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I Met Loh Kiwan
This poignant short novel follows North Korean refugee Loh Kiwan to a place where he doesn't speak the language or understand the customs. His story of hardship and determination is gradually revealed in flashbacks by the narrator, Kim, a writer for a South Korean TV show, who learned about Loh from a news report. She traces his progress from North Korea to Brussels to London as he struggles to make his way and find a home in an unfamiliar world.
Readers come to see that Kim, too, has embarked on a journey, one driven by her need to understand what drives people to live, even thrive, despite tremendous loss and despair. Her own conflicted feelings of personal and professional guilt are mirrored in the novel's other characters: Jae, Kim's romantic interest and producer of the TV show she once wrote for; Yunju, a young cancer victim whose illness she now regrets exploiting; Pak, a doctor who helped Loh in Brussels, yet suffers deep remorse over the many life and death decisions he has made for his patients. Cho Haejin weaves these characters into a story of hope and trust, one that asks basic questions about what it means to be human and humane.
First published in 2011 in South Korea, this timely book won the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.
Readers come to see that Kim, too, has embarked on a journey, one driven by her need to understand what drives people to live, even thrive, despite tremendous loss and despair. Her own conflicted feelings of personal and professional guilt are mirrored in the novel's other characters: Jae, Kim's romantic interest and producer of the TV show she once wrote for; Yunju, a young cancer victim whose illness she now regrets exploiting; Pak, a doctor who helped Loh in Brussels, yet suffers deep remorse over the many life and death decisions he has made for his patients. Cho Haejin weaves these characters into a story of hope and trust, one that asks basic questions about what it means to be human and humane.
First published in 2011 in South Korea, this timely book won the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.
- GenresFictionAsian Literature
134 pages, Paperback
Published August 31, 2019
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July 11, 2020
처음에 그는 , 그저 이니셜 L 에 지나지 않았다.
종종 무국적자 혹은 난민으로 명명되었으며, 신분증 하나 없는 미등록자나 합법적인 절차 없이 유입된 불법체류자로 표현될 때도 있었다. 그는 또한 그 누구와도 현실적인 교신을 할 수 없는 유령같은 존재이기도 했고, 인생과 세계 앞에서 무엇 하나 보장되는 것이 없는 다른 땅에서 온 다른 부류의 사람, 곧 이방인이기도 했다.
In the beginning he was just an initial, L.
He was often called a refugee, a person without a country, lacking identification, an illegal alien who floated from place to place with no legal process to guide him. He was a ghost who could barely communicate with anyone, a stranger from elsewhere who in each new place enjoyed no guarantees of survival or belonging.
로기완을 만났다 by 조해진 (Cho Hae-jin, 2011) has been translated as I Met Loh Kiwan by Ji-eun Lee and was published in 2019 by The University of Hawaii Press as part of the Modern Korea Fiction Series.
The novel opens as per the above extract. The novel is narrated by a writer whose given name we never learn, referred to by herself and others as the initial K., Kim and Kim-chakka (writer Kim). She is, or was, a screenwriter for TV but has walked away from her job to visit Brussels in search of L. who she saw featured in a magazine article, one line he uttered in particular grabbing her intention.
It was a sentence from L. that led me to Brussels—the sentence in his interview with the weekly magazine H, a candid confession to the interviewer—that forced me to leave the world I had known.
L.- she finds his name is actually Lo Kiwan (로기완) - was a refugee from North Korea, who first escaped to China. Then after his mother died he was persuaded by South Korean missionnaries to sell her corpse and use the money to pay a broker to provide him with a flight to Berlin and a fake South Korean passport. From there he took a bus to Brussels (he’d chosen the bus because the broker who bought him the ticket had told him that buses have more lenient passport checks than trains) arriving in December 2007, to seek asylum.
I try to imagine his appearance: He carries a big cloth bag and wears a shabby pair of jeans, a heavy parka, and a faded brown hat. The crystal of his wristwatch is cracked, his gloves have pills, his scarf, wound several times around his neck, is a drab color, and his sneakers are tattered and dirty. He gets off the bus, and his keen eyes shine with apprehension and bewilderment with each bump from a passerby. His family name is Loh, first name Kiwan. He was then twenty years old, short in stature at five feet two inches and gaunt at just over one hundred pounds. This person had to leave a poor and faraway land on his own without knowing French or Flemish—Belgium’s two official languages—or English. “Bel-gium, Bru-ssels, Bel-gium, Bru-ssels,” he cycled softly through the names, which remained unfamiliar no matter how many times he heard them.
