[_list: Books from Korea] Vol.24 Summer 2014

Vol.24 Summer 2014

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_list : Books from Korea

Foreword

_l

ist: Books from Korea, published by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) since 2008, has played the first violin in introducing Korean books abroad. Every issue has contained almost 150 titles including fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, which means that _list has introduced nearly 3,600 Korean books to the world over the last six years.

Thanks to such efforts, Korean children’s books and nonfiction have been increasing in popularity throughout Asia, including China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Moreover, book readings for Korean writers have been popping up all over Europe and North America. In April this year, Korea participated in the London Book Fair as the Market Focus country 2014.

This was a favorable opportunity to expand Korea’s reputation within the international literary community. Ten Korean writers including Hwang Sokyong, Yi Mun-yol, Lee Seung-U, Kim Insuk, Shin Kyung-sook, Kim Youngha, Han Kang, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Sun-mi, and Yoon Tae-ho took part in various cultural programs and seminars that directly targeted to international readers.

As international readers become increasingly familiar with Korean writers, _list undertakes the editorial mission of providing them with a window to view a broad range of contemporary Korean literature. With judicious selection and accord, we continue to devote special features on specific topics, genres, and individual authors. By putting Korean writers on the world stage, and at the same time highlighting similarities and contrasts among them, we aim to assist international readers in understanding and drawing a topographic map of Korean literature. _list is devoting Volumes 24 and 25 to the theme of “diaspora” with stories about those who live different lives in distant lands, far away from their homeland. In the first half of the 20th century, the Korean diaspora was driven out and confined to Russia, China, Japan, and the US under unavoidable circumstances beginning with Japanese colonialism (19101945). Then, in the second half of the century voluntary emigration powered by a desire for economic, professional, and educational opportunities in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia propelled hundreds of thousands abroad.

Today, over seven million Koreans are living in 170 countries. In Volume 24 under this special theme, _list observes the varied lives of uprooted characters in Korean literature, then in volume 25, writers from the Korean diaspora themselves will share their works.

The featured writer for this volume of _list is Bok Geo-il, an early luminary of science fiction in Korea. It is with honor and pleasure that we present an excerpt from his latest autobiographical novel, A Day in the Life of a Man Who Worries About Trivial Things as a Profession, written while he was fighting cancer. In our digital edition, readers can watch him play the harmonica and baduk (go) as well as hear him read from his latest work.

In order to survive and thrive as a literary magazine in this digital age, we keep in mind how best to communicate with our international readers. For more useful, timely bi-directional communication, we plan to rebuild our website (www.list.or.kr) and iPad application by September. Only through recognizing and embodying the diverse needs of our greater reading audience, can _list build a bridge between Korean writers and international readers.

We invite you to join in building that bridge together.

Building a Bridge Between Korean Writers and International Readers

by Park Jangyun editor-in-chief, _list: Books from Korea

Vol.24 Summer 2014

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Contents 04 08

London Book Fair 2014 Excerpt Spotlight Yi Kwang-Su, The Soil Hyesim, Magnolia & Lotus

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Featured Writer: Bok Geo-il

The Turbulent Life of a Literary Intellectual Outsider Writer’s Insight: A Cartographer’s Dream Interview: The Journey of a Science Fiction Writer Literary Works of Bok Geo-il Writer’s Profile: Standing Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn

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Seoul International Writers’ Festival 2014

Fiction 08 Yi Kwang-Su, The Soil 20 Bok Geo-il, The Jovian Sayings 22 Bok Geo-il, A Day in the Life of a Man Who Worries About Trivial Things as a Profession 34 Kim Young-ha, Black Flower 37 Kim Insuk, The Long Road 40 Kang Young-sook, Rina 42 Seo Hajin, Sugar or Salt 44 Bang Hyeon-seok, Time to Eat Lobster 56 Yi Mun-yol, Our Twisted Hero

Poetry 10 Hyesim, Magnolia & Lotus 25 Kim So Yeon, Okinawa, Tunisia, Francis Jammes 26 Dan Disney, either, Orpheus

Poet Meets Poet: Kim So Yeon and Dan Disney

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Special Section

Transnationalism in Korean Literature Featured Work: Park Kyung-Ri, Land Writer’s Note: Kim Young-ha

Kim Insuk

Kang Young-sook

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54 58 62

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Reviews Hwang Sok-yong, The Shadow of Arms Kim Hyesoon, I’m OK, I’m Pig! Shin Kyung-sook, I’ll Be Right There Han Kang, La Vegetariana Yi In-seong, Sept méandres pour une île Cheon Myeong-kwan, Na Krayu Zhizni Jang Eun-jin, No One Writes Back Organization of Korean Historians, Everyday Life in Joseon-Era Korea

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Korean Literature Essay Contest LTI Korea Trip Culture Spotlight

_list : Books from Korea

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Date of Publication June 18, 2014 All correspondence should be addressed to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea 112 Gil-32, Yeongdong-daero (Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 135-873, Korea Telephone: 82-2-6919-7714 Fax: 82-2-3448-4247 E-mail: list_korea@klti.or.kr www.klti.or.kr www.list.or.kr Vol. 24 Summer 2014 A Literary Quarterly

DIGITAL EDITION www.list.or.kr

APPLICATION

Interview Kim So Yeon and Dan Disney

Bok Geo-il

LTI Korea Trip

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London Book Fair 2014

Online Extras

Video Audio Photo Web

Look for these icons throughout the issue for exclusive online content at www.list.or.kr available starting October 2014.

We promise you we will provide various contents including audio books, photos, videos, and much more.

Vol.24 Summer 2014

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London Book Fair

Korea Market Focus 2014: “Books Opening the Mind, Doors Opening the Future” T

his year’s London Book Fair, held from April 8-10 at Earls Court, was an exciting occasion for the Korean publishing and literary community, with Korea being showcased as the Market Focus country for 2014.

The London Book Fair Korea Market Focus programme consisted broadly of two different types: the Professional Programme, in partnership with the Publishers Association (PA) and the Korean Publishers Association (KPA); and the Cultural Programme, curated by the British Council and LTI Korea. This was the culmination of a number of activities and events which began last year, and the Cultural Programme will continue through this year with Korean writers participating in literary festivals and residencies around the UK. Activities in 2013 leading up to this year’s London Book Fair included literary events with novelists Ch’oe Yun, Jung Young Moon, and Jeong Chan at the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK); a UK writers’ trip to Korea; a Korean literary professionals’ study trip to the UK supported by the Arts Council Korea; and a UK editors’ trip to Korea.

The Professional Programme, which ran concurrently at the London Book Fair, offered a forum for those in the trade to learn more about the Korean publishing industry. Sessions included an overview of the Korean book market, technology and digital publishing, children’s and educational books, and a

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roundtable discussion on translation, publication, and globalization of Korean literature.

The Cultural Programme during the London Book Fair involved 10 prominent Korean writers and more than 35 panelists including British writers, translators, and editors at more than 20 events at 12 venues across four cities. The invited delegation of writers represented the diversity of contemporary Korean writing, including critically acclaimed novelists Hwang Sok-yong, Yi Mun-yol, Lee Seung-U, Kim Insuk, Shin Kyung-sook, Kim Young-ha, and Han Kang; distinguished poet Kim Hyesoon; groundbreaking webtoonist Yoon Tae-ho; and children’s books writer and the London Book Fair’s Market Focus “Author of the Day,” Hwang Sun-mi. Writer Krys Lee and literary translator Brother Anthony of Taizé were also invited from Seoul by the British Council and LTI Korea to take part in several events. Each Korean writer participated in at least one London Book Fair seminar at Earls Court and one public event at major venues across London (Asia House, British Library, English PEN/Free Word Centre, Korean Cultural Centre UK, London Review Bookshop, and the Saison Poetry Library at the Royal Festival Hall) or the UK (Cambridge Literary Festival, Edinburgh Central Library, and Wales Literature Exchange).

Most events featured a Korean writer alongside a UK writer and a literary professional to discuss wideranging themes and topics, including the relationship

between literature and history, illusions and reality, allegory and literary imagination, family and identity, text and visual media, and literary translation.

All the events were very well attended with a diverse range of audience members, from those with a personal interest in Korean culture, to those in the publishing trade and literary profession from the UK and around the world. The topics and content of each and every event were thoughtfully conceived and stimulating for the purposes of the Market Focus programme, and responses from the participants and audience were very positive overall. It was evident that a great deal of consideration and planning went in, from the selection of panelists, types of events, venues, and other details, to ensure that the Korea Market Focus programme would not merely be a oneoff project, but a significant foundation from which new opportunities and relationships can be created, developed, and nurtured between the British and Korean literary industry and participants to help promote Korean literature in the UK or Englishlanguage market and British literature in Korea.

While K-pop, film, and other cultural aspects of the “Korean Wave” have enjoyed growing popularity and recognition, Korean literature has been relatively unknown on British shores. Thus, the advent of this year’s London Book Fair Korea Market Focus has been timely, and those of us passionate about Korean literature in the UK feel hopeful that new initiatives have started in earnest to encourage future prospects for Korean literature to reach a wider audience in the English-language speaking world.

The full brochure and further details of the LBF Korea Market Focus 2014 can be found on The British Council Literature website.

As part of the ongoing Korea Market Focus Cultural Programme, the novelist Gong JiYoung was invited to appear at the Hay Festival on May 25, and writers Bae Suah and Kim Aeran will be in residence this summer at Writers’ Centre Norwich and the University of Edinburgh respectively. Gong Ji-Young and Bae Suah have also been scheduled to participate in literary events in May and June hosted by the Centre of Korean Studies at SOAS, University of London, in association with the British Council, Arts Council Korea, and Writers’ Centre Norwich.

literature.britishcouncil. org/projects/2014/ london-book-fair-2014

www.soas.ac.uk/ koreanstudies

by Grace Koh SOAS, University of London

Visit the _list website to view photo galleries.

Grace Koh’s research areas include Korean and East Asian literary traditions; literary and intellectual history; travel literature and cultural encounters; and critical theory and comparative literature.

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London Book Fair

Translation Market Grows B

oth the UK and the US have a long tradition of ignoring literature in translation, relying on second generation immigrants, who are native English speakers, to tell the stories of their countries of origin to a wide public, while relegating the job of translation to university presses with small and specialist readerships.

