A Korean novel asks whether the future of tourism is a disaster

When Cliff Richard cheerfully sang about going on a summer holiday, he had no idea what the future had in store.

A recent online survey in India reveals that only 36 percent of respondents would like to go on a family vacation this year, while 43 percent have no such plans. Quite understandable. The BOTT Travel Sentiment Tracker also indicated that close to 40 percent of companies in the travel and tourism sector are facing an imminent shutdown.

The threat of the pandemic apart, climate change is also slated to affect tourism (along with everything else). This not only alters the choice of destination, but it also creates uncertainty about the duration of the trip and quality of the experience.

An opportunistic response to this has been the rise of so-called disaster tourism, with people visiting sites of man-made or environmental catastrophes. Some examples: flooded neighbourhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the area of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and parts of Kathmandu affected by the 2015 earthquake.

The ethics and implications of such activity are at the heart of Korean writer Yun Ko-Eun’s sardonic new novel, translated into English by Lizzie Buehler. The Disaster Tourist is an ingenious, probing work that imagines a world afflicted by calamities, and the actions of a travel agency which organises trips to disrupted destinations.

Why do people take such journeys in the first place? Yun Ko-Eun explains, “On a disaster trip, travellers’ reactions to their surroundings usually went through the following stages: shock → sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort → gratefulness for their own lives → a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived.” Just a step ahead of those of us who stare at and then forward images of mishaps on mobile phones.

The Disaster Tourist deals with the plight of Yona, a thirty-something programming coordinator for Jungle, a Seoul-based travel agency. For over ten years, she’s been surveying disaster zones and moulding them into travel destinations. The frequency of calamities and damage to humans and property are transformed into colourful graphs spread out on her desk.

This diligent employee’s most recent assignment has been to investigate the possibilities of travel to tsunami-struck Jinhae, a town formerly known for its cherry blossom festival. The proposed itinerary combines observing the aftermath with volunteer work. Other packages mix tourism and survival challenges as well as education, with classes in history or science.

Jungle takes advantage of the beleaguered state of the world by dividing disasters into thirty-three distinct categories. These include volcano eruptions, earthquakes, war, drought, typhoons and tsunamis, with 152 different tourism packages. Ah, the joys of capitalism.

Unfortunately, Yona isn’t having an especially good time at work. The culture is toxic: sexual harassment is rife, and she lives with the fear that her services may be terminated without reason. She decides to take steps to counter this. If her current situation was a disaster, “she was going to have to treat it like one of the disasters she researched for Jungle.”

Soon, she is sent on an expedition to review and rate a travel package on an island near Vietnam where terrifying desert sinkholes are the main draw. Here, she surveys the packaged, drab surroundings with fellow-travellers, listens to stories about historical massacres that have been created to thrill visitors and, of course, travels to the sinkholes themselves.

Along the way, it’s made clear how locals are dependent on tourists, having no other option. The resort owner, for example, is pathetically eager to please those at the travel agency. Those outside the resort who have endured earlier disasters, or are related to the survivors, offer themselves as subjects for photographs.

As it turns out, Yona is left behind at the resort because of a mix-up, and she now has to find her way back on her own. This is when The Disaster Tourist shifts to another gear, with Yona being drawn into a conspiracy that envisages turning the island into a destination for a potential disaster.

New characters emerge, among them a writer tasked with creating a script to entice future tourists, and a local worker whom Yona is drawn to. In this way, The Disaster Tourist also asks us to reflect on what we see when we travel by exploring the overlapping zones of expectations, curated stories, and real life.

For Yona, packaging natural disasters was a way of making a living, but now, she has to face “a greater disaster: her feelings.” Alas, such feelings aren’t valued too highly in the world of the novel. They float away, unwanted and adrift, like sizeable islands of trash in the oceans that Yona and her clients occasionally speculate about.

This, then, is a bleak vision of a system that exploits both resources and catastrophes. It isn’t too far from real life in suggesting that along with the tourism industry, the planet and its inhabitants also need to be saved.