Kim contacts the journalist who wrote the article:
Three days later came his cordial reply. He introduced himself as an occasional contributor to H—he wasn’t one of their staff reporters— who lived abroad and wrote on current issues in his host country. He’d fallen out of touch with L. after the interview but could introduce me to a Korean who knew much more about him. I sent a reply with repeated thank-yous, and the next moment I purchased a flight to Brussels leaving Incheon Airport in ten days’ time. Three months had passed since the discovery that Yunju’s tumors had turned malignant and the start of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.
She arrives 3 years after Lo Kiwan, in December 2010. The journalist introduces her to Pak, a retired doctor who now acts as an interpreter for Korean-speaking refugees (part of his role is to tell if they are North Koreans, and in genuine need of asylum, or ethnic-Korean Chinese) and who befriended Lo Kiwan, and who tells her he left for the UK a year ago.
Pak hands her Lo Kiwan's personal diary from the time of his arrival, bequeathed to him when Lo Kiwan went to the UK, and instead of finding Lo Kiwan, Kim actually retraces his footsteps and tries to recreate his experiences, attempting to live her way into his story.
As the brief (110 page) story unfolds it becomes clear that all three of the main characters harbour guilt - Lo Kiwan for how he funded his trip, Pak for helping his terminally ill wife commit suicide, and Kim for an incident related to her TV career, where she worked on a show featuring people in need and inviting donations from viewers, her role to stir up as much sympathy as possible. In one case, of a teenage girl, Yunju with a large tumour disfiguring her face, Kim decided to delay the show featuring the operation to remove it until Chuseok weekend, for prime viewing figures, which meant persuading the doctors to delay the operation: unfortunately when they operate the tumour has become malign. Kim's trip in search of Lo Kiwan is in a sense an excuse to flee (Jae is her producer and someone to who she was, before this incident, personally close):
The next surgery, this one to remove an actual malignant tumor and not a misdiagnosed neurofibroma, was scheduled for the following month. I didn’t have the nerve to hear whatever new diagnosis Yunju would face after the operation. I just couldn’t. Jae was right. I was about to run away, the only thing I could do to cope.
The original novel won the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature and this is a worthy novel in English, although unfortunately seems to have had little publicity. I rather suspect review copies haven't been sent to the leading bloggers of Korean literature (e.g. Tony's Reading List and Philip Gowman) and given the two blurbs on the book are from academics and the hardback was priced at USD68 (the paperback to be fair was USD20), I suspect this may have been aimed more at an academic audience, which is a shame. It was featured recently by Korean Literature Now, so hopefully that may bring the novel to more readers.
A moving meditation on trust, guilt and identity and a more universal story that the 'North Korean refugee' storyline might suggest:
The clues that substantiate our lives and identities are more tenuous than we imagine, if indeed they exist at all. Unplanned social relations, communities based in customs, and bonds forged of simple attraction, nationality, or kinship are intangible but set limits that demarcate our lives. They might offer consolation that we’re not alone, but that consolation is neither permanent nor true. Business cards with a company name and phone number, public documents that record birth, death, marriage, and medical history—what do these prove? A celebratory photograph in a wallet, a journal detailing weekly engagements and routines, passport pages stamped by customs and immigration inside some foreign airport, a rusted key to somewhere, or a dog-eared page in a book may all testify to a life but do not encapsulate it.
3.5 stars rounded to 4 as the novel needs more readers.
Brief video interview with the author:
https://koreanliteraturenow.com/inter...
Interview with the translator:
https://ealc.wustl.edu/news/translati...
Further extracts from the novel:
https://koreanliteraturenow.com/ficti...
An article setting the novel in literary context: https://koreanliteraturenow.com/essay...
종종 무국적자 혹은 난민으로 명명되었으며, 신분증 하나 없는 미등록자나 합법적인 절차 없이 유입된 불법체류자로 표현될 때도 있었다. 그는 또한 그 누구와도 현실적인 교신을 할 수 없는 유령같은 존재이기도 했고, 인생과 세계 앞에서 무엇 하나 보장되는 것이 없는 다른 땅에서 온 다른 부류의 사람, 곧 이방인이기도 했다.
