1
JUNGLE
Northbound: High atmospheric pressure, cherry blossoms, news of deaths
Southbound: Dust clouds, strikes, debris
NEWS OF THE DEATHS MOVED FAST that week. Word was spreading quickly, but it wouldn’t be long before people lost interest. By the time funeral proceedings began, the public would have already forgotten the deceased.
A tsunami had hit Jinhae, in the province of Kyeongnam. Jinhae was where cherry blossoms first bloomed in early spring. When it happened, on an otherwise typical afternoon, life in the city had stopped. In an instant, everything was underwater: tourists beholding the flowers, pedestrians meandering about, buildings that had been warmed by the sun, and street lamps on the edge of the beach.
Yona went down to Jinhae on Friday evening. Jungle—the travel company where she worked as a programming coordinator—didn’t currently offer any travel packages to visit the post-tsunami rubble, but it would soon. After arriving, Yona’s first tasks were to hand over donations and dispatch volunteers. She spent the weekend giving out money—ten-thousand-won contributions from nearly a thousand Jungle employees—expressing her condolences and assessing the situation. Jungle divided disasters into thirty-three distinct categories, including volcano eruptions, earthquakes, war, drought, typhoons and tsunamis, with 152 available packages. For the city of Jinhae, Yona planned to create an itinerary that combined viewing the aftermath of the tsunami with volunteer work.
Yona’s return to Seoul took longer than the trek down south. As Korea marched into spring, cherry blossoms were blanketing the country. The flowers had already bloomed in Jinhae, and during Yona’s weekend away from home, northern blossoms began to bud as well. Once she was back in Seoul, Yona turned on her TV. After the south coast tsunami, the news broadcast not only typical weather forecasts and programmes about the flowers’ arrival, but also information about where the ocean currents would take the tsunami wreckage now trapped in their waters. The trash consisted of artefacts of daily life stolen by nature, mostly pieces of plastic and forgettable knickknacks not yet decomposed. Soon to be forgotten by their former owners, they were destined to swirl about the sea for decades. The debris flowed south along the currents, bobbing atop ever-moving waves.
Predictions about the trash’s future path varied. Some said it would flow into the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, the one that was seven times the size of the Korean Peninsula. Others guessed that within the next two years it would end up along the coast of Chile. Some people even estimated where the trash would be ten years from now. Most citizens just hoped that they wouldn’t cross paths with the tsunami’s remains. They wanted to shield themselves from disaster, to hide from risk.
However, one segment of Korean society differed from the risk-averse majority. These voyagers carried survival kits, generators and tents as they searched out disaster zones worthy of exploration. They were the kind of people who would relish the chance to weather the open sea in search of the mythical island of trash. Jungle was the travel company for such adventurers.
Yona had once dreamed of going on treacherous journeys. The first place she’d ever travelled to was Nagasaki, her trip inspired by a single sentence in a guidebook: ‘The city is home to statues commemorating citizens who lost their lives in the atomic bomb explosion, as well as those who passed away in local storms.’ The guidebook mapped the location of the Nagasaki statues, but as she read, Yona had realised she didn’t care where the statues were. Instead, she’d begun to wonder what exactly went missing when a person lost his or her life, and if the lost life was ever found elsewhere. Yona was always wondering about this kind of unknown information—like where rocks that fell off the side of a mountain ended up. And what about the scales removed from a filleted fish, or unwanted potato sprouts, or even bullets?
Yona had worked at Jungle for over ten years, surveying disaster zones and moulding them into travel destinations. As a child, she hadn’t imagined doing work like this, but she was skilled at quantifying the unquantifiable. The frequency and strength of disasters, and the resulting damage to humans and property, transformed into colourful graphs now spread out on Yona’s desk. Next to the graphs lay a world map and a Korean map, place names marked with notations to indicate which disasters had occurred there. To Yona, certain places were now interchangeable with disaster. New Orleans made her think about the remaining traces of Hurricane Katrina. In New Zealand, it was the earthquake that had shaken the city of Christchurch into rubble. Near Chernobyl, the ghost towns that emerged after the region was exposed to radiation, along with the Red Forest created by the fallout. In Brazil, the favelas, and in Sri Lanka, Japan and Phuket—like in Jinhae—the damage wreaked by tsunamis. Ultimately, no city could ever completely evade catastrophe. Disaster lay dormant in every corner, like depression. You never knew when it might spring into terrible action, but if you were lucky, it could remain hidden for a lifetime.
Every year, the world experienced on average 900 earthquakes that measured higher than 5.0 on the Richter scale, and 300 volcanoes—large and small—exploded across all seven continents. These facts were as quotidian to Yona as the changing colours of a traffic light. Only last year, almost 200,000 people had died in natural disasters. With an average of 100,000 annual deaths over the past ten years, calamity was growing more powerful and periodic. And while technological innovations prevented more and more catastrophe, new and wilier disasters popped up as well. Learning about misfortune was what Yona did. Because calamity was her job, it had a tendency to occupy her mind even during her off-hours. Working at Jungle was all encompassing.
‘It’s the customer service line,’ Yona’s subordinate said as he handed her the phone.
Now Yona would repeat phrases she’d said a thousand times, like an android on autopilot. ‘Ma’am, if you cancel, you’ll incur a service fee,’ or ‘Sir, this is specified in the contract.’ Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Yona’s responsibility, but she had already fielded several customer complaints today. The calls were coming in at the most inopportune moment.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said calmly into the phone, ‘but refunds are not possible.’
Customers always responded to this sentence in the same way.
‘But there are still three months left until the trip,’ replied the voice on the other end. ‘Why would there be a one hundred per cent penalty for cancellation? I’m cancelling because my child is sick. Are you really saying that there’s no chance of a refund? Actually, why is it that none of your trips allow for cancellation?’
‘Cancellations are possible, sir,’ Yona said, ‘but we cannot refund deposits already paid in full.’
‘Cancellations are possible, but refunds aren’t? Is it always like this? That means I should have only paid part of the deposit at first. If this is how you’re going to be, I’ll have to file a complaint with the Consumer Protection Bureau.’
‘Would you like me to transfer you to them now?’ Yona asked. ‘I’m sorry to say, they won’t be of any help. Our contract clearly stipulated from the beginning that your trip cannot be refunded, regardless of the date of cancellation. You signed the contract, sir. Since you’ve already paid the deposit, you received a large discount, so buying early wasn’t a bad idea. If you still decide to go on the trip, rest assured that you received the best possible price. People signing up now are being charged thirty-five per cent more, even if they pay the reservation deposit up front.’