This has put foreign language literature at a triple disadvantage: it not only limits the quantity of translated books, widely reported to be under three percent of the market in both the UK and the US, but it limits the reach of those that are translated—implying that this is not literature for the general reader, even if they are able to track it down. It also affects the nature of the translations themselves. Academics may be knowledgable and faithful to the original text, but they are not necessarily the most creative of translators; their principle aim is not to entertain but to educate.

In the last few years in the UK this has begun to change, with a number of small publishers springing up with a mission to champion literature in translation, while a handful of organizations have begun to offer support, either through campaigning and promoting (as in the case of Literature Across Frontiers) or, in the case of English PEN, through direct sponsorship of translations.

It is against this background that in 2004 the London Book Fair created its Market Focus initiative, which this year chose Korea as its subject.

A partnership with the British Council enabled it

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to spread out to other cities in Scotland, England, and Wales. In total the cultural programme involved 10 writers in 18 events across four cities during the week of the book fair, with two residencies and three festival appearances due over summer 2014.

Of the 10 writers selected for the fair, I was aware in advance of only two: Shin Kyung-sook for Please Look after Mom, and Hwang Sun-mi for The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, both of which have been published in translation in the last two years.

All the other Korean novelists I have read write in English. I don’t think I am unusual in this.

Yet the Market Focus comes at a time when there is a great appetite for Korean culture: bibimbap restaurants are springing up around London, while K-pop has become a cult among the UK’s musical youth. On the literary side, the huge popularity of Japanese manga would suggest that there should be following for Korean manhwa. But, as represented at the book fair by Yoon Taeho, this vibrant literary culture presents a particular challenge: manhwa has not commercialized itself in the way that manga has, and is so strongly rooted in the culture and cityscape of Seoul that it requires a double mediation, of imagery and of text. In a fascinating discussion at the LTI Korea, Yoon explained how important it is to remain true to societal realities, while revealing just how technologically advanced the Korean comics industry is, and what a powerful commercial model it has in webtoons.

Among the senior novelists, Yi Mun-yol and Hwang Sok-yong inspired particular interest from the writers’ organization PEN, making both solo and panel appearances. Both told stories about Korean

history that are unfamiliar to the West. Yi spoke of the separation of families, and the importance of ritual based on a shared sense of place in the psyche of a divided country.

PEN director, Jo Glanville, said that Hwang’s own political history, and the way in which he embodied it in his work, opened eyes to a narrative of the last 60 years in East Asia that was very different to the one with which most westerners are familiar: his Vietnam novel The Shadow of Arms interrogates the Americanized version of history perpetrated largely through movies, while The Guest offers a brave challenge to preconceptions about blame in North and South Korea. Both Hwang and Yi have suffered in the past from poor, and dated translations and will hopefully reach far wider audiences now that their key works are being reissued and retranslated.

Yi Mun-yol also took part in a session on “Allegory and the Literary Imagination,” raising interesting questions about the ways in which Korean fiction is read in the West. In works such as his novella Our Twisted Hero, allegory offers a way of dealing with political complexities that are often lost in translation; though intended as an illustration of forms of dictatorship, Our Twisted Hero has been widely read in US schools as an anti-bullying parable.

However, the tradition of allegory and fable is one of the strengths of Korean literature, in that it has the capacity to make the specific universal—as demonstrated by the international success of Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, which has picked up a following among both young and adult readers.

I personally was fascinated to meet these authors and to discover a literature about which I was shamefully ignorant. I am impatient to read more. However, the big challenge that faces Korea,

as with many other literary cultures, was outlined in a panel discussion on “Translation in the Marketplace.” John Siciliano, executive editor of Penguin Random House, said that what the big publishing houses were looking for was literature that didn’t appear to be translated at all. Readers wanted good stories to which they could relate directly. Translators, another panelist said, need to work from their second language into their first in order to deliver that smooth reading experience—so there need to be more native English-speakers commissioned to translate into English.

There was, however, a general agreement that the growth of passionate, independent publishers, and the opportunities offered by online publishing, meant that the market for literature in translation is healthier now than it has been in the past. The political belligerence, and secrecy, of North Korea has meant that there is currently a strong interest in books about the Korean peninsula. At present that appetite is mostly served by journalistic accounts and survivor stories, but I believe there is huge scope for the more nuanced accounts that well-translated fiction and poetry can offer.

Claire Armitstead is a published author who has contributed essays to New Performance (Macmillan, 1994) and Women: A Cultural Review (Oxford University Press, 1996). She makes regular appearances on radio and television as a cultural commentator on literature and the arts.

by Claire Armitstead literary editor, The Guardian

The London Book Fair Market Focus initiative has done much to open doors, creating both commercial and cultural partnerships around the world since it was first introduced in 2004. The objective of the Market Focus is to put the spotlight on publishing trade links with the country or region that is showcased, highlighting its publishing industry, and the opportunities for conducting business with the rest of the world.

Korea was chosen as Market Focus for 2014 to reflect the country’s status as one of the top 10 publishing markets in the world, and its growing reputation within the international literary community, as exemplified by Shin Kyung-sook winning the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.

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Excerpt Spotlight

The Soil and Magnolia & Lotus included in

World Literature Today’s “75 Notable Translations 2013” Part 1-Chapter 1

A

The Soil Yi Kwang-Su Translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013, 420p ISBN 9781564789112

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_list :: Books from Korea

fter returning from the night school where he taught, Heo Sung lay down, resting his neck upon his schoolbag and lacing his fingers behind his head to form a pillow. Lying still, he could hear mosquitoes buzzing to and fro as they tried to get around the mosquito-repellent smoke. Now that the seventh month of the lunar calendar was half past, the wind felt a bit cool after nightfall.

For a couple of years, Heo Sung had lived in Seoul with little possibility of hearing the mosquitoes’ buzz. In his hometown, even listening to them again pleased him.

“How tall and beautiful Yu Sun has become,” Heo Sung murmured to himself. Her image appeared before him, healthy and strong with gently rounded features. Though her face was tanned dark from the mountain region’s strong sunlight, her eyes, nose, and mouth stood out sharply without losing the softness of a young woman’s features. Reflecting moonlight, her face had been beautiful, almost like moonlight itself. Only her roughened hands did not fit. Used for weeding fields and working in water, they were not the porcelain hands of a city woman. She wore a stiff skirt and a traditional summer jacket of hemp cloth, along with black rubber shoes. She went without socks, which left the tops of her feet darkly tanned. Equally dark were her hands, wrists, and neck, as well as her calves below the short bloomers and shorter skirt, as if the summer sunlight had wished to kiss her body whenever offered a chance, desiring her beautiful and healthy skin.

Heo Sung tried to compare Yu Sun with Jeongseon. The latter was daughter to Mr. Yun, the aristocratic official in whose Seoul residence Sung was the house tutor. Jeong-seon was a fragile woman with fair skin, almost transparent, and hands so

small and soft that they seemed likely to shatter at a touch. She had been one of the loveliest beauties in Sookmyung Girls’ High School.

In Sung’s eyes, Jeong-seon was the celestial maiden of the moon, so unreachable. He had roomed in the servants’ quarters of the Yun family while tutoring their young son in primary school studies, and for such a poor man from the countryside without parents or property, a beautiful woman like Jeong-seon, the only daughter of a noble and wealthy family, was one in whose presence he felt unworthy even to lift up his eyes.

But he might be able to secure at least a woman like Yu Sun for himself. In his current situation, Yu Sun’s parents might be reluctant to offer him their daughter’s hand, but they would perhaps consider him as a future son-in-law after he had graduated from college.

With those thoughts, Sung sighed over his circumstances.

Sung’s family had been among the welloff families in the village. His father Gyeom, a graduate of Daesung School in Pyongyang, had been arrested several times under the Japanese Military Police Government as a suspect in the Sinminhoe, Bukgando, and Seogando affairs, as well as in the independence movement. His various sentences added up to about eight years, but he spent over ten altogether behind bars, including detentions at the police station after his arrest and his time confined during the investigations.

The family fortune had been used up in supporting him those long prison years, and sustaining the household itself was difficult, let alone providing for Sung’s school fees. Once out of prison, Gyeom had used the family’s rice paddies and other lands as collateral for funds from a financial cooperative to start a business. But having no experience with that

kind of work, he failed, losing all the collateral land, and so turned to alcohol out of anger, only to die of typhoid fever. His wife and daughter, Sung’s younger sister, also became infected and died, leaving Sung with nothing but the clothes on his back.

Sung thus had no place of his own, and the house where he was now staying belonged to his cousin Seong.

Yu Sun’s family lived over a hill from where he was staying. Her parents were simple farmers. Sun’s father Jin-hi was still young, and her grandfather had succeeded in the first-level national exam, attaining the title chosi. The Heo clan had lived in Sung’s village for several hundred years. The Yu clan had lived equally as long in the village over the hill. Both had produced family members who had succeeded in the national exams, or who had lived in the tile-roofed houses of the rich. But according to Grandfather Yu, “There’s been no use for scholarship or in being yangban nobility since the Reformation of 1894.”

As the two villages slowly declined, the courageous gave up their government offices, tied headbands to their brows, and threw away their books and brush pens to wield hoes in rice paddies instead. Some, however, buckled down, sticking to their offices and hoping for the glory of old times.

But a few like Sung’s father stood “at the forefront of reform,” keeping their hair cut short and wearing Western-style clothes. Some of these ended up in prison. Members of Yu Sun’s family were among the quiet, sly ones who looked out for their own interests. Heo Sung’s family was among those active in affairs, working to improve the world or going to modern schools. (pp. 5-7)

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Excerpt Spotlight

Magnolia & Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim Hyesim Translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yŏng Hŏ New York, White Pine Press, 2013, 97p ISBN 9781935210436

October 1231, I Pass by Growth of Humanity Temple: Borrowing a Poem Written on a Wall A stand of bamboo unifies a garden— a salutary breeze drifts below a fence.

In the season of golden leaves, I regret the day’s brevity— this night of silence—I want it to last.

Sun showers surround the Abbot’s quarters— humid air entices the land.

Five days I’ve stayed, resting my staff and shoes— such a delight when the world’s grace endures.