In the beginning he was just an initial, L.
He was often called a refugee, a person without a country, lacking identification, an illegal alien who floated from place to place with no legal process to guide him. He was a ghost who could barely communicate with anyone, a stranger from elsewhere who in each new place enjoyed no guarantees of survival or belonging.
로기완을 만났다 by 조해진 (Cho Hae-jin, 2011) has been translated as I Met Loh Kiwan by Ji-eun Lee and was published in 2019 by The University of Hawaii Press as part of the Modern Korea Fiction Series.
The novel opens as per the above extract. The novel is narrated by a writer whose given name we never learn, referred to by herself and others as the initial K., Kim and Kim-chakka (writer Kim). She is, or was, a screenwriter for TV but has walked away from her job to visit Brussels in search of L. who she saw featured in a magazine article, one line he uttered in particular grabbing her intention.
It was a sentence from L. that led me to Brussels—the sentence in his interview with the weekly magazine H, a candid confession to the interviewer—that forced me to leave the world I had known.
L.- she finds his name is actually Lo Kiwan (로기완) - was a refugee from North Korea, who first escaped to China. Then after his mother died he was persuaded by South Korean missionnaries to sell her corpse and use the money to pay a broker to provide him with a flight to Berlin and a fake South Korean passport. From there he took a bus to Brussels (he’d chosen the bus because the broker who bought him the ticket had told him that buses have more lenient passport checks than trains) arriving in December 2007, to seek asylum.
I try to imagine his appearance: He carries a big cloth bag and wears a shabby pair of jeans, a heavy parka, and a faded brown hat. The crystal of his wristwatch is cracked, his gloves have pills, his scarf, wound several times around his neck, is a drab color, and his sneakers are tattered and dirty. He gets off the bus, and his keen eyes shine with apprehension and bewilderment with each bump from a passerby. His family name is Loh, first name Kiwan. He was then twenty years old, short in stature at five feet two inches and gaunt at just over one hundred pounds. This person had to leave a poor and faraway land on his own without knowing French or Flemish—Belgium’s two official languages—or English. “Bel-gium, Bru-ssels, Bel-gium, Bru-ssels,” he cycled softly through the names, which remained unfamiliar no matter how many times he heard them.
Kim contacts the journalist who wrote the article:
Three days later came his cordial reply. He introduced himself as an occasional contributor to H—he wasn’t one of their staff reporters— who lived abroad and wrote on current issues in his host country. He’d fallen out of touch with L. after the interview but could introduce me to a Korean who knew much more about him. I sent a reply with repeated thank-yous, and the next moment I purchased a flight to Brussels leaving Incheon Airport in ten days’ time. Three months had passed since the discovery that Yunju’s tumors had turned malignant and the start of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.
She arrives 3 years after Lo Kiwan, in December 2010. The journalist introduces her to Pak, a retired doctor who now acts as an interpreter for Korean-speaking refugees (part of his role is to tell if they are North Koreans, and in genuine need of asylum, or ethnic-Korean Chinese) and who befriended Lo Kiwan, and who tells her he left for the UK a year ago.
Pak hands her Lo Kiwan's personal diary from the time of his arrival, bequeathed to him when Lo Kiwan went to the UK, and instead of finding Lo Kiwan, Kim actually retraces his footsteps and tries to recreate his experiences, attempting to live her way into his story.
As the brief (110 page) story unfolds it becomes clear that all three of the main characters harbour guilt - Lo Kiwan for how he funded his trip, Pak for helping his terminally ill wife commit suicide, and Kim for an incident related to her TV career, where she worked on a show featuring people in need and inviting donations from viewers, her role to stir up as much sympathy as possible. In one case, of a teenage girl, Yunju with a large tumour disfiguring her face, Kim decided to delay the show featuring the operation to remove it until Chuseok weekend, for prime viewing figures, which meant persuading the doctors to delay the operation: unfortunately when they operate the tumour has become malign. Kim's trip in search of Lo Kiwan is in a sense an excuse to flee (Jae is her producer and someone to who she was, before this incident, personally close):
The next surgery, this one to remove an actual malignant tumor and not a misdiagnosed neurofibroma, was scheduled for the following month. I didn’t have the nerve to hear whatever new diagnosis Yunju would face after the operation. I just couldn’t. Jae was right. I was about to run away, the only thing I could do to cope.
