength and dignity, pointing to the novel’s overarching message that women, burdened and downtrodden as they may be, have a profound capacity to respond to suffering with strength.
Though Isak and Sunja’s marriage is founded on “disgrace,” and it ends in untimely tragedy, it is, ironically, one of the healthiest relationships in the novel—exemplifying a loving, equal partnership between a husband and wife. Despite great hardships, Sunja’s courageous choice to say yes to Isak’s proposal opens up greater opportunities for her, her mother, her children, and future generations in Japan. When Isak, while a guest at the boardinghouse, learns about Sunja’s vulnerable situation, he decides he will propose to her, hoping to offer his protection to her and her baby—much like the biblical prophet Hosea, who knowingly married an unfaithful woman and was a father to her children. While even a fellow pastor is tempted to dismiss Isak as a “religious lunatic” for this idea, Isak never treats Sunja like a project or regards her as being indebted to him for his so-called sacrificial act. And Sunja enters their marriage with her eyes open, even though she isn’t sure she can love him, believe in his God, or forget Hansu. She chooses him knowing that it’s her best escape from a shameful scenario and the best hope for her unborn child, showing her ability to be strong in the midst of deep suffering.
After Sunja is widowed, she is willing to accept Hansu’s involvement in her life for the sake of her sons, in spite of her pride and continued ambivalence about him. With Isak gone, she now regards suffering for her sons’ sake as her primary role, and the rest of her choices in life flow from this. After Isak dies and Sunja learns that Hansu has been supporting her financially without her knowing it (having instigated her hiring at his restaurant), she chooses to accept his help in fleeing Osaka before the American bombing begins. Though she’s initially resistant, she comes around to Hansu’s view that “the world can go to hell, but you need to protect your sons.” At this point in her life, her sons are all she has, and it’s her job to fight for their survival and be strong for them.
As her own mother is dying, Sunja is disgusted and wearied by Yangjin’s repetition of the proverb, “A woman’s lot is to suffer.” She wonders, “She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough […] Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?” She never resolves this question, and Lee never clearly passes an unambiguous judgment on the choices Sunja has made. Yet at the end of the book, it’s clear that, despite irrevocable losses, Sunja is also surrounded by three generations of a growing, successful family who’ve beaten the odds in a hostile environment. None of this, good or bad, would have happened without Sunja’s self-respect and courage as a poor young woman in a remote village, emphasizing how women—even if their “lot is to suffer”—have the unique capacity to respond to hardship with resilience, strength, and wisdom.
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Love, Motherhood, and Women’s Choices Quotes in Pachinko
History has failed us, but no matter. […]
In 1910, when Hoonie was twenty-seven years old, Japan annexed Korea. The fisherman and his wife, thrifty and hardy peasants, refused to be distracted by the country’s incompetent aristocrats and corrupt rulers, who had lost their nation to thieves. When the rent for their house was raised again, the couple moved out of their bedroom and slept in the anteroom near the kitchen to increase the number of lodgers.
“Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life—but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman—just ourselves.”
“The widow told me about her daughter only yesterday. And last night before my evening prayers, it occurred to me that this is what I can do for them: Give the woman and child my name. What is my name to me? It’s only a matter of grace that I was born a male who could enter my descendants in a family registry. If the young woman was abandoned by a scoundrel, it’s hardly her fault, and certainly, even if the man is not a bad person, the unborn child is innocent. Why should he suffer so? He would be ostracized. […] Maybe my life can be significant—not on a grand scale like my brother, but to a few people. Maybe I can help this young woman and her child. And they will be helping me, because I will have a family of my own—a great blessing no matter how you look at it.”
Sunja cried out, “Kimchi! Delicious Kimchi! Kimchi! Delicious kimchi! Oishi desu! Oishi kimchi!”
This sound, the sound of her own voice, felt familiar, not because it was her own voice but because it reminded her of all the times she’d gone to the market as a girl—first with her father, later by herself as a young woman, then as a lover yearning for the gaze of her beloved. The chorus of women hawking had always been with her, and now she’d joined them. “Kimchi! Kimchi! Homemade kimchi! The most delicious kimchi in Ikaino! More tasty than your grandmother’s! Oishi desu, oishi!'' She tried to sound cheerful, because back home, she had always frequented the nicest ajummas. When the passersby glanced in her direction, she bowed and smiled at them. ''Oishi! Oishi!”
“How did I know that you needed work? How did I know where Noa goes to school, that his math teacher is a Korean who pretends to be Japanese, that your husband died because he didn’t get out of prison in time, and that you’re alone in this world. How did I know how to keep my family safe? It’s my job to know what others don’t. How did you know to make kimchi and sell it on a street corner to earn money? You knew because you wanted to live. I want to live, too, and if I want to live, I have to know things others don’t. Now, I’m telling you something valuable. I’m telling you something so you can save your sons’ lives. Don’t waste this information. The world can go to hell, but you need to protect your sons.”
“Yakuza are the filthiest people in Japan. They are thugs; they are common criminals. They frighten shopkeepers; they sell drugs; they control prostitution; and they hurt innocent people. All the worst Koreans are members of these gangs. I took money for my education from a yakuza, and you thought this was acceptable? I will never be able to wash this dirt from my name. You can’t be very bright,” he said. “How can you make something clean from something dirty? And now, you have made me dirty,” Noa said quietly, as if he was learning this as he was saying it to her. “All my life, I have had Japanese telling me that my blood is Korean— that Koreans are angry, violent, cunning, and deceitful criminals. All my life, I had to endure this. I tried to be as honest and humble as Baek Isak was; I never raised my voice. But this blood, my blood is Korean, and now I learn that my blood is yakuza blood. I can never change this, no matter what I do. It would have been better if I were never born. How could you have ruined my life? How could you be so imprudent? A foolish mother and a criminal father. I am cursed.”
He believed that she’d been foolish for refusing to be his wife in Korea. What did it matter that he had a marriage in Japan? He would have taken excellent care of her and Noa. They would have had other children. She would never have had to work in an open market or in a restaurant kitchen. Nevertheless, he had to admire her for not taking his money the way any young girl did these days. In Tokyo, it was possible for a man to buy a girl for a bottle of French perfume or a pair of shoes from Italy.
The marriage was a stable one, and eight years passed quickly. The couple did not quarrel. Noa did not love Risa in the way he had his college girlfriend, but that was a good thing, he thought. Never again, he swore, would he be that vulnerable to another person. Noa remained careful around his new family. Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth. Noa carried the story of his life as a Korean like a dark, heavy rock within him. Not a day passed when he didn’t fear being discovered.
Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
“Go-saeng,” Yangjin said out loud. “A woman’s lot is to suffer.”
“Yes, go-saeng.” Kyunghee nodded, repeating the word for suffering.
All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer—suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother, die suffering. Go-saeng—the word made her sick. What else was there besides this? She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough. Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she’d drunk like water? In the end, he had refused to suffer the conditions of his birth.
[…]
Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe in such cruel ideals.
“Japan will never change. […] The zainichi can’t leave, nee? But it’s not just you. Japan will never take people like my mother back into society again; it will never take back people like me. And we’re Japanese! I’m diseased. I got this from some Japanese guy who owned an old trading company. He’s dead now. But nobody cares. The doctors here, even, they just want me to go away. So listen, Solomon, you should stay here and not go back to the States, and you should take over your papa’s business. Become so rich that you can do whatever you want. But, my beautiful Solomon, they’re never going to think we’re okay. Do you know what I mean?” Hana stared at him. “Do what I tell you to do.”
