Introduction The thing that struck me while editing Resident Alien most forcibly was a purposeful irony felt throughout the collection. The difficulty of being truly resident is revealed through the various snapshots Dunat Banks has taken of Koreans: the humiliation of unemployed businessmen pretending to be at work, the necessity for clean linen, the hopeless longing for foreign women dancing just out of reach. The general impression is of people who must live in the landscape of their failures. The other side of the table features sojourners fooled into thinking their actions carry no permanence, and the attitude is one of general merriment as we sit in on party after party. The costume party revealed in "From the Closets of the Weary" forms a kind of microcosm of these parties and even of the book itself: in the morning the narrator is left, in a different kind of humiliating pose, disheveled on the side of a road and wondering what would have happened had things gone further. And all the time the voice behind the camera becomes gradually more isolated, leaving us with the feeling that we are always mentally caught in places we have left rather than being where we are. This final impression is reminiscent of Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow when he asked why all the time we are going forward we are looking behind us. – Adam Getty
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