Amphetamine Sulphate has released a nicely-stapled piece of street literature here. At only 52 pages, I wasn't expecting as much to chew on as exists within. And as I learned from reading Mountainhead (reviewed here), one may go into a New Juche Joint expecting juicy reprobate shenanigans only to arrive at the frightfully sublime. So when I heard about Stupid Baby I was all in for another dispatch from my favorite Scot in the Far East.
This is basically a tale about an expat and his relationship with an older woman that happens to be a prostitute. If you've read any other New Juche, this isn't surprising in the least. We accompany Juche in first-person, present tense, throughout his adventures in the slums, markets, and bars around where he lives. He lives, by the way, not as your usual philandering sex tourist in Southeast Asia, but as a commoner. He lives with the prostitutes and gangs and crooked cops, on their turf. Amongst the rat shit and crummy, air-conditionless rooms. He seeps himself in the stench of undeveloped squalor.
You get a great sense of it from the beginning. In fact, the first 12 pages of this short work are spent describing the surroundings, orienting the reader with the setting and the petty politics (criminal and otherwise) that govern the slums. There is less poetry than I'm used to, having read some New Juche before, in this opening, which made me worry. It almost felt like an exercise in descriptive/travel writing. That being said, the author excels at it, so who the fuck cares.
After bringing us into his world, we are shown how he lives and navigates his relationship with his old lady. He includes extracts of text-messages before each new scene, showing us the ebb and flow of epithet-filled feelings from two opposing forces that I won't spoil here. Suffice to say it creates an interesting little story of its own.
Mostly, we are with Juche and Goong (lover/girlfriend/prostitute), invited to spectate their most intimate and vulnerable moments. The couple can (as most couples do) go from fighting to fucking to doing cute things like drawing temporary tattoos on each other. Some of the childish love games they play create some of the most tender moments in the book. At one point, Juche draws a mustache on Goong's upper lip, at her request.
...the pen tickled her face and we both kept laughing. She wanted to hoodwink the deity that delivered her dreams into thinking she was a man, so she could burgle the experience of a man's dream.
Goong is a childlike, and eventually tragic person. I say person instead of character, because I'm assuming all of this is true. During their relationship, she is in her late 40's or early 50's. She is still a prostitute, and she loves New Juche. There are many touching moments where, through Goong's actions, we get glimpses into her wounded soul. She likes to cut out old pictures of herself and combine them with current(ish) pictures of Juche. We get glimpses into her past that are as shitty as you can imagine, but we also see immense amounts of love. There is no pandering or judgement going on here.
There are vignettes strewn throughout that show how different Juche is to your average sex tourist or expat. In one, a rich old man with health issues has fallen hopelessly in love with a prostitute that is so obviously using him for money (and hasn't given him sex in years), that it's almost sad. He also seems to assume that Juche is his friend, blinded as he is by his wealth and love sickness.
He has expressed the nauseating belief that they have been together in past lives and therefore their companionship has been preordained and will continue into future lives. This, he explains, makes him feel more comfortable with the limits she imposes on their relationship in this life. He has adopted his own partial conception of the other's belief system as a means of coping with the stress of her deception.
And then, towards the end of the conversation they are having at a bar:
Why are we here? What are we doing here? He grins smugly through my questions, looking over me.
New Juche is not a man of classical conscience or moral pedigree. He fucks around with streetwalkers and gets amazingly drunk while Goong pines for his affection. But, then, she too has her job and its necessities. Everyone has to secure sustenance and shelter with the cards they are dealt. And Juche isn't about to get all pious on us.
All in all, I loved this book. It's not as big nor deep as Mountainhead, but it is all class. I would almost consider it a companion piece to that work, or a sort of case study of the protagonist during some of his minor adventures. It definitely sheds some interesting light on his other work. I imagine New Juche probably of considers all of his art to be pieces of a greater whole, and Stupid Baby is an integral part of a messy, unpredictable, disgusting, beautiful thing.
5/5. Buy it HERE and support independent literature.
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