Raised by a mother who always encouraged me to imagine what it would be like ‘if the shoe were on the other foot’, I was often the one who tried to stop other kids from killing insects. Once a cockroach is found in the classroom, it is destined to be brutally killed by boys using a shoe or textbook. (The Korean orthography for ‘Samsa’ is ‘잠자’ and ‘잡자’, the imperative form of the verb ‘catch’, shares all consonants and vowels bar one consonant from the name ‘잠자’.) What a witty interlingual pun. I read on the internet that in some school classrooms, whenever a cockroach appears, the students shout out ‘그레고르 잡자!’, meaning ‘Catch Gregor!’ in Korean. Since 2015, a literature textbook for high school students in South Korea has included ‘The Metamorphosis’, meaning that almost every Korean student has had access to this story. Ever since I first read Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ in Korean around the age of 14, I always imagined the protagonist Samsa as, specifically, a cockroach. Kafka was first introduced to South Korea in the mid-1950s and has continued to grow in popularity. However, in Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, the word ‘cockroach’ never actually appears. One thing I want to highlight about this trend is that it deals with, of all things, a person’s transformation into a cockroach. This social media trend is just one example of how Kafka is being consumed by young people in the context of Korean popular culture. – ‘If you had wings, could you give me a ride?’ jokes a witty mum.Īlthough Kafka is not mentioned here, the question paraphrases the opening sentence of ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915): ‘As Gregor Sama woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin’. – ‘I’d find a way to become a cockroach, so that we could live as a cockroach couple forever,’ remarks a romantic husband. – ‘I’d lock you up in the house and burn it down,’ says a mischievous partner. – ‘I’d use pesticides to kill it, or cut off the head immediately to save the family,’ a traditionally practical father answers. – ‘I think I’d still love you, and still find you beautiful,’ says an affectionate mum. What would you do?’ There are various answers to this: A person asks a family member: ‘One morning, you wake up and find that I’ve changed into a cockroach. Recently, the so-called ‘Cockroach test’ or ‘Cockroach question’ began trending in South Korea on social platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram.
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