Seeing Red and Blue

Life and sex and the use of color in Han Kang's The Vegetarian

As part of my Fall 2025 Self-Taught MFA curriculum, I noted that I wanted to read and think about craft in a recent award winner, namely, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, as translated by Deborah Smith. This book won the 2016 Booker International and was a key work contributing to Han Kang’s “unexpected” 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. (I say “unexpected” only because she was far from the bettor’s favorite that year, not because of any issue with the writer or her craft).

William Morris. Cray, 1884. The Art Institute of Chicago. CC0.

If you need a synopsis, the Booker prize one will give you the highlights. Adam Roberts has perhaps a more useful one if you haven’t read the novel. Quickly: the novel is set in modern (2007 era) South Korea (Seoul) and follows the story of Yeong-hye, an ordinary woman. We get her story through the views of her husband (Mr Cheong), her unnamed brother-in-law, and her sister (In-hye).

I suspect teachers of undergraduate literature are having a field day with this one; there’s much to discuss, from themes of misogyny and sexual violence to the role of meat in contemporary Korean culture to even what we should interpret from the fact that Yeong-hye and her brother, Yeong-ho, seem to share a generational name, but so do Yeong-hye and her sister, In-hye; just not the same one. I do not profess to know enough Korean, or enough about Korean culture, to dig deeply into this.¹

Instead, I thought I’d write about the use of color, particularly in the second part (“The Mongolian Mark”), as a thought about craft. But before I could, I hit a snag.

Translation differences

I started reading a couple of other reviews and analyses of the book, some I agree with and some I do not, of course. My own preference-meter of it lies somewhere between the adulation of The Guardian (“sensual, provocative and violent”) and The New York Times (“ferocious, magnificently death-affirming”) and the denigration of some literary scholars (“generic and narrative ambiguities,” “a slightly fatuous take on the subject”). Which is to say, more plainly, I neither loved nor disliked this book. I originally picked it because I saw a copy while I was in South Korea, had heard of it, and thought it would be a good chance to read something well-regarded outside my usual choices. I didn’t think more deeply about it than that. And it’s going to stick with me, not least because I decided to write this piece about it, but also because of the striking, often shocking, imagery.

In particular, there’s one scene in which Yeong-hye recalls a dog that bit her as a child, and what her (violent, abusive) Father did about it. In my edition, the relevant passage reads:

Father says he won’t tie the dog to a tree and scorch it with a lamp, or flog it. He says he heard somewhere that driving a dog to keep running until the point of death makes the meat tender. (p47)

Meanwhile, Ryan Chang, writing in Biblioklept², renders the passage thusly:

While Father ties the dog to the tree and scorches it with a lamp, he says it isn’t to be flogged. He says he heard somewhere that driving a dog to keep running until the point of death is considered a milder punishment.

Those are entirely different passages, which make you read the character of Father in entirely different lights. He’s still an abusive, violent asshole, but is he a dog-eating one who wants to tenderize his dinner³, or merely a garden-variety animal abuser?

Which led me down a rabbit hole of reading critique of the translation after critique of the translation, including one that compares the French translation (which did not win the Booker International) with the English (which did, despite a widely reported note that the translator had only studied Korean for 3 years before this work and a suspiciously precise statistic claiming that 10.9% of the first part is mistranslated). Remember: translation is not an apolitical act.

So now I don’t know what to believe. Which brings me to…

A bit of background on color

I don’t read Korean, so I’m at the mercy of my translator here. Which is a little bit unfortunate, because the Korean language has a lot of very specific words for very specific colors. And yet my copy of the novel only uses basic words: red, blue, yellow, white. Is that because Deborah Smith only knew those color-words? Because that’s how it was in the original? I’ll probably never know.

So instead, I have to look only at the colors as they are represented in my translation.

The 5 basic colors in Korea (obangsaek/오방색)

Traditional Korean color symbolism is based on the use of 5 colors, derived from natural elements in the environment. Each color is also associated with a direction and a season of the year.