“This poem was written near the end of Hyesim’s life. It has a tonal and thematic peace that suggests Hyesim had a deep appreciation for the beauty of the world, and possibly an awareness that his time in the world was coming to an end.” translation note by Ian Haight

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Featured Writer

The Turbulent Life of a

Literary Intellectual Outsider T

he most thought-provoking conversation I’ve ever had with writer Bok Geo-il took place at the end of the 1990s. At the time, Korea was under IMF trusteeship, a part of history that Koreans will not soon forget. While Korea was undergoing such a devastating financial crisis, I arranged a roundtable with Bok Geo-il through Munye Joongang, the magazine I was afraid with. He was known as an economic expert and a cosmopolitan in literary circles. Another cosmopolitan writer who was visiting Korea, that is, the late translator Lee Yun-gi, was also in attendance at the roundtable. This turned out to be the very place where Bok Geo-il proposed the infamous “English as the official language in Korea” that led to a riotous debate that exploded among cultural and literary circles. I believe this was the first time that Bok so unguardedly brought up this idea at an official debate (rather than through his writing).

Anyone who lived through those times in this country would remember how Bok’s suggestion came as such a tremendous shock. It was not surprising that most intellectuals—except for a small minority of openminded and liberal-leaning ones—were outraged by this idea that was considered tantamount to giving up national sovereignty, and they passionately denounced this writer with the unusual name. So then, does Bok’s decision to coolly bring up the issue anyway, fully expecting vilification, make him a foolish Don Quixote, or Joan of Arc, a passionate hero who simply wanted to save her country?

by Han Ki professor of Korean Literature, University of Seoul

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Writer’s Insight

A Cartographer’s Dream M

y image of myself is as a shabby cartographer haunting the wharves of Lisbon or Amsterdam at the dawn of the Great Seafaring Age in the 16th century. This cartographer patiently fills up blanks and redraws contours on his map, guessing the shapes of distant continents with tips gleaned from sailors that have crossed the dangerous seas. Though he cannot compete with the official cartographers that are supported by the royal courts and he barely makes a living, haunted by unknown continents that slowly reveal their shapes, he has dedicated his life to making a map of the world. A shabby cartographer is an apt metaphor. From my childhood I was fascinated by knowledge and aspired to be an intellectual. As George Orwell said, the most prominent feature of an intellectual is the love of knowledge that has no practical use in everyday life. But such useless knowledge is essential to make a map of this world.

In the 19th century the high waves of European civilization suddenly arrived and overwhelmed East Asia. The encounter and merger of the two great civilizations was a fundamental force that shaped East Asia’s modern history. It was so vast a process that it couldn’t have been anything but allencompassing and violent. Since the first Opium War between China and Britain erupted in 1839, all the wars in East Asia, including the civil wars of Japan, China, and Korea, came out of such encounters and syntheses of civilizations.

A technologically advanced Europe that had successfully carried out the scientific revolution and Industrial Revolution easily subjugated the traditional civilizations of East Asia. Such triumphs of European civilization were in fact the last step in its global dominance. In so many societies traditional social structures and value systems were rapidly replaced by those of Europe.

China was the center of East Asia and the written Chinese language was the lingua franca for the entire region. Korea, a relatively small country between China and Japan, had absorbed ancient Chinese civilization from early on and her culture

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_list : Books from Korea

came to have characteristics as a periphery of Chinese culture.

As civilizations throughout the world came to be synthesized around the dominant values of European civilization, Chinese civilization itself was relegated to the periphery of the emerging global civilization.

Unfortunately, Korea’s effort to modernize lagged behind and it became a colony of Japan early in the 20th century. Since Korea was forced to absorb modernity through the Japanese colonial system, its traditional culture became severely limited and warped. This colonial status added another layer to the already peripheral characteristics of Korea.

Thus, Korean culture came to retain a triple layer of periphery.

The features of peripheral societies are idiosyncratic, quite different from those of core societies. This is especially prominent in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge. Since news of the latest developments on the forefront of knowledge from the core only slowly propagates outward, intellectuals on the periphery face great obstacles in their pursuit of creativity and often take the risk of reinvention. In addition, their creativity is seldom appreciated. Since peripheral societies rarely have their own criteria for evaluating creative work, they usually refer to the core for judgment. Naturally, even when a truly creative work comes out of the periphery, it cannot be instantly recognized as such. Only when its value is fortuitously recognized by the core, is it accepted in its own society. Since every civilization has a vast periphery and peripheral societies have common features, this is a matter of universal significance.

From early on, I was interested in this matter. Korea’s triple-layered periphery imposes fundamental limitations on its culture. In fact, I found that nearly all the features, especially the undesirable ones, of Korean society have been shaped by such a historical condition. It is obvious that to overcome such limitations Koreans should first recognize and reflect on this periphery. If it

is very difficult to honestly recognize and patiently reflect on one’s own shortcomings, it is practically impossible for a society to do so. Nationalism permeates every facet of society and seldom permits calm social discussions, so I decided to deal with such peripheral features of Korean culture in my literary works.

One of the reasons why I am so sensitive to the peripheral characteristics of my society is that I have always pursued knowledge for its own sake. For a man who wished to be a cartographer of knowledge, the vast asymmetry between my heritage and European civilization was the most fundamental condition.

And I wanted to understand how such a historical situation had come about. I defined myself as an intellectual on the periphery and from that vantage point surveyed and reflected on human history and civilization.

The fact that European civilization’s preeminence ultimately came out from the scientific revolution and the Industrial Revolution induced me to pay close attention to science and technology. While I studied how science and technology shaped and advanced our lives, I was also keen to observe how science and technology from Europe permeated and changed other civilizations, creating a global civilization in the process. And I tried to put the knowledge and insights thus gained into my literary works.

Such an attitude allows my works to retain the features of science fiction and I endeavor to offer “conceptual breakthroughs” that science fiction so felicitously permits. In Search of an Epitaph (1987), an alternative history, described a counterfactual contemporary Korean society still under colonial rule of the Japanese Empire. In it I tried to delineate the features in the actual Korean society that had been shaped through the experience of colonial rule. A Traveler in History (1991) is a time travel novel, in which a late 21st century chrononaut gets stranded in 16th century Korea and attempts to transform medieval society into a more developed and humane one, fully using his modern knowledge. Such a setting is good for illuminating how knowledge grows

and affects social development. The Jovian Sayings (2014), set on the Jovian satellite Ganemede, speculates on the implications of well-developed artificial intelligence and searches for cooperation between humans and robots. Other works of mine also deal with scientific knowledge in the near or distant future.

I have written my literary works as the map of this world. All human knowledge takes the form of a story. We can perceive the world in no other way.

Even a sentence is a miniature story. Literature is an apt means to delineate the shape of the world. And science fiction is the most relevant form of literature in a modern civilization primarily driven by science and technology.

by Bok Geo-il writer

ⓒBok Eunjo

Vol.24 Summer 2014 13

Interview

The Journey of a

Science Fiction Writer Bok Geo-il is widely considered to be a writer who has ushered in a new epoch in the Korean SF genre. Having made a spectacular debut with the novel In Search of an Epitaph, Bok has continued to expand the horizons of Korean SF by making use of distinctive literary devices such as time reversal or the reverse of history.

Ko Doo Hyun: You debuted as a writer at age 41 with the novel In Search of an Epitaph published in 1987 after you quit a pretty decent job. At the time of your debut, you were an obscure writer. What made you choose to write a science fiction novel using the literary device of a so-called “alternate history� for your debut? A lot of people wonder why you chose the SF genre among others.

Bok Geo-il:

Ko Doo Hyun and Bok Geo-il

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At the time when I started to work on my first book, Korean society was in an extremely oppressive atmosphere. My first book was published in 1987.

At that time, the Fifth Republic of Korea had been established by a new military group, which lasted from 1981 to 1988. Under the authoritarian regime, which was established as a result of a military coup, it was very difficult to depict Korean society as it was.

I thought that under such circumstances it would be unwise to opt for a mainstream literary technique to reflect and portray the reality of Korea. So I decided to reverse the concept. That is, I attempted to draw attention to the fact that the era of the Fifth Republic shared something in common with the Japanese Imperialist era.

Ko: If your debut novel In Search of an Epitaph can be taken as a “reverse of history,” then A Traveler in History published in 1991, four years after your first book, could be a “reverse of time.” It was first published in three volumes. Now more than 20 years later, you are going to publish the fourth volume.

What has driven you to follow up with this sequel?

I was told that after you were diagnosed with liver cancer, the first thing that came to your mind was to finish this series.

Bok: I always wanted to depict the fundamental structure of Korean society through an intellectual novel. In this sense, my second novel, A Traveler in History, was set in a context where sophisticated knowledge of 21st century Korea is transplanted into 16th century Joseon. The first, second, and third volumes of the book have been released, which have all been highly received by readers. However, after the release of the third volume, a flood of requests to write articles has deprived me of time, thus preventing me from working on my next book.

Along the way, I was diagnosed with cancer, which of course sobered me. At that time, what crossed my mind was that I had to finish the sequel first more than anything else. As of now the writing process is almost done, so I expect that a new book will come out by this fall.

Ko: Many people think that SF novels will grow in hand with futurology. You have defined “science fiction novels as science incarnate that best reflects the real world.” Then, what do you think is the difference between pure literature and science fiction?

Bok: It is technology that drastically changes our life. Well, technology basically arises from science.

For that matter, mobile phones can be cited as an example. Unfortunately, however, literature is unable to deal with technology properly. Literature, more often than not, explores the emotional aspects of human beings. Science fiction is a type of writing that takes stories related to science more seriously.

Of course, novels from different genres also partially

deal with science. Every novel that portrays modern societies, to some extent, shares the characteristics of science fiction.

Ko: You have said that much of your knowledge of natural science came from Isaac Asimov’s works of science fiction, haven’t you? You likened him as a “guide to an intellectual exploration of the universe.” I just wonder how greatly Isaac Asimov has influenced you.

Bok: Scientists are required to conform to the norms set by the scientific community. They have to tell only what has been proved beyond any doubt.

