Oxford Soju Club ~ By Jinwoo Park
Jinwoo Park’s first novel tells of spies who find one another, but have run out of mission
(Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2025, ISBN #978-1-4597-5501-9)
Review by Bill Drucker (Fall 2025)
This is a clever tale of a Korean American CIA agent, North Korean spies, and a South Korean restaurateur, all descending on the Oxford Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant near the famed university campus.
Author Jinwoo Park tells what seems like a throwback narrative, but it is set in the present, with biting wit and a critical address to the Korean diaspora and its resistance to integration into a new country. The diverse group of ethnic Koreans in the story – Northern spies, Southern restaurant owners, Korean American counterspies – are all smart people, but they have no life, only outmoded missions. They have no real country of allegiance, and no citizenship, and have lost the thread of why they are doing what they are doing.
All immigrants – some are serial immigrants – but have in common that none can get beyond feeling like transplants in a foreign land. The Oxford Soju Club is the new Casablanca, a temporary port for immigrants and refugees, spies and curious tourists.
Each character ostensibly has a national security agenda, and the mostly ethnic Korean agents appear to take their roles and responsibilities of national security oh so seriously. These operatives act as if the Cold War is still on. The wartime cause may have lost its relevance in the broader society, but it gives them all a purpose in a changing world.
The story starts with the ignominious stabbing death of Doha, a North Korean spymaster, the mentor of Yohan Kim, a young and resourceful spy. With his dying breath, Doha tells Yohan “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.”
Yohan Kim is smart but not always savvy. From the young agent’s perspective, his mission is to be loyal to the homeland, follow orders, go where they tell you, and make the assignment a success. His ideological vision is shortsighted. But because of his mentor’s untimely death, finding the significance of the words “Soju Club” and “Dr. Ryu” is no longer just another order, it’s an assignment.
A Korean American CIA agent, Yunah Choi, has placed a watch on the Club. She has been to the Club as a customer under a fake name, posing as a Korean medical school dropout who is working locally as a bartender. She talks casually to owner Jihoon Lim, and decides he is not a security risk. However, Choi’s counterpart American agents view the situation with more ingrained national security paranoia, perceiving a Cold War yellow peril, and distrust of Asians and immigrants.
Choi is modern, ambitious in her career, but not taken seriously because she is a woman and a Korean. Her traditional Korean family does not understand her, so Yunah keeps her distance from them rather than getting into futile arguments.
She knows who Doha is, and who Yohan Kim is. Choi attempts to talk to Yohan soju style. When she tries to convince him to jump ship and switch sides, he is unmoved. She perceives that the situation is what it is. It is not about sides, or security, or patriotism.
Kim, for his part, wonders whether lending his talents to Choi and CIA would be appreciably different than working for the homeland. He also has a more important mission of loyalty to find out why his mentor Doha was killed. Was it a planned assassination, or an impulsive kill? Yohan’s conscience works on him; such a man didn’t deserve that cheap death.
Jihoon Lim, owner of the Soju Club, is an affable South Korean, portrayed as a typical industrious immigrant, trying to build a life in a new country. He lives in a kind of exile, a person who left Korea but for whom Korea has never left him. His creation of a Korean drinking and dining establishment has made the Soju Club a gathering place for other Korean exiles, as well as a unique experience for British tourists and regulars.
Spies are watching the Soju Club because they believe that the infamous Dr. Ryu will appear there. No one from the CIA knows what Dr. Ryu looks like, but they are ready to do anything to catch the high-ranking spy. One evening, when all the players are at the Soju Club, there is a misguided incident, guns are drawn, and people get shot, but Dr. Ryu and Yohan Kim escape.
It’s all a game, with a kind of practical fatalism for justification, and no one taking responsibility for the consequences. Yohan, taken from a North Korean orphanage, trained and sent on various foreign assignments, is molded into a member of the lost diaspora. He asks before he leaves the homeland, “Will I ever come back?” Each place he goes, he assumes a new identity. Then he sheds it to move to the next assignment, a new location, a new name and identity. He can speak Chinese, Russia and English. In the Oxford job, he is supposed to be an ethnically Japanese student. He is the ideal tool, taking orders with few questions.
In being Korean, the characters wrestle with personal identity and belonging. They are outsiders, whether they compartmentalize their heritage or, like typical immigrant exiles, maintain their Korean-ness only for family obligations, language and traditions. When Yohan is offered a black stout, he looks at it suspiciously. For him, the drink is soju. At least he has his drinking tradition to believe in.
To one degree or another, all the characters have similar issues with a mishmash of backgrounds and belonging to an estranged diaspora that lacks any strong allegiances or loyalties. That this psycho-social narrative comes to us as a fast-moving spy novel is unique and keeps the reader’s attention.
Park has a confident writing style. He can take diverse elements and merge them into an engaging tale in narratives that are always briskly paced. He builds clever stories around characters who take things too seriously, with outcomes that are more ironic than heroic.
The novel is a fun read, with Park taking a few snarky and entertaining jabs at the post-Cold War espionage game which, for the characters, is an exercise that spans a range from paranoia to inflated self-importance. The author also explores in his characters some persistent, often socially-destructive Asian immigrant mindsets.
Author Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian who attended Oxford University for his Master’s studies. His memories of Oxford streets and many local spots are reflected in his descriptions. Oxford Soju Club is Park’s debut novel, and the reader is left hoping it will not be his last.