The original novel won the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature and this is a worthy novel in English, although unfortunately seems to have had little publicity. I rather suspect review copies haven't been sent to the leading bloggers of Korean literature (e.g. Tony's Reading List and Philip Gowman) and given the two blurbs on the book are from academics and the hardback was priced at USD68 (the paperback to be fair was USD20), I suspect this may have been aimed more at an academic audience, which is a shame. It was featured recently by Korean Literature Now, so hopefully that may bring the novel to more readers.
A moving meditation on trust, guilt and identity and a more universal story that the 'North Korean refugee' storyline might suggest:
The clues that substantiate our lives and identities are more tenuous than we imagine, if indeed they exist at all. Unplanned social relations, communities based in customs, and bonds forged of simple attraction, nationality, or kinship are intangible but set limits that demarcate our lives. They might offer consolation that we’re not alone, but that consolation is neither permanent nor true. Business cards with a company name and phone number, public documents that record birth, death, marriage, and medical history—what do these prove? A celebratory photograph in a wallet, a journal detailing weekly engagements and routines, passport pages stamped by customs and immigration inside some foreign airport, a rusted key to somewhere, or a dog-eared page in a book may all testify to a life but do not encapsulate it.
3.5 stars rounded to 4 as the novel needs more readers.
Brief video interview with the author:
https://koreanliteraturenow.com/inter...
Interview with the translator:
https://ealc.wustl.edu/news/translati...
Further extracts from the novel:
https://koreanliteraturenow.com/ficti...
An article setting the novel in literary context: https://koreanliteraturenow.com/essay...
March 4, 2022
What a book. I haven't felt this thrilled/compelled by book in a long time. Cho Haejin's writing (or at least Lee Jieun's English translation) was so beautiful and breath-taking to read. I had to read this book in chunks and take breaks here and there because of how heavy some of the content was.
“I had long decided I could never know exactly when another person’s suffering starts, when it peaks, how it proceeds, how it infiltrates the person’s life, and how it occupies his or her waking hours. Perhaps it was this habitual noncommitment that led Loh’s words to jar me so badly, call so deeply into question where I stood. After recounting an arduous journey bereft of comfort or warmth and clouded with fatigue, Loh told the reporter, ‘I traded my mother for my own survival. That’s why I had to live.’”
This idea, that suffering can’t be quantified, sometimes can’t even be identified, is such an interesting idea. That you won’t be able to understand how pervasive the suffering of another is, how much it invades a person’s being rings so true. The idea that you can't reform someone's suffering, that you can only try to offer support, raises the question: How much can words alter the reality of a crisis?
So much of this book, by exploring the complexities of the characters, by diving into the nuances of their decision making, the depths of their emotional toils and the despair of regret, forces the reader into introspection. By reading the book (and the afterword mentions this), the reader inherently becomes involved in the processing of emotion, the recognition of suffering and how lonely being alive can feel.
At multiple points I would think, How can I judge Kim? How do I know, if put in the exact same circumstances as her, that my decision making would be different, that I would have the courage to do what's right? Don't we all run from our problems, avoid confronting our worst mistakes, in the fear that it will reveal something ugly about ourselves, something irreversible?
This was also the first time I've read a work about a North Korean refugee that doesn't fall into tropes of North Korea as bad and South Korea/the West as "savior" countries—a trope that is so overused, so flat that it turns the nuances of a refugee's experience into a stereotype, weaponizes it as propaganda. I loved that Cho takes time to explore Loh's story, as an individual, and doesn't take sides but rather let's his story speak for itself, with all the crags and crevices that exist in a human life.
This was truly a remarkable, remarkable read.
“I had long decided I could never know exactly when another person’s suffering starts, when it peaks, how it proceeds, how it infiltrates the person’s life, and how it occupies his or her waking hours. Perhaps it was this habitual noncommitment that led Loh’s words to jar me so badly, call so deeply into question where I stood. After recounting an arduous journey bereft of comfort or warmth and clouded with fatigue, Loh told the reporter, ‘I traded my mother for my own survival. That’s why I had to live.’”
This idea, that suffering can’t be quantified, sometimes can’t even be identified, is such an interesting idea. That you won’t be able to understand how pervasive the suffering of another is, how much it invades a person’s being rings so true. The idea that you can't reform someone's suffering, that you can only try to offer support, raises the question: How much can words alter the reality of a crisis?
