3
PARASITE
In February 2020, I emailed a former boyfriend who lived in his home country of the Republic of Korea. We’d met in the southern United States many years before and had enjoyed a perfect love affair in 2007, while we were both living in the same city temporarily for work. A brilliant scientist, he had a small mouth that always produced a big smile due to his enormous, dimpled cheeks. I’d taken him for soul food, and he told me about life in Seoul. When he drove me to the airport after our last night together, I cried a little, but we visited each other a couple times and have been long-distance friends ever since.
When I emailed him, it was just a few weeks after the first cases of the novel coronavirus had been documented in the United States and in South Korea on the very same day. But that wasn’t why I’d thought to touch base with him; I wrote because we shared a love of cinema and the movie Parasite (
Gisaengchung) had surprisingly just won the Oscar for Best Picture.
It was an odd choice for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s highest honor. Just a few months prior to winning two Oscars himself, the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, was asked by writer E. Alex Jung about “the fact that no Korean film had ever been nominated for an Oscar. ‘It’s a little strange, but it’s not a big deal,’ he says, shrugging. ‘The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.’” The film was almost entirely in the Korean language, featured no stars who were famous in the United States, and had been directed by a man who was calling the Academy provincial.
While an armistice agreement was signed in 1953, technically, the Korean War has never ended, which means that Parasite is set in a region of the world where the United States has been engaged in a simmering war for seven decades. Most controversially, Parasite indicts the very economic system by which the Oscars are meant to earn producers a maximum return on their financial investment. When asked how a film about “the Korean class struggle” had become embraced globally, Bong told film writer Kate Hagen, “I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism.”
Parasite tells the story of the family of a young man in Seoul named Ki-woo Kim (who later goes by “Kevin”) and the other members of the Kim family: Ki-woo’s father, Ki-taek (“Mr. Kim”); his mother, Chung-sook (“Mrs. Kim”); and his sister, Ki Jung (“Jessica”). Ki-woo, a poor young man, is not in college and has few prospects. He, his sister, and his parents are all out of work, and the entire Kim family lives in a tiny basement apartment in Seoul, where they are routinely subjected to fumigation by municipal exterminators. Early in Parasite, the family is seen being gassed in their own home, as if the city wants to rid itself of poor people like them, just as it might want to destroy vermin such as rats and cockroaches, or viruses infecting the city.
For older South Korean viewers, the gassing scene might recall the widespread use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), primarily in urban areas and around American military bases after World War II (and in the most active years of the Korean War in the 1950s), and of how tear gas was used on student and labor activists during the minjung democracy protests in South Korea of the 1970s and ’80s. But when I went to see Parasite on the big screen three times in 2019, it reminded me of three times I had personally experienced being gassed.
The most recent memory was as a reporter in Ferguson in 2014, when I saw residents of West Florissant Avenue ordered into their homes by a tank under Missouri governor Jay Nixon’s curfew. As the police began gassing their street, elderly Fergusonians became stuck in their houses and had to make a terrible decision: Should I stay at home and be gassed, or flee and be arrested for breaking curfew? It also brought me back to Southern California in 1989 and to Brooklyn in 1999, two instances a continent and a decade apart, when I’d been chased inside to avoid helicopters spraying the insecticide malathion. In California, the choppers were trying to kill crop-damaging medflies, and in Brooklyn, they were trying to kill West Nile virus–carrying mosquitoes. But in both cases— as in fictional Parasite and very real Ferguson—regardless of their intended targets, the gas hit people at home, too.
By the time I saw Parasite for a fourth time, at home during the quarantine summer of 2020, I remembered seeing U.S. police tear-gas protesters in a wide variety of settings in some one hundred cities to tamp down antiracist dissent, and China spraying entire cities with disinfectant to tamp down coronavirus. The gassings are a reminder of how toxic attempts to control viruses often cause collateral damage to the bodies of the very people those viruses are most likely to infect.
In Parasite, when Ki-woo’s friend, who is a student at university, prepares to study abroad, he asks Ki-woo to take over his job tutoring the daughter of the wealthy Park family. Helped by fake credentials forged by his sister, Ki-woo passes himself off to the Parks as college student “Kevin” and gets the job, eventually bringing his sister, “Jessica,” into the Parks’ home as an art teacher for their son. Eventually, Kevin and Jessica conspire to get the Parks’ chauffeur fired, hiring their father in his place. Wanting a job for their mother, they go about getting the Parks’ housekeeper, Moon-gwang, fired as well, by conning the Parks into thinking she has an infectious and highly stigmatized disease: tuberculosis. (Underscored by composer Jung Jae-il’s unrelenting classical violins, the revelation of the fake TB diagnosis is the most wickedly funny scene in the film.)