Talking about the future takes imagination, but science cannot move forwards where science, magic, and superstition are all combined together. So science fiction writers have often predicted science will proceed on such a course. As far as the future is concerned science fiction writers are experts. What science fiction writers do through their works is freely go back and forth from today’s human society to the far-off future. The 1930s and 1940s produced many great science fiction writers. Isaac Asimov is the most representative figure of that period. He was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written 500 books throughout his life. I have so far written only 50 books, and this has worked me to death. So, writing 500 books during a life is too hard to imagine. He was extremely knowledgeable and full of imagination, so I just followed his lead.

As that was the case, it is difficult to pinpoint which part of me as a writer has been most greatly influenced by Isaac Asimov.

It is more appropriate to say his influence is all over me.

All the masters of science fiction are my teachers.

Vol.24 Summer 2014 15

Ko: I believe the ultimate goal science fiction novels pursue is to find an answer to a fundamental question: What are human beings about? Are there any tips on how to write a good SF novel that you want to give your fellow junior writers or prospective writers?

Ko Doo Hyun started his literary career in 1993 when he won the annual spring literary contest sponsored by the JoongAng Ilbo with his serial poem “Anthology of Exile Poetry: On the Way to Namhae.” He has so far published two books of poems: A Parcel Being Delivered Late and A Letter Being Sent from Mulmi Coast. Ko was also awarded the 10th Young Poet Prize of Poetry and Poetics.

Bok: I believe, above all things, writers should be very honest. Being honest takes a lot of courage.

So it seems to be the most daunting task. For this reason, George Orwell and Henry Miller are the writers whom I respect most as my masters. But in fact, I am not so honest as my masters. Being an honest man requires considerable courage. Thus, I think that writers who lack this quality are forced to narrow their own limitations.

Ko: I absolutely agree with you. And I have brought your new book titled A Day in the Life of a Man Who Worries About Trivial Things as a Profession (2014) with me. This new book is your third autobiographical work and it’s the one that most directly portrays your life as a writer after Plain Tales from High Hills (1988), which is about the tragic situation of the divided nation experienced by the author in his 20s while serving in the military as an artillery officer, and Invisible Hand (2006), which reflects him as an author and social critic in his 50s. Am I right?

Bok: Yes, you are. I tried to show the process by which the protagonist of the novel gradually grows up from his 20s, through his 50s to his 60s in these three autobiographical works. For me it’s a small achievement in itself and I am very satisfied with the fact that I succeeded in showing to readers who particularly care for me the process of how an intellectual becomes a mature human being.

on a sleepless night after being diagnosed with liver cancer, that poetry, a genre that you had paid little attention to, flooded into your mind. And I also heard that experience made you feel that what had been clogging your heart suddenly went away. You have already published two books of poems since then, haven’t you?

Bok: I’m not sure whether it’s an appropriate analogy or not. But, shale gases are extracted when enormous pressure is applied to break rocks. It seems that the entire time I was mostly writing prose, the poet inside me couldn’t come out. But the shadow of death that suddenly loomed over me seems to have acted as “pressure” and in turn ruptured something that was clogging my heart. Amid this process, the shale gases of the poet inside me finally gushed out.

That was the process. One early spring, at dawn I heard a baby crying, which came from somewhere among the apartment buildings. A baby crying is a good thing. Then the sound of the baby crying suddenly reminded me of the image of my parents’ graves and then my past, which finally inspired me to write poetry. And then, a string of poems poured out. After writing poems, the heavy worries that had been oppressing me for a month just went away in less than 15 days. In retrospect, perhaps the unusual experience that I went through seems to have been a healing process.

Ko: And I hope that more sounds of babies crying will help you compose lots of good poetry in the years ahead. And I also wish you good health. Thank you.

by Ko Doo Hyun poet and reporter at The Korea Economic Daily

Ko: I heard that while you were mooning around To watch video highlights of this interview, visit www.list.or.kr

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_list : Books from Korea

Literary Works

of Bok Geo-il

In Search of an Epitaph

Autumn in Ojangwon

Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1987, 372p ISBN 8932009805

Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1988, 117p ISBN 9788932003498

A Traveler in History

Under the Blue Moon

Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1991, 291p ISBN 2002194004763

Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1992, 324p ISBN 8932005966

A Lullaby for My Aging Wife

The Unforgotten War

Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2001, 112p ISBN 893201292X

Singapore, Stallion Press Pte Ltd. 2014, 129p ISBN 9789810787905

Vol.24 Summer 2014 17

Writer’s Profile

An Introduction to Writer Bok Geo-il

B

ok Geo-il, as a novelist and social critic, holds a distinct and unique position in Korean society.

He has mostly published science fiction, an unpopular literary genre among Korean readers, and has been well known for his outspoken comments on a variety of controversial social issues.

There are several elements that clearly distinguish him from other Korean writers. And these elements are intimately connected.

First, Bok debuted as a writer after going through a fairly unusual process and then instantly established himself within the literary community in Korea. Bok debuted in his early 40s, a relatively older age for a new writer to enter the scene. He worked as a salaryman for many years before starting his career as a novelist. His first novel In Search of an Epitaph was published in 1987. His debut work came out in book form from Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd., a leading publisher of literature in Korea. In most cases, new writers start their professional writing careers by publishing a short story in a newspaper or literary magazine. However, the writer as newcomer received exceptional treatment from Moonji; in turn, the publisher’s bold attempt was a huge success.

What made this exceptional treatment and process possible is that Bok Geo-il had long built extensive knowledge in the social and natural sciences as well as literature, and trained himself to be a writer.

Second, although his first work In Search of an Epitaph is an SF novel that takes the form of an alternate history, his book was highly received by the mainstream literary establishment. In Search of an Epitaph is set in an imaginary history. The story of this novel develops under a hypothesis that Japan was not defeated in the Second World War and accordingly Korea is still under Japanese colonial rule until the late 1980s. As the author mentions in

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Writer’s Profile

Standing Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn:

the novel’s preface, such an alteration of a historical event is a literary device frequently used in science fiction. However, at that time, Korean society had little awareness and understanding of the SF genre, and so In Search of an Epitaph was widely regarded only as lowbrow genre fiction. As a result, the general public paid more attention to the writer and his work rather than to the SF genre itself, which has remained relatively underdeveloped in Korea.

Third, one of the characteristics that can define the writer is his unique ideological position. Without reserve Bok has expressed opinions that have been strikingly different from most Korean intellectuals and writers. It is his outspokenness that has often landed him at the center of controversies involving non-literary issues. He has strongly advocated liberalism and the capitalist market economy and presented audacious outlooks and opinions on social change brought by the advancement of technology.

Many readers who have progressive thoughts have wrongly taken him for a stubborn conservative, rather than a liberal. Not only that, they have had ill feelings towards the writer’s ideas that are a clear departure from nationalistic views. The most cited example of this is his insistence on the designation of English as Korea’s common language.

Being an intellectual on the periphery, as expressed by the author himself, Bok has been one of the few writers who continue to seek a “conceptual breakthrough” in Korean society. The outspoken writer has raised issues about various customs that have been widely accepted as social norms and proposed remedial measures, attempting a radical reform of society. In addition, as an SF writer, Bok has carried on with experiments in the SF genre that have yet to be explored, rather than just cater to the demotic tastes of readers.

Besides In Search of an Epitaph, among his major works is a roman fleuve titled A Traveler in History (1991). The saga begins where the protagonist has time traveled to the past, going back to medieval Korea, or the Joseon era. The main character, who has knowledge and know-how from the 21st century, strives to build a new society by replacing the medieval feudal system. It is needless to say that the writer’s own ideas are actively reflected in the very thought of creating a new society. Furthermore, the serial story Under the Blue Moon (1992) released by a commercial computer communication service, a first of its kind in Korea, unfolds as a drama involving crew members who fall in love at a NorthSouth Korean moonbase.

Among other literary works of importance is a trilogy of autobiographical novels. Plain Tales from High Hills (1988) is the first part of the trilogy and deals with the author in his 20s. The autobiographical novel recounts the writer’s personal experience as a military officer stationed at the DMZ on the border of North and South Korea during the 1960s; during that period, he fought a battle against North Korean soldiers, witnessing fellow soldiers wounded or killed. This first part of the trilogy is a candid account of the agony and thoughts of a young intellectual who faces a divided nation.

And then Invisible Hand (2006), the second part of the trilogy, begins with a story related to 2009 Lost Memories, a Korean movie adapted from his debut novel In Search of an Epitaph. The writer lost a copyright lawsuit against the film studio that produced the movie in question. In Invisible Hand, the writer narrates what he saw and felt during

the lawsuit in a composed tone, while making an assessment and prediction on the multifarious aspects of human beings and Korean society from a broad and contemplative perspective.

Recently, the third part of the autobiographical trilogy, A Day in the Life of a Man Who Worries About Trivial Things as a Profession (2014), has been released. In this novel, the writer relates the tangled feelings of a novelist who is fully occupied with writing a book, while rejecting treatment even after being given a warning for a serious health problem.

The author, now in the twilight years of his life, looks back on a wealth of past memories and tries to find his true identity as a novelist, particularly as an SF writer, rather than as a social critic.

Bok Geo-il is an unlucky writer to say the least. He has published great SF novels, but he has yet to receive proper appraisal from his contemporaries. Although he has espoused incisive analyses of social issues based on his scientific, rational thoughts, many readers are still unwilling to take him seriously. However, I am convinced that he deserves more attention than he has gotten so far from Korean readers. I am sure that particularly those readers of the younger generation will be fascinated by his works over time.

It is his outspokenness that has often landed him at the center of controversies involving nonliterary issues.

by Park Sang-joon director, Seoul SF Archive

Vol.24 Summer 2014 19

Excerpt

The Jovian Sayings #418

To a politician, nothing is more important than choosing one’s foe well. If one chooses a man too strong for oneself as one’s foe, one will be in mortal danger. If one chooses a small man as one’s foe, one will become small oneself. If one’s attention is fixed to a false foe, one won’t be ready when a real foe appears. When one destroys all visible foes, there will arise an invisible foe within one’s bosom.

- Miriam Hahn

The Jovian Sayings Bok Geo-il Translated by the author Singapore, Stallion Press Pte Ltd. 2014, 112p ISBN 9789810787912

20 _list : Books from Korea

O

n coming to power, Timothy Goldstein (2773-2895), president of East Ganymede, began to persecute Chris Hermann, who had competed with him in the presidential election. In a long article titled ‘One Good Foe is Worth Ten Friends’ in the Jovian Gazette, Miriam Hahn urged Goldstein to desist from such attitude and instead regard Hermann as a proper ‘foe.’ She pointed out that a political leader should choose a good ‘foe’ and supported her argument with examples from the history of East Ganymede.

