river of fire and other stories
o c h ˘o n g h ˘u i
Translated by
bruce
and
ju-chan fulton
AFTERWORD
With the passing of Pak Kyŏngni in 2008 and Pak Wansŏ in 2011, O Chŏnghŭi has become the elder stateswoman of contemporary Korean fiction, a writer who enjoys critical success, if not widespread popularity, and who is proving increasingly influential among younger Korean writers. She was one of the first Korean writers to receive training in creative writing at the university level, at Sŏrabŏl College of Arts. Like Pak Wansŏ, Hwang Sunwŏn, Kim Tongni, and Ch’oe Yun—four of modern Korea’s most accomplished authors—she emerged more or less fully
C5873.indb 219
4/20/12 8:00 AM
220
afterword
formed as a writer. She began writing “The Toy Shop Woman” (Wangujŏm yŏin), which was honored with the 1968 New Writers Award, sponsored by the Chungang ilbo, a Seoul daily, while still in high school. She then published approximately a story a year until her first collection, River of Fire (Pul ŭi kang), appeared in 1977. If by that time there were any doubts about her commitment to her craft, she dispelled them by remarking in a brief afterword that while writing a story she is constantly plagued by doubts as to whether she has given her all to that particular work.1 River of Fire is remarkable for the tension created by the juxtaposition in each of the twelve stories of a first-person narrative and a nameless narrator, an unsettling combination of intimacy and distance. In these stories, O became arguably the first Korean writer to carry out Virginia Woolf ’s dictum that killing off the gentle, egoless, self-sacrificing “angel in the house” is part of a woman writer’s job. The decade that followed was O’s most productive period. Her second and third story collections, The Garden of My Childhood (Yunyŏn ŭi ttŭl) and Spirit on the Wind (Param ŭi nŏk), appeared in 1981 and 1986, respectively. Receiving the Tongin Literature Prize in 1982 for “The Bronze Mirror” (Tonggyŏng), she became one of the first writers to capture both of the major Korean prizes for short fiction and novellas, “Evening Game” (Chŏnyŏk ŭi keim) having been honored with the 1979 Yi Sang Literature Prize. The stories in these two volumes are more diverse in character, theme, and technique. “Chinatown” (Chunguggin kŏri, 1979) is one of the most accomplished coming-of-age stories in contemporary Korea. “Words of Farewell” (Pyŏlsa, 1981) utilizes stream-of-consciousness technique in depicting parallel spiritual journeys by a husband and wife, the former having left home to avoid surveillance by the authorities. The title story of Spirit on the Wind is a dual narrative that examines trauma from the point of view of the victim and her uncomprehending husband. At the same time, the stories in both collections, like those in River of
C5873.indb 220
4/20/12 8:00 AM
afterword
221
Fire, continue to portray families broken by desertion, infidelity, sterility, madness, and death. These holes in the family fabric parallel the breakdown of a traditional agrarian society built around the extended family, which was accelerated by the industrialization of South Korea under a succession of military dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s. By the mid-1980s O’s writing had become more discursive as she responded to criticism of her works as lacking in historical consciousness and awareness of contemporary realities—two catchphrases applied indiscriminately by the conservative and patriarchal literary establishment of South Korea to writers who did not focus overtly on social, political, or historical problems in their fiction. Always an intertextual writer—in one of her earliest stories, “Weaver Woman” (Chingnyŏ, 1970), she adopts the herder boy and the weaving girl of one of Korea’s best-known folktales, who are separated forever for neglecting their duties, and recasts them as a barren wife and her wandering husband, who are estranged by her inability to produce the all-important male offspring—O began to incorporate more historical elements into her works. “The Monument Intersection” (Pulmangbi, 1983), for example, is inspired by her own family’s migration, after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, from Hwanghae Province in present-day North Korea to what would become South Korea. O’s literary fiction in the 1990s was sporadic; a highlight being the publication in book form of The Bird (Sae) in 1996. Curiously, the cover of the first printing of this book identifies it simply as sosŏl (fiction). Not until the new millennium and a subsequent printing did this work receive the cachet of changp’yŏn sosŏl (novel). In the early 1990s, in an effort to broaden her readership, O published two volumes of comte, a genre that in Korea consists primarily of family-centered miniatures and occupies an ambiguous space somewhere between literary fiction and popular fiction. “The Release” (Pangsaeng, 1990) in the present volume is
C5873.indb 221
4/20/12 8:00 AM
222
afterword
from one of those collections, The Drunkard’s Wife (Sulkkun ŭi anae, 1993). She has since published children’s and young adult fiction and two volumes of essays. The present volume contains one story from the 1960s, three from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, and two from the 1990s. The first four stories, all originally published in her 1977 River of Fire volume, exhibit the clarity and concentration characteristic of her early work, but are not without their humor, which is shown to good effect especially in “One Spring Day” (Pomnal, 1973). The three stories from the 1980s feature a broader cast of characters and, in contrast with the River of Fire stories, limited third-person narratives. “Lake P’aro” (P’aroho, 1989) is revealing for its glimpses of the lifestyle of Korean international students and its metatextual element. In this story O draws on two years of life with her family near Albany, New York, while her husband, a professor, was on sabbatical. The final story, “The Old Well” (Yet umul, 1994), has a retrospective quality. O Chŏnghŭi will be remembered as the writer who pioneered gender parity in contemporary Korean fiction and who raised the bar of accomplishment to a new level. She is one of the few writers of modern Korean fiction to acknowledge in her stories the individual’s capacity for evil, and apart from Ch’oe Yun in “There a Petal Silently Falls” (Chŏgi sori ŏpshi han chŏm kkonnip i chigo, 1988),2 no one has written more insightfully about trauma. It is difficult to overemphasize O’s influence on contemporary Korean writers. P’yŏn Hyeyŏng, one of the most prominent of the current generation, wrote her master’s thesis on O. According to the dust jacket of O’s 2006 essay collection, The Patterns of My Heart (Nae maŭm ŭi munŭi), among the authors most influenced by her are Shin Kyŏngsuk (author of the U.S. best-selling Please Look After Mom [Ŏmma rŭl put’akhae, 2008]), Chŏn Kyŏngnin, Cho Kyŏngnan, Ha Sŏngnan, and Yun Sŏnghŭi. And the obligatory interpretive essay in a 1994 volume of self-selected stories was written by none other than Kim Hyesun, contemporary Korea’s