When the Parks go camping, the entire Kim family moves into their mansion and lives it up. At that point, Bong Joon-ho seems to depict the Kims as a kind of virus, leeching off the host Parks’ lives in the body of their beautiful home. But while trying to enjoy all the lovely trappings of capitalism, the Kims receive a rude surprise: the banished housekeeper, Moon-gwang, returns. Scaring the Kims into thinking they’ve been found out, Moon-gwang desperately reveals that, for years, ever since he took money from loan sharks he could not pay back, she’s been hiding her husband, Geun-sae, in a secret subbasement below the Park mansion. (Geun-sae seems grateful for this life and even has erected an altar to Mr. Park, to whom he pays bloody homage.)
Moon-gwang and the Kims are not parasites, as such, of the wealthy Parks. Rather—as becomes obvious in the final act of Parasite—it is the Park family who is leeching off the labor of Moon-gwang and the Kims. As Karl Marx wrote in 1867, “Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” (Marx was evoking not the kind of vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—that novel wouldn’t be published until 1897—but likely the folktales that also inspired Stoker, which humanized the parasitic qualities of bloodsucking bats.)
With his film, Bong taps into a common feeling among lower- and middle-class workers around the globe that the “time during which the labourer works” has no boundaries; it exists around the clock, leaving workers no time for themselves, sucking their blood, and trapping them in untenable circumstances, as Geun-sae is trapped in that basement for years without light or fresh air. Indeed, this was a sentiment shared even by many real-world professional-class laborers when they began working from home in 2020.
Parasite shows how capitalism orders relationships within intimate domestic spaces. In order to have time for high-paying jobs in which they can accumulate more capital, the upper classes depend upon low-paid workers to complete an increasingly absurd number of domestic tasks. The film points to an international system (outside white/nonwhite U.S. race relations) that structures these relationships globally. It shows how capitalism requires an underclass whose life value is depleted and sucked upward, “vampire-like,” toward the ruling class. Meanwhile, because of the material conditions of the underclass, the viral risk is concentrated there, both metaphorically and in reality.
Many domestic workers in the United States were sent away during the pandemic, lest they infect those they served. And yet, more of the professional class’s domestic tasks than ever were performed by newly designated “essential workers”; they were just done off-site.
Essential workers did not include just nurses and doctors. The category of folks who did not get to work from home included people cooking food for minimum wage in fast-food restaurants, delivering food via Uber Eats, and shopping for groceries. The people who performed these tasks were often not legal employees at all, but “contractors,” with no guaranteed salary or benefits. Initially, these crowd-sourced human shields performed their work without personal protective gear, taking on viral risk so those above them in the class hierarchy could be safer. But the term essential worker is misleading: the jobs were considered essential, but the workers performing them were considered expendable. If someone died doing these jobs—and they did—they’d be replaced by someone else who couldn’t afford to avoid viral risk like the people staying at home.
According to a study published by the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, the most lethal “essential” job during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in California was line cook in a restaurant. Line cooks died at higher rates because they performed work in poorly ventilated, crowded spaces and because they were often poorly paid, undocumented, didn’t have health insurance, and lived in crowded households. During the pandemic, most people did not need to eat in restaurants; if the goal of the lockdown was to keep people distanced to prevent transmission, bulk food could have been distributed more safely to people’s homes, where they could have cooked it themselves (or, if they were workers who had to leave their homes, where they could have made lunches to eat on the job without restaurants). But line cooks were justified as essential to try to keep the economy going—because capitalism demanded that fast-food chains keep operating, even if the “essential” line cooks had to sacrifice their lives.
Throughout human history there have been modes of exchange and even commerce within most societies, but they were not necessarily capitalist. Capitalism is often presented in educational systems, journalism, and popular culture as the pinnacle of human organizing, a system by which humans, acting rationally, bring their goods and services to a common marketplace to make logical trades with one another, lowering poverty and improving the quality of life for everyone as they do. But capitalism is not predicated upon free exchange at all; rather, it is an all-consuming system whose central incentive is to extract value, or capital, for profit. It does so by usurping the entirety of the lives of workers, including those who are enslaved.