“Our history after the division clearly shows this point. President Mistral Chao regarded the Crystal Group that split off from her Democratic Party as the most menacing foe. So, she did not clearly recognize the threat posed by the ambitious military in an economically distressed society and was ousted from presidency only two years after her election by the 7/17 Military Coup.”

“President Julian Peletier, a nononsense professional soldier, did not brook any opposition. To him, all opponents were people who opposed for opposition’s sake and who were no more than objects for political engineering. Unfortunately, without any foe outside, there appeared a foe within. At the apogee of his political career, Peletier was assassinated by his intelligence chief whom he had trusted with political engineering.”

Miriam Hahn (2821- ) is a historian and has taught at the Galileo University.

Renowned for her knowledge and insight in the history of Ganymede, she wrote many celebrated books, including The Adventurous (2878), The Political History of Ganymede (2879) and The Cultural Landscape of a Frontier Society (2885). (pp. 12-13)

#465

The gravest problem humanity faces is evolutionary crisis. Humans succeeded in subverting the traditional evolutionary process but so far failed in devising an alternative evolutionary strategy.

- RUFOX 1224 Raynard

R

ufox 1224 has a knack of presenting an issue people would rather not think about in a palatable way. The quoted passage is from Our Tomorrow.

“The gravest problem humanity faces is evolutionary crisis. Humans succeeded in subverting the traditional evolutionary process but so far failed in devising an alternative evolutionary strategy. I cannot think of a crisis more serious than this one.”

“The fundamental entity of all the species originated from the Old Earth is genes, not organisms like human individuals. The survival and propagation of genes is the ultimate purpose of all living creatures and organisms are in essence genecarriers. The sieve of natural selection ensures that individuals are optimized to the propagation of genes. For instance, germ cells that participate in reproduction have great privileges not granted to somatic cells. And individuals are designed to be fittest

during the time of reproduction. Once the period of reproduction is over, the individuals’ bodies rapidly lose vitality.

So there is no divergence of genetic interests between individuals and species.”

“In the case of homo sapiens, the emergence of high intelligence and the rise of civilization had fundamentally changed the situation. Thanks their high intelligence, humans became selfconscious and invented the concept of self. Unsurprisingly, they came to devote more and more resources to the welfare of their selves. And the prosperous civilization provided them with means to do so. So there arose a conflict of interests between the individuals’ self-indulgence and the species’ genetic prerogative. And the individual is winning, as always.”

This novel is an accurate portrayal through metaphor of our political situation.

- Han Ki

(pp. 54-55)

Vol.24 Summer 2014 21

Excerpt

Chapter 5

These Shining Works of Literature translated by Jamie Chang

Part 3

A Day in the Life of a Man Who Worries About Trivial Things as a Profession Bok Geo-il Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.

2014, 200p ISBN 9788954624251

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T

he pedestrian path is narrow. A narrow path has been paved along the banks of a brook, and over half of it has been taken over by the bike lane, so one has to be careful not to knock into others out for a walk. It is a nice spring day, and so there’re many people about.

“Hi,” waves and greets a little girl when their eyes meet. She looks to be about three years old walking down the path with her grandmother.

The girl stares at I-rip. It seems she doesn’t know how to react.

“Ji-hye, can you say hello to the gentleman? Bow and say ‘hello.’” The grandmother stops and instructs her granddaughter.

Only then does the little girl remember what she’d learned. Like a female greeter at a department store, she bows with one hand on her stomach.

“Very good!” A satisfied grin appears on her face as he compliments her. Her grandmother smiles.

“Well, pretty lady, bye bye!”

She waves at him as he does.

Her grandmother looks at her proudly and they walk on again hand in hand.

When he says hello to a child and the child does not respond, the parent or grandparent reflexively urges the child to say hello back. There are hardly any exceptions. It’s rather peculiar.

Whether it’s the parent or grandparent, the guardian doesn’t have time to think consciously about this matter. So it is unlikely that they believe one must respond in kind when someone offers a

friendly greeting, or that a child must learn this behavior to have normal relationships with other people in the future. Perhaps it is simply human nature to be friendly even to people we pass by in the street. Our long history of living in societies must have made us innately friendly. This must be part of a behavior evolutionary biologists call reciprocal altruism.

A bright, warm feeling fills him.

He walks on savoring this light and warmth, and when he glances back, he sees the little girl looking back at him as her grandmother drags her away by the hand. He waves, and she waves back enthusiastically.

A bit out of breath, I-rip stops. It feels as though he is in the last stages of a fight with a foe he cannot defeat.

He lets out a sigh in spite of himself and suddenly feels dejected. He doesn’t want to die like this. It suddenly occurs to him that he would like to be involved in something important and work hard for it before he dies, while he still has the strength.

A sharp sound comes from the brook. An unusually large male duck is chasing a smaller male duck. I-rip suddenly feels a hot surge flowing through his body. It’s the spring, and everyone’s looking for a mate. Dark schools of fish come from the Han River, ducks fight over mates, and pheasants call at the Nanji Hangang Park. The scenery unfolding along the brook suddenly sweeps him up like a symphony. He tries to look at every

Autobiographical Work Series

Part 1 element that forms this scenery and feel it with his heart. From the smallest wildflower to the largest tree, from the fish in the murky water to the people strolling down the path, each living thing is an instrument. Each plays the part written in their bodies to form this grand symphony. To use a metaphor more familiar to I-rip, each living thing is a work of literature written in the same language.

The information in our genes is written in the language of DNA. This language is based on four nucleobases: cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T). Combinations of three form codons that refer to specific amino acids, and the amino acids come together to form protein. In other words, codons are the vocabulary of the DNA language, and since four possibilities fill three slots—4 multiplied by 4 multiplied by 4—they can form a total of 64 possible “words.”

Among these “words” are three “stop signs” that signal the termination of translation. It’s a splendid language complete with periods.

All living things are works written in this language. Even the smallest, most insignificant living thing is a work of literature that relates the saga of 4 billion years in a language that we all share. This revelation came only with age, but when it did, it opened his eyes to a completely new way of looking at sceneries. No part of the picture seemed insignificant.

His works are secondary works of

literature written by works of literature written in the DNA language called “mankind.” No matter how grand, what mankind refers to as literature, or even the arts or culture in general, are based on countless literary works written in the DNA language. If one loses sight of this background, it becomes tough to see the real meaning.

In awe, he looks around once again.

The more he thinks about it, the more he finds it wondrous that such a rich ecosystem has formed around a brook that flows through the heart of the city.

The fact that he has cancer cells growing in his body due to faulty data processing always weighs heavy on his heart, but at this moment, the thought of his being a part of this ecosystem soothes him and washes away the grief. He feels he has come close to making peace with the world, and a feeling close to happiness fills his heart. For someone facing death, that’s no small accomplishment.

He starts to walk again. Feeling his strides gain momentum, he whistles a tune. It’s “Colonel Bogey March.” He remembers a scene from the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, which he saw as a boy. The British prisoners of war were marching along to a whistled tune. The living must live on in this way. In spite of people staring, he walks on, whistling, arms swinging at his sides. (pp. 25-29)

Plain Tales from High Hills Bok Geo-il Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1988, 270p ISBN 2002194001144

Part 2

Invisible Hand Bok Geo-il Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2006, 230p ISBN 9788932016894

Visit the _list website to hear a recording of this work read by the author.

Vol.24 Summer 2014 23

Seoul International Writers’ Festival 2014

Poet Meets Poet Poets Kim So Yeon (Korea) and Dan Disney (Australia), participants of the 2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival (SIWF), ask questions about each other’s poems.

Kim So Yeon

was born in 1967 in Gyeongju.

She was educated at the Catholic University of Korea (BA, MA, Korean Literature). In 1993, she published her first poem “We Praise” in the quarterly Hyundae Poetry and Thought. She has published the poetry collections Pushed to the Limit, The Exhaustion of Stars Pulls the Night, Bones Called Tears, A Mathematician’s Morning, and the essay collections Heart Dictionary, The World of Siot. She is the recipient of the Nojak Literary Award (2010) and the Hyundae Literary Award (2011).

Q

Q1.

What happened in these places to precipitate this poem?

I was in Bangkok as a tourist when I saw the news about the revolution in Tunisia on TV. The name of the revolution, “Jasmine Revolution,” inspired me to write this poem. When I was traveling in Okinawa, I picked up a hermit crab that was carrying a jasmine leaf like a backpack. I brought it back to the hotel with me, thinking it was just an empty shell, and played with it for a while. When I woke up the next morning, the conch shell had disappeared. I searched for it and found it on the edge of the terrace. There was a live hermit crab hiding inside it. I think it tried to make a run for it, and in the process lost a leg I found lying on another part of the terrace. I felt guilty, so I ran back to the beach with the hermit crab and set it free. The word “jasmine” reminded me of the incident. Because of that I was in Bangkok, but also in Okinawa, and formed a link with the developments in Tunisia.

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Q2.

How do you typify what you are trying to do with a poem? Are you trying to find the sublime in the mundane? The universal in the particular?

I like to look for the sublime in the mundane, and return to the fact that the sublime is nothing extraordinary but common and downto-earth instead. I hope to reinterpret the mundane as sublime, and transform the sublime back to the mundane.

A

Visit the _list website to watch Kim So Yeon and Dan Disney’s conversation about “Eros and Dream” wih Korean American writer, Krys Lee.

Visit the _list website to hear a billingual recording of the poem read by Kim So Yeon and Dan Disney.

Okinawa, Tunisia, Francis Jammes

by Kim So Yeon translated by Brother Anthony and Chung Eun Gwi The limit we can reach, things this far, are so banal like hermit crabs, like hermit crabs Each of us like an observatory standing at a spot with a good view is tall and lonely, but that’s all We walked, but on looking back there were no footprints.

Did we crawl? Like hermit crabs, like hermit crabs? + I will not be discreet.

Just like a flower I will raise objections with fragrance.

Interpreting this as scream or silence I will leave as the dictator’s task.