So much of this book, by exploring the complexities of the characters, by diving into the nuances of their decision making, the depths of their emotional toils and the despair of regret, forces the reader into introspection. By reading the book (and the afterword mentions this), the reader inherently becomes involved in the processing of emotion, the recognition of suffering and how lonely being alive can feel.
At multiple points I would think, How can I judge Kim? How do I know, if put in the exact same circumstances as her, that my decision making would be different, that I would have the courage to do what's right? Don't we all run from our problems, avoid confronting our worst mistakes, in the fear that it will reveal something ugly about ourselves, something irreversible?
This was also the first time I've read a work about a North Korean refugee that doesn't fall into tropes of North Korea as bad and South Korea/the West as "savior" countries—a trope that is so overused, so flat that it turns the nuances of a refugee's experience into a stereotype, weaponizes it as propaganda. I loved that Cho takes time to explore Loh's story, as an individual, and doesn't take sides but rather let's his story speak for itself, with all the crags and crevices that exist in a human life.
This was truly a remarkable, remarkable read.
July 21, 2025
I heard of a good review about the author- and this was the only book I can find among her works.
Started the book without knowing anything other than the exotic sounding name is North Korean's.
It wasn't easy to get into the story at first- multiple characters are named without much detailed explanation. You kind of have to follow the consciousness of the narrator to figure things out.
Two stories (or three) run parallel- story of Ro and the narrator's. It's hard to understand why the narrator fixed on Ro's story and come to a strange country. There was a point in the book where you finally figure out why she had to follow Ro and how the narrator's story transforms as she literally walks the steps of Ro. Then it seems like there would have been no other way, but this journey to follow.
I think the story is about empathy- what it really means to be in someone's shoes and under the skin and how you learn what to do.
Started the book without knowing anything other than the exotic sounding name is North Korean's.
It wasn't easy to get into the story at first- multiple characters are named without much detailed explanation. You kind of have to follow the consciousness of the narrator to figure things out.
Two stories (or three) run parallel- story of Ro and the narrator's. It's hard to understand why the narrator fixed on Ro's story and come to a strange country. There was a point in the book where you finally figure out why she had to follow Ro and how the narrator's story transforms as she literally walks the steps of Ro. Then it seems like there would have been no other way, but this journey to follow.
I think the story is about empathy- what it really means to be in someone's shoes and under the skin and how you learn what to do.
January 7, 2026
I Met Loh Kiwan is a quiet yet profoundly moving novel that captures the fragile resilience of the human spirit in displacement. Cho Haejin tells Loh Kiwan’s story with restraint and compassion, allowing hardship, loss, and perseverance to surface gradually through memory and reflection. The shifting perspectives, particularly through Kim’s moral and emotional reckoning, deepen the narrative beyond a single refugee’s journey. What makes this book exceptional is its humanity. Every character carries guilt, hope, and unresolved pain, woven together with subtle elegance. Spare, thoughtful, and deeply humane, this novel lingers not through spectacle but through empathy, asking enduring questions about survival, responsibility, and what it truly means to care for another life.
November 29, 2024
I only read this book because they came out with a film of the same name and I'm someone who has to read the source material (in most cases) before watching the adaptation.
Conflicted, because while I see the merit in this work, I wouldn't say I liked the reading process. I couldn't care less about the narrator and judged her (with no right to) for what she'd done and sought to reconcile with and repair, and that made the 136 pages seem like 500.
However, I do think the topics discussed in this novella are worth thinking over.
Conflicted, because while I see the merit in this work, I wouldn't say I liked the reading process. I couldn't care less about the narrator and judged her (with no right to) for what she'd done and sought to reconcile with and repair, and that made the 136 pages seem like 500.
However, I do think the topics discussed in this novella are worth thinking over.
November 26, 2024
Una dura narrativa que más allá de la sobrevivencia, habla sobre la búsqueda de la libertad de decidir, lo que en Corea del Norte no es posible. Un libro que me sacó emociones como la frustración, la impotencia, el llanto, la felicidad y el agradecimiento.
Read
May 17, 2020Another example of exchange for livelihood when Loh sold his mother's body for the money to travel to Europe.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
watched-not-read
April 24, 2025My Name Is Loh Kiwan (2023)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26672512...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26672512...
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