Bad Friends
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"Jinju is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms about making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power structures: parents beat children, teachers beat students, older students beat younger students. But at each moment that the duress verges on bleakness, Ancco pulls back with soft moments of friendship between Jinju and her best friend, Jung-ae. What unfolds is a story of female friendship, a Ferrante-esque connection formed through youthful excess, malaise, and struggle that stays with the young women into adulthood."--Amazon.com.
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Pearl is beaten at home, at school, and even by the neighbours and yet still somehow considers herself lucky given the distance of time. Looking back she harbours no ill-will to her father despite the horrific beatings. There is a graphically recounted event involving her father repeatedly smashing her with a broken badminton racket's aluminum frame, ripping open her head and hands and covering Pearl in enough blood that her sister passed out simply looking at her. Another incident where she was left near immobile on the ground, her hands suddenly gripped in a palsy from her father's unrelenting blows. Horrible and yet recalled with blunt stoicism - punishments justified as being borne out of parental love and concern. That somehow that was what was missing from her friend Jeong-Ae's life. That was what could have pulled her back from the decisions she made that pulled her down a different path that started when they decided to run away at 15 and find themselves quickly swept up into a world of brothels.
A precise work told at a ten year remove, we see Pearl as an adult recounting these events as she pieces together her own graphic novel. Ancco/Pearl imbues her remembered friendship with warmth and confidently nails the young voices that can be both brash and bullying as well as scared and naive. There is a quiet hope here amidst the violence - small, vague and entirely human. Beautifully done.
