Week 7-Network in “Scavengers”

This week I read a story titled “Scavengers” and visualized the network among the characters in the story. Told in a first-person narrative, the story is about an American tourist in North Korea investigating the true identities of a wrestler named Ryokdosan who had been celebrated as a national hero by North Koreans after Ryokdosan’s death on 8 December 1963. However, according to the source, the narrative found more reliable, Ryokdosan was a wrestler born in 1924 in some place which only became territory of North Korea after the war. His whole career was based in the Japanese-occupied Korea and in the US and he did not care about being patriotic for North Korea. His accidental death was also not political at all. The story reveals how distorted the North Korean propaganda could be.

With Google Fusion Tables, I am able to create a graph of important characters’ network as below. I define the “connection” is constituted by any interaction between characters or mentioning of one character by another. I focus on major characters so minor characters and collective characters are dismissed in the visualization because minor characters are only functional while the relationships related to collective characters were not specific enough. Another reason could be network among the collective characters could be symptomized by that of the major characters.

I first found this network graph illuminates the temporality about the characters’ connections. The graph shows clearly the stories had two storylines cored by the narrator and Ryokdosan respectively. Apparently the narrator’s story points to present. He stayed in the hotel North Korea prepared for foreigners after 1995. One rice wine bottle emblazoned with the Japanese pro wrestler Rikidōzan, known as Ryokdosan in North Korea in a gift shop triggered his interest in knowing more about this historical figure. Then he did his own research on Ryokdosan later. Then there came Ryokdosan’s story line that covered his whole life from 1920s-1960s. Within this story there is another story in 1995 when North Korea reinforced the story of Ryokdosan by inviting American wrestlers to fight against Ryokdosan’s protégé. Three different focal characters show how the characters establish their relations and how a false historical narrative built over the time.

Then I could see how the international connections could happen through the interactions of characters. The major characters travelled around the countries and seemingly they did as they pleased. However, North Korea, Japan and the US were the three nationwide forces dominating people’s activities in the stories. Characters’ actions are all built within the historical contexts manifested by the regulations and by international politics. At the same time, it is difficult to define which nationality Ryokdosan identified himself with even though in the plots both Japanese and Korean believe he should be exclusively Japanese or Korean. Ryokdosan connected all the three groups of people coming from those countries.

The graph is also helpful in addressing other questions like how people of different social hierarchies built influences and how knowledge and ideologies were transmitted throw traveling and narrating. It highlights the hidden relationship behind the elusive prose narrative. However, it cannot replace the narrative because of its highly reductive nature. The graph does not show motivations, temporal changes or character development. We need more supplimentary information like the original texts or critical works in order to understand this graph in a more profound way.