If this sounds extreme to you, just think about how many times you’ve been told, by your job or by a self-help book, that your personal value is defined by your productivity. This places capitalism’s economic goals at odds with human health. And because of this pressure to optimize value creation on the backs of, and at the expense of, workers at every turn in its development, capitalism has created a viral underclass.
Capitalism rose as a system intertwined with the trade in human cargo, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As we saw in chapter 1, this enriched those who owned enslaved humans (and all industries associated with this barbaric practice) while also exporting pathogens across the seas. As capitalism moved, in the nineteenth century, from a reliance on enslaved labor to a reliance on wage labor, it created appalling conditions in the form of dangerous factories and crowded housing, in which viruses flourished among the proletariat, or working class—anything to keep operation costs down and profits up.
And while state-sponsored medical research improved life expectancy dramatically in the twentieth century, capitalism increasingly made sure those gains were not felt by all. For example, state-funded pharmacological research created medications to stop the effects of HIV by 1996. But in order to protect the profits of the private corporations contracted to develop those medications with state monies, the drugs were manufactured in and for only wealthy countries for a long time (when they could have been produced en masse around the world to save lives faster). This meant that even as death rates in the United States declined, AIDS deaths globally continued to soar for another seven years. Shockingly, more people died of AIDS after there were effective medications than before, either because those people couldn’t afford the medications or because the medications weren’t available in their country at all.
Capitalism distorts the world so that the reason for human existence becomes the accumulation of value by the ruling class—even if that means the viral underclass must perish. By 2021, there were many effective vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus. However, their patents weren’t freely shared globally as a way to produce as many doses as quickly as possible to save lives and tamp down the virus before it could mutate further. The reason was capitalism. Drug companies wanted to protect the intellectual property of what they had made and to treat it as a private, profit-generating good, even though their research was largely funded by state grants and even though sales were guaranteed by government purchases.
Capitalism also creates a sense of alienation, as people become separated from the means of production that make life itself possible (i.e., farmers can’t eat their own goods because they need to sell them to turn a profit; carmakers learn only one part of making a car but not how to make the whole thing, in order to maximize assembly-line productivity; a housekeeper like Moon-gwang in Parasite doesn’t get to enjoy time in her own home, and her husband, Geun-sae, learns to live without sunlight). When their countries are raided or destabilized by global capitalism, people can even be forced to leave their homelands to survive, only to be exploited again in the countries to which they flee.
Side effects of capitalism can include a sense of alienation even within one’s own body. For instance, Michael Johnson’s body was used as an athlete by his university, while he was a college student who couldn’t really read. The wealth generated by a young athlete’s enormous talent doesn’t benefit the athlete as much as it does a team owner’s wallet or a university coach’s salary; the athlete’s body becomes a vessel out of which someone else siphons capital and accumulates the value of their labor elsewhere—even at the expense of the athlete’s health and well-being.
Perversely, viral infection and other illnesses can do the same. Under capitalism, pharmacological treatment isn’t just an opportunity to bring healing to an afflicted person, but a business opportunity to extract value out of that person’s body. The Greek drag queen Zackie Oh once referred to his HIV medication by describing “that awkward moment when you realize that the most expensive thing in your house is your antiretrovirals!”
That’s capitalism. Capitalism exploits humans’ best abilities and their vulnerabilities alike and their relationships with others. The system does not breed wellness; it produces widespread need that can never quite be met, leading to ongoing crises that can be exploited for profit.
Karl Marx asserted that history is driven by class conflict—by the creation of different classes and by the tension between them in gaining access to the resources necessary to live well that help define the very meaning of life on earth. Yet, until the end of Parasite, the conflict is mostly intraclass conflict, not interclass conflict. The poor families fight one another for limited job opportunities and don’t join forces to take on the upper class that is oppressing them both. Rather than trying to take resources from the wealthy Parks, the Kims and Moon-gwang and her dungeon-dwelling husband fight among themselves; the parasite of capitalism uses their bodies as a host to replicate itself. But in the final moments of the film, we do see an eruption of the class conflict Marx identified.