You, this remote runway that is not you, I running you supporting, I flying up you applauding, we will move apart but we will meet in one place and every time, in the place where we met, at that spot where we leaned shoulder to shoulder pretending to embrace, shoulder to shoulder, “A good consolation is a love delightful as a young strawberry on the edge of an old torrent.”* We once saw a hermit crab leaving its home, we saw it moving, throwing away one arm, one leg, then we saw a branch of jasmine falling, we saw the hermit crab place the jasmine blossom on its back then go on walking.

This being the only place for us to hide is corny like hermit crabs, like hermit crabs. + If my heel is bleeding tell me about a bunch of strawberries blooming on a cliff.

If your hair gives off a smell of blood I will say that it smells of jasmine * Une bonne consolation est un amour charmant comme une jeune fraise au bord d’un vieux torrent (Francis Jammes)

Vol.24 Summer 2014 25

Dan Disney

Alongside poems, Dan Disney’s great love is wandering, which often leads to places of sublime strangeness—the docks of Casablanca, where he felt like a morsel in a lair; drinking ‘til sunrise with the king of a wind-bitten, northwestern Irish island; collectively seasick with 300 Russian pilgrims on their way across the White Sea. He was arrested in Prague when it was the capital of Czechoslovakia, and has been interrogated by border guards in Turkey, Belarus, and Laos. He has stood at the foot of Immanuel Kant’s statue and watched an undercover drug bust, and sat on the doorstep of Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest hütte in the rain. Disney grew up in the mountains in Australia; he has worked in paddocks, warehouses, and psychiatric institutions. Currently, he teaches 20th century poetry at Sogang University.

either, Orpheus (ii)

ears toward solitudes

◀

freedom the nude habit of thought

◀

experimental tourists in air’s velvet skin

◀

customers jerking into coffee shops

◀ ◀

ears toward solitudes

◀

a map of new methods in each stiff mind

◀

the long processions setting off the gods crabwalking boundary lines

◀ experimental tourists in air’s velvet skin ◀ that huge presence of speaking trees ◀ tram bells wobbling across each park’s sleep ◀ ears toward solitudes ◀ a theatre of bad nerves and cigarettes ◀ we folk suppressing our Tourettes ◀ experimental tourists in air’s velvet skin Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea vs John Cage’s “Experimental Music: Doctrine”

Visit the _list website to hear a billingual recording of the poem read by Kim So Yeon and Dan Disney.

26 _list : Books from Korea

Q

Q1.

I enjoyed this poem. It seemed like a bird’s-eye view of a structure with a courtyard. Perhaps a historic site, maybe a temple, and I imagined a sculpture of a deity placed in the center. If you would humor my imagination, which temple in which city and country would you say this place was, and why?

Wonderful—I had no idea someone might read this as a situated text, and a temple no less! In his Critique of Judgment, Kant names the following inscription above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature) as the most sublime thought ever expressed: “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil” (§49, footnote 51). What is that sentence if not a humanly-constructed cry across the meaningless, primordial bounds of our world-asdwelling? Someone from antiquity has been a clever ventriloquist in mouthing the words of Isis, to remind us how we perform ourselves using particular modes of consciousness, contained by language while the world-as-dwelling endures and simply exists outside every meaning-making system we’ll construct. We build these architectures to the gods as spaces in which to perform our hopefulness that they’ll grant us meaning … what we cannot attain, though, is an extra-linguistic or revelatory, authentically pansystemic view of everything. Simply, there is nature —ultimately unknowable and unattainable—and us.

I have been to two temples dedicated to Isis: firstly in Pompeii (Italy), and then in Ephesus (Turkey).

The former is next door to an ancient precinct of bordellos, the latter not much more than a frog swamp. I love the fact that there were communities, once upon a time and (comparatively) not so long ago, that used these places to formally worship nature; and I love that inscription, which reminds me how it is so often human nature to fall (interesting that we use that verb) into the worship of something or other.

Q2.

I focused on two terms that represent crowds of people, “folk” and “tourists.”

What would you say is the point of divergence between these two kinds of crowds?

In this text there are “tourists,” “folk,” and “customers”: I was brought up by a religious mother, and she participated in an offshoot of the Christian church that believed, among other things, that miracles were being performed by the cult’s two charismatic leaders, who were regarded not only as teachers but unimpeachable saints. It was a strange environment, growing up in a household that understood as fact the fantastic logic of wish-fulfillment and magical thinking. One of the leaders of the sect died, and the other was found a little later to be engaging in ritualized, group masturbation with young male members of his congregation; for whatever reasons I was never invited to those particular sessions! Suffice to say, though, scandal ensued and the group quickly imploded in a maelstrom of accusation and counteraccusation, etc.

My feeling is that even ideas are commodities, fetishized and peddled amid particular communities … in this sense we are all tourists, collectively “folk,” acquiring our ideas around meaningfulness. We have to exercise caution around what we choose to regard as truthful, though: believe anything, but not everything. Rather than differentiate between “folk” and “tourists,” I invoke the word “folk” intentionally in this poem, suffused as it is with associations of a particular ideology being delivered en masse, not so long ago by a particular charismatic leader (i.e. a Führer). There is no direct commentary or critique of Fascism here, but more an associative linguistic resonance with the idea of how ideas can travel (sometimes quickly, persuasively, and indeed dangerously).

A

Vol.24 Summer 2014 27

Special Section

Transnationalism in Korean Literature

30 33 36 39 42 44

Park Kyung-Ri, Land Kim Young-ha, Black Flower Kim Insuk, The Long Road Kang Young-sook, Rina Seo Hajin, Sugar or Salt Bang Hyeon-seok, Time to Eat Lobster

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mong the many forms of transnationalism in literature, this article deals with the issue of crossing or breaking down boundaries in the spatial sense. In this context, transnationalism in Korean literature refers to Korean writers going beyond the spatial environment of “Korea” and staging their works in other spaces. This space is where the activities of characters or events in a writer’s work take place and the message of the writer is conveyed.

The structure of this space can become a factor that determines the content of the work. In other words, a space in a literary work is a major element that makes the very existence of the work possible.

There are many writers in contemporary Korean literature whose works deeply engage with the expansion of space and transnational logics, and it is in fact common to find such writers. In Land, the opus magnum by the late Park Kyung-Ri who passed away in 2008, the scope of the story reaches to Manchuria during the Japanese occupation. We also see similar transnational expansion in Hwang Sok-yong’s Shim Chong or Princess Bari. The Great Jungle by Jo Jung-Rae caused controversy for fictionalizing the world of Chinese business for the sake of Korea, but it’s a bestseller that has done well in recent years. Kim Insuk’s Sydney, Standing at the Blue Ocean and The Long Road, Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic Is Calling You and Black Flower, and Kang Young-sook’s Rina all exemplify similar patterns of transnationalism in Korean literature today.

Kim Insuk’s Sydney, Standing at the Blue Ocean deals with Korean immigrants in Australia.

Revolving around one couple, the novel is a moving saga on the tenacious vitality and love of those on the boundary between Korea and Australia. The Long Road depicts the hardships and inner conflicts that three young people experience before, during, and after they cross the border from Korea to Australia. Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower is about Korean laborers who migrated to Mexico during the Japanese occupation. They do not find bright paths

lined with flowers there. Kim Young-ha describes the dark, devastating situation of their lives as “black flowers.” Your Republic Is Calling You, by the same author, is a story about a North Korean spy in South Korea. Making use of the unique situation on the Korean peninsula, Kim Young-ha sheds light on the existential life within the reality of history using his characteristically unique imagination.

Korea-Vietnam relations have been a complex web of conflicts and cooperation, but friendship and trust have been building rapidly between the two countries in recent years. Even in the field of literature, we have seen active exchange. This phenomenon brought on the natural incorporation of Vietnam as a background. A good example of this is Time to Eat Lobster and Forms of Being by Bang Hyeon-seok. Time to Eat Lobster depicts the Koreans in Vietnam coming to understand the pain and wounds of the Vietnamese, while Forms of Being is a gift endowed by the friendly relationship between Vietnam and Korea.

Seo Hajin, a writer who examines relationships in contemporary society from a new perspective, has also demonstrated a variety of transnational writings. “On the Deck” is a story of a fatherdaughter trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The history of the ancient temple and the personal history of the father and daughter intertwine as wounds are healed. “Dad’s Private Life” is about a man’s three-day tryst with his lover and his daughter who spies on them. The dizzying landscape of Hong Kong and the daughter’s distress and confusion overlap as she grows through the experience. Set in Los Angeles, “Shadow Street” is a story about a highranking agent in the intelligence sector who escapes from his country. The motif of a letter delivered to the wrong address stands for the problems caused by an identity that cannot be free from its country and society.

“Sugar or Salt” by the same writer is also set

in the US. The stories of a female narrator, her old friend, and the friend’s husband unfold in Korea and the US. The complexity of contemporary society represented by the ambiguity as to whether the relationship is “sugar” or “salt” lies in the crux of the story. The consciousness of writers who cross

There are many writers in contemporary Korean literature whose works deeply engage with the expansion of space and transnational logics. boundaries thus reflects the multiple identities of people today. It is very complex, but without it, we cannot hope to explain contemporary lives.

If we look at transnational literature in the larger context of Korean history and, breaking it down further, by separate countries, we are able to identify another area: Korean diaspora literature. This includes all literature written in Korean by Koreans residing in China, Central Asia, Japan, and the US as well as writings written in foreign languages by descendants of Koreans. Since this area, or diaspora literature, is an extension of transnationalism that we are focusing on in this issue, it will be further discussed in the next issue.

by Kim Jonghoi literary critic and professor of Korean Literature Kyunghee University

Vol.24 Summer 2014 29

Featured Work

Park

Kyung-Ri

S

he was born in Tongyeong, Gyeongsangnam-do Province in 1926 and died in Wonju, Gangwondo Province in 2008. Park studied at Jinju Girls’ High School and went on to teach at many different schools. She was at Yeonan Girls’ Middle School in Hwanghae-do Province when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Her husband died in the war.

After the war, she devoted her life to her writing.

She made her debut by publishing a short story in Hyundae Munhak at the recommendation of Kim Tong-ni, a prominent Korean writer.

Park Kyung-Ri’s representative work, Land, is an in-depth portrayal of the relationship between the fates of people from various classes and times as Korea went from a feudal monarchy to a Japanese colony. Land became part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Her novel has thus been critically acclaimed both in Korea and abroad.

