Fantastical. Unsettling.
Terrifying. Sometimes, even gross. But all relevant and topical. Korean writer Bora Chung’s collection of 10 short stories, Cursed Bunny, all have a purpose, much like folk tales have morals.
The uneasiness sets in right from the word go. The first story, The Head, is about a woman who discovers a clay-ey lump with a few strands of hair popping up from inside the toilet seat. The reader finds out that it is created out of the things dumped by the woman down the toilet. The narrative follows her life as she tries to evade the head from one bathroom to another. When she tells others—parents, her husband—about it, she is asked to “forget about it. That’s nothing”.
What stands out in Chung’s storytelling is its subjective interpretability. Almost all fiction always has a direction it is headed in and once the foundation of the story is established, both the author and the reader move towards the same conclusion. That is, however, not true of Chung. Her writing is unsettling, not just in the uncanniness of the choice of subject, but also the knee-jerk finales that jolt one out of the comfort that a reader tends to settle in.
Towards the end, the head pulls itself out of the toilet to reveal that it has, over the years, bit by bit, completed its body to now look like a younger version of the woman, one that eventually pushes her down the toilet bowl.
An obvious interpretation, and perhaps what Chung herself was intending to address, is how a patriarchal society disregards a woman’s concern (read voice), dismissing it as hysteria. The other, less likely, maybe a bit reductive, way to look at it is to equate the growing head with a teratoma tumour that has the ability to grow hair and other body parts, and say that, if unchecked, an unassuming ailment can consume you.
Equally jumpy is Goodbye, My Love. The misleading title is to blame, partly, but a few stories in, you know that’s Chung’s thing. It revolves around an android programmer, who is constantly coming up with newer, more efficient models to make technology more complementing to human existence. With all the ‘whether AI is coming for humans’ jobs’ talks that ChatGPT has set rolling, a menacing twist almost seems imminent.
But Chung’s not the one to deliver the expected. It is a pleasant surprise to see the programmer––as she successfully updates two of her latest androids–– miss the very first model (Model 1), now tucked in a closet, she ever worked on. It is a love story, one thinks. The heart feels warm, and then breaks a little when she decides to finally say goodbye and return the non-functional metal body to the owner-company. That is until the three androids, somehow connect “their power sources” to sync, and stab her, ironically, for trying to dispose Model 1. That is where Chung’s strength lies. Creating a mind-bending world so unreal that it feels dangerously close to reality.