• White (metal/gold, west, fall)

• Blue (tree, east, spring)

• Black (water, north, winter)

• Red (fire, south, summer)

• Yellow (earth, center)

Western versus Eastern interpretations

Let’s remember that this is a novel originally written in Korean, by a Korean author, and that I’m using a translation by a British translator. Thus it is crucial that we think about both what the author might have meant to imply to a Korean audience (assuming the translator faithfully rendered the color-translation) and what a Western audience is likely to read into the same colors-as-symbols.

Red

In both Korean and English-speaking traditions, red often signifies danger. It can mean right-wing politicians. For Koreans, it is considered bad luck to write someone’s name in red, as this can be associated with death. But it also means passion, love, and creation.

Blue

For Koreans, blue carries connotations of freedom, safety, youth, and hope. It can symbolize yin (as in traditional Korean wedding attire for grooms). In the west, blue is also sometimes associated with calm and serenity, but can also represent sadness and depression.

Blue and red together symbolize life itself (they represent south and east, which get solar energy)

Green

In Korea, green is considered a sub-color of blue (so much so people may refer to ‘blue’ lights in traffic signals, despite the fact that the light bulbs are the same as in the west). But it can also mean prosperity and luck, just as in English (think: clover and money).

Yellow

In the west, yellow can mean sunshine and joy, or cowardice and sin. In Korea, it carries connotations of royalty, elegance, fertility, and earth; it is often used by left-wing politicians.

Black

In both cultures: overtones of death, darkness, formality. In Korea, particularly after the Japanese occupation, it came to mean “institutions” or “rules” but now has connotations of exclusivity, modernity, and the west.

White

For both Korean and English speakers, white can mean purity, goodness, innocence. In traditional Korean culture, white was the color of everyday clothing; Koreans called themselves the “white-clothed people” in an effort to distinguish themselves from Japanese occupiers. White is also considered the most basic color, the starting point, even the foundation of humanity. Finally, it can symbolize knowledge.

Color in the text

At long last, we can start to look at the use of color in The Vegetarian. It’s particularly vivid in the sexually-charged second section, “The Mongolian Mark.”

Red and blue: life and sex

The section opens with the unnamed brother-in-law, an artist, seeing a show in a theater, which he’d learned about from a poster in which “men and women sat displaying their naked backs, which were covered from the napes of their necks right down to their bottoms with flowers, coiling stems and thickly overlapping petals, painted on in red and blue” (p61-62, emphasis mine). The performance, with its “showy nudity” and “overtly sexual gestures” (p62), and the colors, which to a Korean reader would have been suggestive of the clothes worn by the bride and groom at a wedding, foreshadow the deeply sexual nature of this section of the book.

The painted flowers

When the brother-in-law paints Yeong-hye for the first time, he gives her “half-open buds, red and orange” (p89) on her shoulders. The reader knows this is the beginning of something dangerous and passionate. The flowers continue down her body “orange…with a thick, vivid yellow pistil” (p89): fertility and sin emerging from the woman’s body. Later, he gives her “huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white” (p93, emphasis mine) on her front. “If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night,” the author continues, “these were the brilliant flowers of the day.” She has changed the visual image into something brighter, and in so doing lets the reader know that the sex that’s coming won’t remain hidden in the darkness of night.

Plant things

One thing I’m struggling with in my own book is how explicit to get about the sex. I certainly have no desire to describe it in the detail found in this novel (besides the fact that I don’t want to, it would be out of place in the emotional landscape of my WIP). But I think it’s interesting to see how it’s done in a book that’s designed to be explicit and shocking, and particularly when the author uses not the traditional, carnal, meat-based imagery of it, but instead an earthy, vegetal language. “A green sap, like that which oozes from bruised leaves, began to flow out from her vagina when he entered her.[…]A blackish paste was smeared over his skin from his lower stomach to his thighs, a fresh sap which could have come from either her or him” (p101-2). Her green, prosperous sap, full of life, gives way to the death of his almost-climax.

1. If you do, please tell me all about it!

2. I can’t be certain which version he read, but clearly it’s a different one than mine.

3. I won’t even begin to start with the casual racism Deborah Smith may have inserted here.