In the penultimate sequence, the chauffeur, Mr. Kim, is forced to dress up as an “Indian” alongside Mr. Park for the Parks’ son’s birthday—there is even a teepee ordered from the States—on what is supposed to be Mr. Kim’s day off. This is a nod to the United States’ role as an occupying force in the Korean Peninsula since the end of World War II, much as the United States had already colonized the North American continent. (Note that to pull off their deceit as they move into the Parks’ lives, the Kims take on contemporary American English names.) Unknown to Mr. Kim, the housekeeper, Moon-gwang, is accidentally killed by Mrs. Kim, and his son, “Kevin,” has tried (and failed) to kill Geun-sae.
As “Indians,” Mr. Park and Mr. Kim, clad in war paint and headdresses, are supposed to pretend to attack the Kims’ daughter, “Jessica,” with a tomahawk axe as she brings out the birthday cake. Instead, Geun-sae emerges from the subbasement and mortally stabs Jessica with a real knife. Chaos breaks out. While trying to save her daughter, Mrs. Kim is attacked by Geun-sae and kills him with a kebab skewer. In his final breaths before dying, Geun-sae tells his idol, Mr. Park, that he has “respect” for him, but ironically, the confused rich man doesn’t even know who Geun-sae is. Mr. Park becomes focused solely on evacuating his family from the melee, screaming at Mr. Kim to stop trying to save his bleeding daughter and give him the car keys. Mr. Park is so disgusted by Geun-sae’s smell, he holds his nose (echoing a disdain he’s had throughout the film for the odor all his employees share because their salaries force them to live literally among pesticides and human feces). In the end, Mr. Kim explodes, stabbing his employer to death.
But the capitalist logic that has infected the Kim family is not so easily excised. In the final sequence of the film, the theory of false consciousness (coined by Marx’s Communist Manifesto coauthor, Friedrich Engels) is illustrated in Kevin’s fantasy. The Parks have sold their home, new owners have moved in, and Mr. Kim has moved into the secret subbasement to live in exile and avoid murder charges. As he mourns his father, Kevin fantasizes about going to college, working, and becoming so rich that he can buy the Park house. Then, he, his mother, and his father will be together and whole—illustrating Engel’s theory of false consciousness, which encourages workers not to see themselves through the eyes of their actual circumstances, but through the prism of aspirational fantasies the ruling class wants them to believe.
It will never happen, of course, a point foreshadowed by the final piano chords of Jung Jae-il’s haunting score. Kevin will never own that house. Perhaps his American name has made him prey to the same dynamic that makes many Americans hesitant about forming unions: because we think that, someday, we will be billionaires—and when we are, we won’t want any greedy unions taking our billions.
The trick of capitalism, especially since the entrenchment of neoliberalism, is that it promises individual success via individual choice and productivity, placing all responsibility on the individual. This is an illusion, of course, and it obscures the real forces at play. I think of neoliberalism as the shifting of risk from the many onto the few—when the state, corporations, and other entities of concentrated wealth do not want to share risk, but instead place it on individuals. “It’s all about you” is how architectural historian (and my former boyfriend) André Bideau once explained it to me. Neoliberalism warps access to education, medicine, and even clean water with a market logic. It sells itself under the illusion of choice, even as it denies people access to the necessary resources of life itself. For example, in the United States, when a worker loses their job (and with it, their health insurance), they are offered the “choice” of buying into their former employer’s insurance plan via the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (more often known by its sinister acronym, COBRA). Since 2011, they could also buy into a plan under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), where the onus is on the unemployed worker to make the right choice in a market exchange. But if the premiums for a family are hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month to buy into COBRA or Obamacare, how much “choice” does a newly unemployed worker actually have?
The last scene of Parasite helps explain why many members of the middle and underclass in societies around the globe reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic with far less fury at oligarchs than they might have. Like Kevin imagining he’ll own that house someday when he won’t, we find our imaginations becoming blunted by neoliberal capitalism, which prevents us from thinking outside its system. Even though COVID-19 disrupted the entire world at once more than anything at any time in modern history ever had, we largely accepted that profit must be a priority with vaccines, no matter how many people died. Even when tens of millions had no income, we largely accepted that rent had to be paid to landlords (and when financial government assistance came in the United States, it often just passed through those in distress to landlords and holders of debt). And even when the right to health care was more obvious than ever in America, during the 2020 Democratic primary, voters did not rally behind Bernie Sanders, the candidate who’d championed Medicare for All; they chose Joe Biden, who does not believe in universal health care.