The novel starts out in a small village called Pyeongsa-ri, then spans all over the Korean peninsula, and reaches out to Northern China and Japan, boasting a vast expanse. Land is a social drama and a family tragedy encompassing a series of events that involves several hundreds of characters.

Park also taught at Yonsei University as a visiting professor and an endowed chair. Her work contained criticism on the paradoxes and incongruities of society, but largely embodied the ideals of coexistence between living things, great mercy and compassion from Buddhism, freedom of existence, and equality. It shared philosophical grounds with her son-in-law Kim Ji-ha’s “Thoughts about Life,” which advocates for the importance of life and living things. A memorial park was built in her honor in Wonju where she lived for over 20 years, and there is a literary museum devoted to her in Tongyeong, the place she was born and is buried.

by Lee Seungha literary critic

30 _list : Books from Korea

Land :

A Classic Korean Novel

Land Park Kyung-Ri Translated by Agnita Tennant Kent, Global Oriental, 2011 ISBN 9781906876043 (3-volume set)

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he novel begins at the end of the 19th century during the autumn festival in 1897 when King Gojong was crowned emperor and the name of the country changed from Joseon to the Korean Empire; it ends on August 15, 1945, the day Korea was liberated from Japan. In other words, it is a historical novel that contains the 50 years of modern Korean history and at the same time a micro-history of the everyday lives of the people. It is similar to Balzac’s The Human Comedy or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart in that many intellectuals and farmers appear, and the scale of Land is reminiscent of Martin du Gard’s Les Thibault and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. In Pyeongsa-ri, Hadong-gun, Gyeongsangnamdo Province lives Deputy Minister Ch’oe who has been a wealthy landowner for five generations, his servants, and the villagers who are tenant farmers on his land. The only descendant of the Ch’oe family, a young girl named Sŏhui, is raised by her strict but

loving grandmother and her father whom she fears.

Kuch’ŏn, the new errand boy, seems troubled by secrets. Kuch’ŏn’s real name is Hwan, the son of Lady Yun who is the spiritual pillar of the Ch’oe family.

Lady Yun lost her husband at a young age and gives birth to Hwan after a man rapes her. This man later goes on to incite a rebellion and is executed. Also involved in his father’s rebellion, Hwan assumes an alias and hides in the Ch’oe family house. Tormented by the secret of his birth and his love for Byeoldang Lady, the wife of his half-brother Ch’oe Ch’isu, Hwan elopes with her deep into the Jirisan Mountains.

The proud, coldhearted Ch’oe Ch’isu tries to reveal his mother’s secret. In the meantime, he leads a life of debauchery with his second cousin Cho Chun’gu and becomes impotent. He takes a gun that Cho Chun’gu lends him and searches Jirisan Mountain to find Hwan and Byeoldang Lady. The ailing Byeoldang Lady dies in Hwan’s arms.

Vol.24 Summer 2014 31

The novel Land begins in Hadong, Gyeongsangnam-do Province, and extends across the Korean peninsula into Jiandao, China, and then Japan, its geographical setting expanding as the story unfolds. ⓒToji Foundation of Culture

Gwinyeo, a maid disgruntled by her place in the world, seduces Ch’oe Ch’isu in her effort to have his child and gain status, but her plans are foiled. She then schemes with Kim Pyeong-san, a nobleman whose family has fallen, and deliberately gets pregnant by giving her body to Chilseong and Rifleman Kang. Unaware that Ch’oe Ch’isu cannot father children, Gwinyeo plots to make Kim Pyeongsan murder Ch’oe Ch’isu so that she may claim that her offspring is Ch’oe Ch’isu’s heir, and have the child inherit the Ch’oe family fortune. But Lady Yun finds something suspicious about her son Ch’isu’s death, and gets Gwinyeo’s confession thanks to the information from the chambermaid Bongsun. Kim Pyeong-san and Chilseong pay for their crime with their lives. As a result of this scheme, Kim Pyeongsan’s wife commits suicide and Chilseong’s wife leaves the village.

Cho Chun’gu comes to the Ch’oe family estate with his wife and his son, Byeongsu. With the Ch’oe family fortune in his sights, Cho Chun’gu had secretly encouraged Kim Pyeong-san to murder Ch’oe Ch’isu.

In the meantime, cholera and famine sweep through the village, killing many including Lady Yun, Mr. Kim, and Bongsun. Cho Chun’gu’s family survives and takes over the Ch’oe family estate.

Now an orphan, Lady Yun’s granddaughter Sŏhui becomes a strong, selfish person. Things go in the favor of pro-Japanese Cho Chun’gu as the Russo-Japanese War breaks out and the JapanKorea Treaty of 1910 is signed, but the villagers can no longer stand Cho Chun’gu’s abuse and storm the Ch’oe family estate with Carpenter Yunbo as the 32

_list : Books from Korea

leader of their uprising. They plan to plunder the property and kill Jo’s family, but they cannot find them.

Meanwhile, Sŏhui finds the land documents through Gilsang who served her father, but when the villagers fail to kill Jo, she realizes she can no longer stay in her hometown. Sŏhui packs up the inheritance Lady Yun left for her and leaves for Jiandao, China along with the villagers who were involved in the uprising.

It wasn’t just property and people that Sŏhui left behind. In Jiandao, she finally understands the sorrow of losing one’s country. She uses Lady Yun’s jewels as capital to invest in real estate and grocery stores, and becomes wealthy. Also, by marrying the manservant Gilsang, and having two children together, she breaks down class barriers.

Sŏhui becomes very rich through brilliant means in China, leaves her independence fighter husband in Manchuria, and returns to Korea to reclaim her father’s land. That brings us to the end of Part One. In the heart and periphery of these stories are characters that represent every social class.

In Part Three of Land, the children of the main characters are studying abroad in Japan, expanding the scope of the story beyond Hadong, China, and East Asia at large. The author takes a close look at the relationship between China, Korea, and Japan toward the end of the novel.

by Lee Seungha literary critic

Three Diaspora:

Writer’s Note

of Departure, of Division, of Change

M

y grandfather went to Manchuria during the Japanese occupation where there were many Koreans that had left the peninsula. He started a business, but when it didn’t go well, he set sail for Japan. When Korea was liberated, he moved his family back to Gyeongsang-do Province where he had been born.

My father-in-law was also born in Japan.

My father and father-in-law discovered at the sanggyeonnye, or formal meeting between two families before a wedding, that they were the same age and given the period they were born into, had childhood histories that followed similar trajectories.

They were both born in Japan into families that had gone there to find work, and returned to Korea and settled down after liberation.

In the early 20th century, hundreds of thousands left the Korean peninsula and went to Manchuria or Japan. My father and father-in-law returned to Korea, but far more people remained. If the grandfathers of me or my wife had not returned, we’d be referred to as joseonjok (descendants of Koreans in China) or jaeil gyopo (descendants of Koreans in Japan) today.

My novel, Black Flower, is based on true events that took place in 1905. One thousand and thirtythree Koreans left for Mexico after they were hired to work as laborers on henequen plantations. Some of them were swept up in the Mexican Revolution and others were involved in the Guatemalan Civil War, but most of them buried their bones there. Black Flower portrays a facet of the stereotypical diaspora experienced by the lower class when Korea was caught in a political whirlwind in the early 20th century.

The Korean diaspora took place within Korea as well. In the years before and following the Korean War, a significant number of people migrated from the North to the South. Busan, where I live now, is at the southern end of the peninsula, but still contains traces of their influence. The war refugees found unclaimed hills to settle in with houses made of

panels. Milmyeon, a Busan delicacy today, was invented by those who migrated down from Hamgyeong-do Province in the North. In the absence of buckwheat to make naengmyeon, a northern cold noodle dish, they used their flour rations from the US Army to make something similar with wheat noodles instead.

The most bizarre of the Korean diasporas is the one that happened after the Korean War. My father was barefoot when he was young. After liberation, he wore rubber shoes, and then lived in his combat boots when he became a soldier.

When he retired from the army he worked at a bank, which meant he was able to afford good leather shoes. These days, he wears Nike sneakers as well. There are few countries in the world that have achieved economic development in such a short period of time. In a country that changes so quickly, people can experience diaspora without moving at all. It is not easy to adjust to a new culture, technology, or rules. One day in the mid-1990s, I remember trying to teach my father how to use a computer mouse. He struggled for a long time with the mouse in his hand, and finally admitted defeat. He simply could not double-click. In the end, Father put his foot down before Windows 95 and “settled” there. He was never able to move into the “territories” of technology that came later, like texting or using a smart phone.

I have also experienced this diaspora that requires no traveling. My novel, Your Republic Is Calling You, is about a North Korean spy who came down to the South and was forgotten. It seems like a story about the second kind of diaspora, the one created by division, but is actually about the third kind. In a society that changes so rapidly, we all live like forgotten spies. We constantly observe those around us, struggle to keep up, and in the end forget who we were to begin with.

The most bizarre of the Korean diasporas is the one that happened after the Korean War.

“Kim brings us the souls caught up on the ground of this larger drama.”

— Minneapolis Star Tribune

by Kim Young-ha writer

Vol.24 Summer 2014 33

Excerpt

Black Flower “W

Black Flower Kim Young-ha Translated by Charles La Shure New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012, 305p ISBN 9780547691138

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hat sort of land is Mexico?” This was at the Seoul Young Men’s Christian Association. An American missionary spoke, his black beard covering his neck. “Mexico is far. Very far.” The boy narrowed his eyes. “Then where is it close to?” The missionary laughed. “It’s right below America. And it’s very hot. But why are you asking about Mexico?”

The boy showed him the advertisement in the Capital Gazette. But the missionary, who did not know Chinese characters, could not read the advertisement. Instead, another young Korean explained the contents of the advertisement in English. Only then did the missionary nod. The boy asked him, “If I were your son, would you tell me to go?” The missionary did not understand right away, so the boy asked again. The missionary’s face grew grave and he slowly shook his head. “Then, if you were me, would you go?” The missionary was lost in deep thought.

The boy hadn’t been long at the school, but he was bright and unusually quick to understand. He had been raised as an orphan, but had not grown timid, and he stood out from the other students with similar stories.

