How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
In pain school, they'd taught him to find his reserve, a private place he could go in unbearable moments. A pain reserve was like a real reserve—you put a fence around it, attended to its welfare, kept it pristine, and dealt with all trespassers. Nobody could ever know what your pain reserve was... because if you lost your pain reserve, you'd lost everything. (209)
We know what you're thinking: there's a school for that? Jun Do's pain training marks him out as someone extraordinary—and also as a person who will suffer a lot during his lifetime. The "reserve" is something more sacred than the popular "happy place." It's often so well defended that even the warden or ranger of the reserve can be surprised at what he finds in the deepest recesses of this private place. The pain reserve becomes the ultimate denial of external reality, allowing the sufferer to dissociate completely with the horrible things happening to his or her physical body.
Quote #8
But did she think the pain in her movies was pretend, did she think the portrayal of national suffering was fiction? Did she think she could be the face of Korea that has been dealt a thousand years of blows without losing a husband or two? (220)
As the voice on the loudspeaker narrates the story of the new Commander Ga moving into Sun Moon's life, we can't help but note the authorial voice ringing through at this moment. It becomes clear, later in the book, that Sun Moon knows a lot about suffering, national and otherwise. This is also a good opportunity for Johnson to use this national voice to poke fun at the state for co-opting the suffering of its people.
Quote #9
"And your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That's better than the truth." "Which is?" "That there's no point to it. It's just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone." (285)
Jun Do reassures Sun Moon that her life's work is valuable—even if it's valuable because it reveals a miserable truth. His nihilism in the face of suffering tells us that he's had great experience in this area and that he finds no value in it at all. There's nothing redemptive or useful in it for Jun Do, and it's certainly not a comfort for him to know that other people have also lived in misery. In a place where a denial of reality is standard practice, this is Jun Do keeping it real, on a high level.