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[ENGLISH] Surviving Oppression Through Solidarity scrap
by Jinwoo Park
March 5, 2026
There is a war on a strange planet. Prisoners of an empire are dropped into its center and forced to fight white aliens armed with superior weapons. One of these prisoners is a woman named Chrisna, who carries a red sword. Almost immediately, she watches her lover die as they are hurled into battle. This is how Red Sword by Bora Chung begins: with suffocating despair and no promise of reprieve.
The planet itself offers no mercy. It is colorless, punishing, and indifferent to human life. White aliens slaughter the prisoners from the front, while Imperial troops execute them from behind for even the smallest infractions. Giant black birds circle overhead, preying indiscriminately on Imperials, prisoners, and aliens alike.
Chung’s prose mirrors this brutality through restraint. Details are withheld. Confusion abounds. The protagonist has no luxury of reflection at all. Instead, survival instincts take over as combat is relentless, each moment sliding into the next threat of death. The fog, both literal and narrative, keeps characters and readers equally disoriented, echoing the experience of fighting a war whose purpose is never fully explained.
And yet, amid the chaos, Chung allows brief moments of respite. Fragmented passages of myth and history interrupt the action, hinting at how this war has come to pass. These sections never fully clarify the world. Instead, they demand active engagement. Meaning is not handed over; it must be assembled as the novel pushes relentlessly forward, often before the reader feels ready to follow. It reflects how Chung does not “keep weak readers,” as once mentioned in an interview.
This refusal to explain too much is in line with the novel’s historical roots. Chung has stated that Red Sword draws inspiration from Naseon Jeongbeol, the seventeenth-century campaign in which the Joseon Dynasty was forced to join Qing’s imperial war against the Tsardom of Russia. For Joseon’s soldiers sent to fight a war they did not choose, explanation was a privilege reserved for empires and historians. Their task was simply to endure.
But imperialism is not the only system Chung confronts. Capitalism, too, casts a long shadow over the novel. The giant black birds, monsters born from imperial ambitions for conquest and extraction, eventually become a scourge against everything in their path. They resemble the kinds of creations capitalism so often produces: forces engineered for domination that spiral beyond control, leaving devastation in their wake.
Patriarchy is another system scrutinized by Chung. The novel centers on female fighters who endure not only the violence of war, but the expectations, dismissals, and abuses layered onto their bodies and roles. The color red is a recurring motif, tied to the titular sword and the ubiquity of blood from the violence, but it also comes to signify women’s resilience. In one passage, Chung describes women born from artificial wombs marching into battle while menstruating, their blood drawing the black birds toward them. The portrayal is visceral and intimate, laying bare the unjust systems that demand such sacrifice from women. The red sword, battered and chipped, at times ineffective, reflects the brutal journey women must take to simply exist.
What makes their struggle bearable is that the women of Red Sword, including Chrisna, are never entirely alone. What sustains them is not heroism in isolation, but connection. Chrisna carries her love for her dead lover, just as she forms bonds with the women, and one man, who fight beside her. Compassion and camaraderie become ways of surviving when little else offers protection.
Anton Hur’s masterful translation demonstrates nuance and conviction. A vocal political commentator, Hur unabashedly espouses Chung’s ideal of fostering community in resistance. Bora Chung and Anton Hur’s exceptional literary alignment in Red Sword proves how powerful translation can be when the translator truly believes in the writer’s words.
What ultimately distinguishes Chrisna’s journey is not endurance alone, but reliance. She survives because of her allies, and they survive because of her. In a world engineered to isolate, solidarity becomes an act of resistance. Red Sword is not a story about victory. It is a story about finding community in the face of oppression, and in that quest for camaraderie, Bora Chung finds something sharper than any blade.
Writer 필자 소개
Jinwoo Park
Jinwoo Park is a Korean-Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed his Master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford in 2015, and has been working in the tech industry as a writer since. In 2021 he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award for his unpublished manuscript, Oxford Soju Club. He talks about literature on TikTok at @jinwoopark0721.
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