Mr. Kim may have killed his boss in Parasite, but he also became locked in the basement as a literal member of the underclass, living beneath yet another wealthy family. Usually, being suspended in a state of false consciousness allows the ruling class to run off with the car keys and leave the underclass holding the bag.
Why is the word viral helpful for describing not only gossipy news and what’s going wrong in networked computers, but also for understanding how capitalism perpetually creates an underclass? First, viruses have been associated in our minds, fairly and unfairly, with deviant sex, intravenous drug use, poor hygiene, and incarceration. Even though literal viruses can pass via human activity as uncontroversial as drinking water, eating food, touching surfaces, or breathing air, viruses have never shaken their historic association with vice. This has shaped how we narrate the stories of people living with viruses, which in turn shapes the medicine and politics around how we treat them.
Though they are often used interchangeably in popular media and metaphors, viruses, bacteria, and parasites are not all the same thing. Long before the medical field of virology developed over the last century or so, and for the better part of a millennium, the word virus had been used to refer generically to any disease or sickness. It comes from the Latin word virus, referring to poison, slime, or the harmful sap of plants. It also forms the root of the word virulent, which, over the centuries, has meant diseased, bad, or even politically illiberal.
Physically, bacteria are smaller than living cells, and viruses are even smaller than bacteria. All viruses are parasites in that they need a host to live, but not all parasites are microscopic viruses. Bacteria can reproduce outside a host, but while some viruses can live for a short while outside a host, they can’t reproduce outside one.
In the late eighteenth century, English surgeon Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, the only infectious disease in human history ever to be eradicated, and around 1880, French biologist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against cholera bacteria. But neither researcher pinpointed the microscopic virus we now understand as the causal agent of so much biological activity. It wasn’t until Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky experimented on diseased tobacco plants in 1892 that scientists began to understand viruses as we now imagine them. Ivanovsky filtered sap from the diseased plants with material whose holes were small enough to retain bacteria; when the filtered sap was found to remain infectious and could make other plants sick, he knew something smaller than bacteria was passing through his filter. When Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck independently re-created similar experiments in 1898, he named the microscopic pathogens viruses.
As a system, capitalism preys on human hosts and eats away at their energy in ways both metaphorical (as seen in Parasite) and also quite literal. This process also opens the door to how viruses enter human bodies. But we have been socialized from childhood to unfairly conflate viruses, virulence, and the people who live with viruses as uniformly toxic. Consider that in fairy tales, viruses signal wickedness. Just look at drawings of warts (caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV) on the faces of gnomes, ogres, or the witch in the first feature-length animated film, Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Similarly, jokes about herpes simplex virus (HSV) being caused by teen promiscuity pervade American pop culture, even though two-thirds of the world lives with herpes. But rather than accept these conflations, we should pull them apart. When we define humans by their most stigmatizing biological traits at the expense of affirming their whole personhood, we create vulnerabilities—the kinds of vulnerabilities that viruses exploit and that can create a viral underclass.
Once parasitic viruses burrow inside any one person, they can sometimes move very easily between other humans. And when they do, they are able to harm not just the person physically placed in their path, but everyone in that person’s social network. This is a natural by-product of a capitalist system in which the flip side of exploitation is reliance, meaning that the fates of everyone in the system are deeply intertwined—something thrown into stark relief by the sudden rebranding of workers earning minimum wage as “essential.” In such a highly connected world, even the patriarch at the top of the ruling class is vulnerable and can become infected—as President Donald Trump showed in real life when he was hospitalized with COVID-19. This is why this virus has unnerved the ruling class around the world more than others; as the casually transmitted SARS-CoV-2 dropped a match into decades of social kindling, those rulers became aware that the blast might reach even them.
U.S. society could share the risks of health with universal health care. The risks of the novel coronavirus of 2019 could have been shared with robust state support for protection, housing, and food security. The billionaire class could have shared the wealth their employees earned, instead of making themselves richer and their workers poorer throughout 2020. But because the state (at the behest of the wealthy who control it) did not want to share this risk, the onus was put on every individual to figure out COVID-19 largely on their own.
This is not a bug of capitalism; it is one of its defining features.
While SARS-CoV-2 was certainly floating around before this date, South Korea and the United States both recorded their first cases on January 20, 2020. At the time, what this would portend was so unimaginable that, when I corresponded with my former lover in Seoul in February about Parasite, we didn’t even discuss it.