C5873.indb 222
4/20/12 8:00 AM
afterword
223
most imaginative poet and a mentor to a generation of creative writers.3 These accomplishments are all the more noteworthy when we consider that O’s “official” oeuvre of literary fiction (the works contained in the five volumes of her fiction published by Munhak kwa chisŏng sa) consists of a mere three dozen pieces— thirty-four stories, a novella, and a novel. That she has accomplished so much on the basis of such a comparatively slender output bears witness to her desire to make every work count. notes 1. O Chŏnghŭi, afterword to Pul ŭi kang (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏng sa, 1977), 281. 2. Ch’oe Yun, “There a Petal Silently Falls,” in There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, 1–78 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 3. Kim Hyesun, “Yŏsŏngjŏk chŏngch’esŏng hyanghayŏ” (Toward a female identity), in Yet umul, 375–98 (Seoul: Ch’ŏng’a ch’ulp’ansa, 1994).
suggestions for further re ading Fulton, Bruce. “O Chŏnghŭi.” In The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua Mostow, 701–3. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. O Chŏnghŭi. The Bird. Trans. Jenny Wang Medina. London: Telegram Books, 2007. ——. “The Bronze Mirror.” Trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. In Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, rev. and exp. ed., ed. Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 215–32. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007. ——. “Chinatown.” In Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 202–30. Seattle: Seal Press, 1989. ——. “Evening Game.” In Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 181–201.
C5873.indb 223
4/20/12 8:00 AM
224
afterword
——. “The Face.” In A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition, trans. with commentary by John Holstein, 215–29. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2009. ——. “Garden of My Childhood.” Trans. Ha-yun Jung. Words Without Borders (online), November 2005. http://wordswithoutborders .org/article/garden-of-my-childhood/ ——. “The Monument Intersection.” In The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories, trans. Suh Ji-moon, 199–248. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998. ——. “The Party.” Trans. Sŏl Sun-bong. Korea Journal 23, no. 10 (October 1983): 49–64. ——. “Spirit on the Wind.” In The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 25–121. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. ——. “Wayfarer.” Trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. In Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon, 329– 44. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ——. “Weaver Woman.” Trans. Miseli Jeon. In Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea, ed. Bruce Fulton, 35–49. St. Paul: Koryo Press, 2011. ——. “Words of Farewell.” In Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 231–74. Yi, Hyangsoon. “The Journey as Meditation: A Buddhist Reading of O Chŏnghŭi’s ‘Words of Farewell.’” Religion and Literature 34, no. 3 (2002): 57–73.
C5873.indb 224
4/20/12 8:00 AM
W E AT H E R H E A D B O O K S O N A S I A
Since her debut in 1968, O Chŏnghŭi has formed a powerful challenge to the patriarchal literary establishment in Korea. Her style has invited rich comparisons with the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. Her early work, featured in this collection, offers compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Her later stories are expansive, weaving eloquent, occasionally wistful thoughts on lost love and tradition together with provocative explorations of sexuality and gender. O Chŏnghŭi’s narrators stand in for the average individual, struggling to cope with emotional rootlessness and a yearning for permanence in family and society. Arguably the first female Korean fiction writer to follow Woolf ’s dictum to do away with the egoless, self-sacrificing “angel in the house,” O Chŏnghŭi is a crucial figure in modern Korean literature, one of the most astute observers of Korean society and the place of tradition within it. “A strong addition to any international fiction collection, not to be overlooked.” Midwest Book Review
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
“River of Fire and Other Stories makes up an important oeuvre which not only maps O Chŏnghŭi’s long, illustrious career but also beautifully illustrates the history of modern Korean literature through women’s eyes and voices.” jina e. kim, Smith College
NEW YORK
“River of Fire and Other Stories tracks the career of one of South Korea’s most consummate writers, subtly suggesting the violent undertones of life under military dictatorship and the malaise of urban life, and coming to a close with a moving meditation upon aging. The themes here are universal, yet their expression is unique to the controlled precision and delicate interior description that are so characteristic of O Chŏnghŭi’s style. A highly enjoyable read.” janet poole, author of When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea
bruce and ju-chan fulton are translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, including There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun (Columbia, 2008).
jacket image : Here , A ll the Molecules in My Body are Buoyed with P urit y and Ecsta sy, © Toh Yunhee, 2003– 2004, oil and pencil with varnish on canvas, 112cm x 484cm, courtesy of the artist. book & jacket design: Chang Jae Lee
cup.columbia.edu
o chŏnghŭi (b. 1947) is also the author of The Garden of My Childhood and Spirit on the Wind, which contain the critically acclaimed stories “Evening Game” (Chŏnyŏkŭikeim), “Chinatown” (Chungguginkŏri), “Words of Farewell” (Pyŏlsa), “The Bronze Mirror” (Tonggyŏng), and “Wayfarer” (Sullyejaŭinorae).
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.