‘Excavations’ Review: A Mystery Entwined With Seoul’s History

A mother of two sits at home waiting for her husband to return — but he never does. This is the opening premise of Hannah Michell’s Excavations. In the Seoul-set novel, Sae, a woman in her early 30s, learns that the skyscraper where her engineer husband Jae works has collapsed. When he fails to come home, she fears the worst. So she launches her own investigation into his disappearance, putting herself at the heart of a years-long mystery that makes her question everything about the man she married and the life they built together.

This is Michell’s U.S. debut; her first novel The Defections was published in the U.K. in 2014. In addition to fiction writing, she works as a lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program with a focus on Korean pop culture. Born in Yorkshire, Michell moved to South Korea when she was six months old and spent her formative years experiencing the country’s changing economic fortune and social landscape.

Black-and-white image of woman with hair down — Author Hannah Michell. (Eliza Power)

Excavations is not only set in Seoul, but imbued with the city’s history and spirit. “Seoul is a woman with a past who hides her scars under a garish dress,” one character muses in the book. And Michell uses Sae as a proxy to expose those scars.

The novel spans a period that parallels Michell’s own ’90s upbringing in South Korea, often with direct analogs to the era’s happenings — like a plot involving Sae and Jae’s involvement in an anti-government student protest movement. “Some of the more contemporary events in the book were at the edge of my awareness,” the author reflects. “I could hear the student protests that were happening, but I was only five, so I didn’t really understand what was at stake during that time. All through high school, I would be walking home through college campuses that were engulfed in tear gas.”

It was only after coming to Berkeley and studying Korean history more intentionally that Michell put the pieces together and came to understand the country she grew up in. She began to see the gaps between the narrative it created for itself and the dark shadows of its history. “There is this narrative of Korea as this very successful economic miracle because at the end of the Korean War, it was the second-poorest country in the world,” Michell says. “Today, it’s the 10th-largest economy. People only want to talk about it in terms of celebrating this miracle.”

The book is animated by Sae and her quest for answers, but it is also interspersed with a manifestation of this economic narrative-building: an interview with a dangerously egotistical chairman. While he tiptoes around his own indiscretions and corrupt dealings, Michell interrogates whose memory is enshrined as historical record and how exactly truth gets buried.

The skyscraper collapse at the book’s center was loosely inspired by the Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995. “There was this big push under the [Park Chung Hee] dictatorship for rapid development. Rapid development can also mean shoddy or rushed construction,” Michell explains of the philosophy that developed and defined post-war Korea. “There are really upsetting stories about how the management knew that the department store was structurally unsound. An hour before the department store collapsed, the management was told to evacuate the building, but they didn’t want to evacuate everyone because there was still money to be made. Metaphorically, it says so much about capitalism.” (In her novel, the skyscraper is named Aspiration Tower.)

Multi-story building with pink exterior half-collapsed with rubble surrounding the site. — An overview of the collapsed Sampoong Department Store on June 29, 1995. The collapse killed 502 people and left 937 injured. (Photo by Choo Youn-Kong/AFP via Getty Images)

When we first meet Sae in 1992, it’s only been a few months since she made the decision to step away from her job as a daily newspaper journalist to care for her young sons full-time. Brief scenes of her routined home life emphasize the stillness — sometimes comforting, sometimes claustrophobic — of motherhood. The collapse is an inflection point that interrupts that stillness permanently. The novel traces Sae’s life into the 2010s, but the tragedy and the problem it presents — Schrodinger’s husband — exert a gravitational pull. The book’s chapter titles heighten that sensation, measuring the distance from the inciting event: “Twenty-four Hours After the Collapse” leads to “Twenty-four Years After the Collapse, 2016.”

Beginning the story in a less digitized world, Michell requires Sae to do gumshoe reporting, an undertaking that naturally folds in new characters with new perspectives and new clues. Sae’s tenacity propels the novel forward as she approaches the mystery from two key angles: as a reporter working to surface the truth of a fatal disaster, and as a mother and wife who needs answers about the whereabouts of the man she built a now-fractured home with.

For many working mothers the tension between political ideals and personal responsibility will feel all too familiar, as it was for Michell. The author, who is also a mother of two, had a moment of realization while attending a protest in support of undocumented students on Berkeley’s campus during Trump’s presidency. “I put my children in childcare to attend this protest, and I wanted to do more to help, but felt really helpless because my children also needed so much of me.” As she explains it, channeling this experience is what gave her novel narrative momentum.

The topic of feminism remains a hot-button issue in South Korea even in the context of fiction. Famously, when Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 — a story about an everywoman who recounts the hardships of her daily lived experience as a woman, wife and mother — was released in 2016, it met a severe anti-feminist backlash. Laying bare how one’s gender determines one’s experience of the world, Michell casts a feminist lens over her characters during a time when real-life reactions to that philosophy defined social life in South Korea.

Sae’s journalistic excavations lead her to meet and become entwined with other women, like Myonghee, the shrewd proprietor of a club where businessmen linked to the collapse loosen their ties and lips. These women — sex workers, sexual assault survivors, entrepreneurs — are disenfranchised by the patriarchal culture of their own country.

“I really wanted to bring to the fore the experiences of these women,” Michell explains. “The experience of being assaulted by the chairman, and then also discarded, and just the way in which women struggle financially, especially if they’re single mothers in the Korean context.” The predicaments these women face are rendered with emotional honesty and era-specific concerns. When Myonghee becomes pregnant with boy-girl twins, Michell illustrates the consequences of the once-common practice of gender preference by having the father determine which child he allows into his family.

Though at its center Excavations is a mystery novel, it weaves together large-scale allegories of capitalism and economic ambition with the smaller-scale drama of a single family in crisis, embedding layers of meaning into a page-turner. We see how the collapse of one building can engulf any and all of its surrounding residents in its smoke and detritus. We see too how easily the corrosive power of greed can orchestrate such a collapse.

‘Excavations’ is out July 11, 2023. You can find the book here.

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A Building Collapse and a Missing Husband Propel Hannah Michell’s New Novel