In his country, the first wave of its COVID-19 outbreak peaked with 909 daily cases on February 29, five weeks after its first case and only three weeks after Parasite won the Oscar. By July, South Korea had just 284 confirmed deaths and about 13,000 confirmed cases in total. Meanwhile, in the United States, we were seeing three times more (40,000) new cases every day by that July and had already amassed about 130,000 confirmed deaths.
In the initial months of the pandemic, South Koreans benefited from having a universal health care system. (Though much of it is privatized and fee-based, the costs are low.) Meanwhile, the United States has no universal health care, and the costs of its patchwork system are very high. In the United States, millions of people who lost their jobs in the pandemic also lost their health care, joining the millions who never had it in the first place.
Additionally, as my friend, writer E. Tammy Kim, wrote in the New York Times, South Korean government, businesses, and citizens took to wearing masks earlier and more collectively than their U.S. counterparts. As Kim reported, the South Korean government coordinated the manufacturing of masks and then subsidized their sale for modest prices in pharmacies and post offices. This kind of state intervention with masks (or much of anything) simply didn’t occur in the United States in the first and second COVID-19 waves, where Amazon profits soared, price gouging of essential supplies went largely unregulated, states bid against one another for medical equipment, and the Trump administration went so far as to stop a plan to distribute 650 million masks to every address via the U.S. Postal Service. (The Biden administration never took up this plan and only began distributing masks through pharmacies after the deadly Delta and Omicron surges had taken hundreds of thousands of lives.) The guiding principle in America seemed to be that the market would save us. But it wouldn’t, because under the guise of American individualism, neoliberal capitalism generally organizes itself by having the poor, rather than the public state, pay for things they need (like masks in a pandemic). This keeps taxes lower and ensures that those who privately control things people need (like Amazon) can concentrate more capital.
But even in South Korea, which touts an effective, enlightened capitalism and which, early on, succeeded in containing COVID-19 for a while (and always kept death rates far lower than the United States), it was easy to shift the blame onto those living in economic precarity when politically expedient. In response to one of the Republic of Korea’s first spikes after rates had fallen, press and government officials went after gay people who had been to a bathhouse where the virus spread, outing them in a culture that is deeply homophobic. In May 2020, the bulk of the country’s second wave of coronavirus infections was traced to a gay club in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood; two people at the club had also visited a gay bathhouse.
Quickly, even though the gay nightclub and bathhouse were cooperative with contact tracing, blame was heaped upon gay South Koreans for the resurgence. Because the level of the virus was low and the level of contact tracing was high, the cluster was contained. But a twenty-five-year-old man in the cluster who tested positive was arrested for lying to authorities. The exact charge was that while he cooperated in answering many questions honestly, he said he didn’t have a job when, in fact, he worked as a tutor for hire. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the man’s name isn’t known; nor is his sexuality. But he seems to have been financially precarious; perhaps he depended upon his tutoring gigs in real life as desperately as Kevin/Ki-woo does in Parasite. Maybe he withheld certain information because he didn’t want his clients to fire him because they thought he was infectious or gay.
Essential workers in the United States faced the same conundrum. One of the perverse ironies of capitalism is that it organizes everything in society around incentives to make money at the expense of everything else—but when the poor do this, they are shamed. If an undocumented worker who picks crops (that people working safely from home are eating) has a fever, what are they supposed to do? Stay home? When they are not eligible for government help and facing eviction? Can they be judged for working while sick to avoid the starvation of their children?
The Korean tutor may have faced a similar dilemma. After spending six months in jail awaiting trial, he was convicted of lying to contact tracers. According to Al Jazeera, the court ruled that he was responsible for eighty infections of COVID-19 and sentenced him to two additional years in prison. As it did with SARS-CoV-2, and as the United States has done with HIV, the Republic of Korea also prosecutes people living with HIV, though rarely. But when the 1987 AIDS Prevention Act is invoked in South Korea, the maximum penalty is only three years’ imprisonment.
I have never been to South Korea, let alone sat in one of its courtrooms where people were prosecuted for transmitting viruses. But in 2015, I did get to sit through every second of such a trial in the United States, where HIV exposure can send someone to prison for life. And in that courtroom, I learned that when it comes to using law and order to produce a viral underclass, South Korea can’t compete for cruelty with the American empire occupying it.