The bearded missionary gave him some coffee and a muffin. The boy’s mouth began to water. The peddler who had taken him around the country had taught him: “If someone gives you something to eat, count to one hundred before eating. And if someone wants to buy something of yours, double the price that comes to mind. That way no one will look down on you.” The boy rarely had the opportunity to follow these instrucions. No one gave him anything to eat, and no one wanted to buy anything he owned.

The missionary opened his eyes wide. “Aren’t you hungry?” The boy’s lips moved slightly. Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four. He couldn’t bear it any longer. He took the sweet-smelling raisin muffin and began to stuff it into his mouth. When he had finished the muffin and coffee, the missionary brought him to a room with a lot of books and showed him a map of the world. On it was a country that looked like a sunken, empty belly. Mexico. The missionary asked him, “Do you really want to go? You’ve only

been attending school for three months... how about studying more before you go?” The boy shook his head. “They say that chances like this do not come often. I heard that boys with no parents are welcome.”

The missionary could see that his heart was set. He gave the boy an English Bible. “Someday you will be able to read it. If you earn some money in Mexico, go to America. The Lord will guide you.” Then he hugged the boy. The boy held the missionary tightly. His beard brushed the nape of the boy’s neck.

The boy went to Jemulpo and stood at the end of the long line. In that line he met the strapping man who tousled the boy’s hair. “A person must have a name. Forget childhood names like Jang-soe. Take Kim as your family name and Ijeong as your given name. It’s easy to write—just the character i (二), meaning two, and the character jeong (正), meaning upright.” As the line grew shorter he wrote the boy’s name in Chinese characters. It was seven strokes in all. The man’s name was Jo Jangyun. A staff sergeant engineer in the new-style army of the Korean Empire, he had set aside his uniform when the RussoJapanese War broke out. There were a number of others in the same situation. Two hundred of these men, who had suited up together and trained in the new-style long rifles with the Russian advisory corps, had thronged to Jemulpo. There were enough of them to form an entire battalion. They had no land and no relatives. No nation needed an army more urgently than the feeble empire, but no rice could be found in the empire’s storerooms to feed them. Above all, the Japanese were demanding a curtailment of Korean military expenditures and a reduction in force of arms. Soldiers on the frontiers left their barracks and wandered off, and when they saw the Continental Colonization Company’s advertisement they raced to Jemulpo. They were the first to want to leave for Mexico, where work, money, and warm food were said to await them.

Jo Jangyun was one of those men. His father, a hunter in Hwanghae province, had left for China; someone had seen him living with a Chinese woman in Shanghai. But Jo Jangyun did not go to Shanghai.

Instead he chose Mexico, where they said the sun was warm year-round. And didn’t they say his wages would be dozens of times higher than a soldier’s pay? What did it matter where he went? There was no need to hesitate. Life in Mexico couldn’t be any harder than it had been in the army.

The boy cast his gaze over the ocean once more.

Three black-billed seagulls wheeled above his head.

Someone had said that there was gold in Mexico.

They said that yellow gold poured forth from the earth, making many suddenly rich. “No. That’s America,” insisted another, but he sounded uncertain too.

The boy repeated his name. “Kim Ijeong. My name is Kim Ijeong. I am going to a far land. And I will return as an adult Kim Ijeong. I will return with my name and with money and I will buy land, and there I will plant rice.” Those with land were respected. That was a simple truth the boy had learned on the road. It couldn’t be Mexican land. It had to be Korean land, and a rice paddy. But another thought had raised its head in the boy’s heart, the thought of another strange land, called America.

The seagulls fluttered above the surface of the water as if dancing. The quicker ones flew away with fairly large fish in their beaks. The wings of the gulls were tinged red. The sun was setting. The boy went down to the cabin and again wedged himself into the corner. The coarse, low voices of men could be heard between the cries of children. There was no strength in the voices of these men; they did not know their futures. Their words dissipated like the foam that washed against the prow of the ship. The boy closed his eyes. He hoped that he would not wake until breakfast. (pp. 6-9)

Visit Kim Young-ha’s podcast to listen to the author talk about Black Flower and hear him read from his work. itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/id356061083

Vol.24 Summer 2014 35

Communicating

Writer’s Note

“She is one of the few writers to write extensively on the Korean expatriate experience.”

the Space Between the Lines

— The Korea Herald

T

hanks to my complex, or perhaps riveting personal life, I’ve lived abroad in different countries for a few years, and sometimes even a few months. But I’ve never been able to speak any local language fluently, no matter where I was. In some places, I was able to manage by speaking slowly; in other places, I could not speak a lick. This is not a big problem if you’re a tourist, but living there is another matter. Language was a matter of communication that stirred up loneliness, pain, and all kinds of disillusionment. It was also an issue in dating and love. Living in a country that’s not mine, I became lonely because of the language that was not my own, but the endless cycle of irony was that I had no choice but to write the things inspired by this loneliness in the language of my country. I often wondered: Wouldn’t Sydney, one of the places I’ve lived, be best represented in Australian English?

Wouldn’t Beijing be most “Beijing” when represented in Mandarin, particularly the Beijing dialect?

Looking at it from the other side of things, wouldn’t Seoul, the place I was born, be most faithfully Seoul when represented in Korean, especially the Seoul dialect? If so, if my works were to be translated, and when the translations reached the readers, would my stories be able to reach them fully?

I once wrote in my novel, Ocean and Butterfly: “It’s not just a problem of language, but in the end, language will become the source of all problems.”

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This was a Korean female narrator commenting on a joseonjok (descendants of Koreans in China) woman who married a Korean man. Language is not just a means of communication, but communication itself.

That’s why language becomes lonely, and so do people.

Writers fill the shortcomings of language with the space between the lines. The spaces between the lines are things that cannot be expressed through words, but nevertheless must be expressed, like wounds, loneliness, and love.

At the London Book Fair, I participated in a session with a Chinese writer. She’d been born and raised in China, but lived in the UK and wrote in English. She said that she had to get a visa to go to China and that the visa allowed her to stay for no more than two weeks. She spoke of her situation, where she could no longer “return home” and was reduced to a visitor in her own country. The gist of her story was that to the Chinese, where one lives is not a matter of choice but a question of a fundamental identity shift.

Even among people whose home countries are not as strict about allowing dual citizenship as China is, there must be people in similar situations.

We live in an age overflowing with people who cannot return home or choose not to return home.

These are the modern nomads. This means we also live in an age where it is necessary to find another language and a space between the lines that can represent them or them, me, and us. This applies to those who read as well as those who write. The term, “transnationalism” gets tossed around a lot these days, and the boundaries that have been taken down cannot only refer to physical ones. Expressions, readings, and receptions of pain and loneliness are all crossing borders. Are my novels doing that as well? Even if I don’t refer to them directly, there must be the breath of nomads past and present who have passed me by pulsing between the lines of my stories. Perhaps I am the nomad. Perhaps we all are.

by Kim Insuk writer

Excerpt

The Long Road T

he first time Han-Yeong heard Kang Meong-U’s name was in a curious rumor circulating at the Korean Compatriots’ Journal.

Supposedly, a Korean had managed to swing permanent residence in the refugee category.

Han-Yeong had understood that it was almost impossible for a South Korean to get a refugee visa. It was hard enough for real refugees from Vietnam or Cambodia. For a South Korean to declare himself a refugee was just not possible unless there was some extraordinary circumstance.

Of course, it wasn’t especially difficult to explain that South Korea had suffered under a dictatorship. The turmoil of Gwangju in 1980 was particularly useful for those who wanted to claim refugee status. Back then, those who were actively protesting against the government could give evidence of their credentials and make a strong argument for being recognized as political refugees. But after the so-called civilian government came to power, the opportunity virtually disappeared. No matter how often specials appeared on television about South Korean labor injustices and the labor movement or about the standoff with North Korea, civilian government meant that South Korea was no longer a source of refugees.

And with each passing year, South Korea became a more important trading partner for Australia. There was no reason for Australia to risk diplomatic friction for the sake of one man’s refugee application.

But there it was: permanent residence as a refugee. Han-Yeong wondered what sort of remarkable history Myeong-U had. By a stroke of good fortune, Park, the immigration lawyer who’d handled the case, was a friend of HanRim’s. Han-Yeong went to visit, and Park jotted down Myeong-U’s address, begging Han-Yeong not to let on under any circumstances that he’d received it from him. Park clearly hoped that a magazine would reveal the story that he could

not personally divulge. Getting to blow his nose without using his hands, so to speak. It didn’t take a genius to realize that Park wanted to enhance his reputation in having word get out that he’d won a case for a refugee visa.

But Park’s subterfuge went awry from the start. Han-Yeong’s interest in Myeong-U had nothing to do with the magazine. The Korean Compatriots’ Journal may have been Han-Yeong’s only job, but because he wasn’t formally employed, he didn’t draw a formal salary. Officially, he still had the right to an unemployment check.

Money wasn’t what made him say yes to his friend’s extremely The Long Road ambiguous request to help him out Kim Insuk at the magazine. Rather, Han-Yeong Translated by Stephen J. Epstein felt that after a year of loafing Portland, Merwin Asia, 2010, 113p ISBN 9781878282811 around he needed a routine. He’d quit a good job he’d worked at for five years because of its suffocating regularity. When he thought about it now, he was amazed at his own transformation.

Maybe he had made the decision expecting that the journal would have a Korean staff, and that through working there he would get to meet Koreans from all walks of life. At some point he’d become distressed by the sensation that he was flotsam cast adrift in a void. For him to feel such anguish was mildly ridiculous. He had come as a skilled migrant and found a decent job immediately upon arrival, and even though he’d moved around a bit, he’d always landed positions at good architectural firms.

That he’d found work easily right after immigration could even be considered a piece of great fortune.

When he quit, everyone around him had the identical reaction. What the hell are you doing? A good job like that! He couldn’t explain to them his anguish, his lethargy, his suffocation.

Vol.24 Summer 2014 37

And in no time, here he was: an Australian resident, an Australian employee, a taxpayer for eight years, with local friends and colleagues. He was invited to parties and to go on bushwalking trips.

His friends liked to hear him tell details about Korea, and he liked to hear them say what they thought about Koreans living in Australia. Of course, they taught him almost everything about Australian life.

Andrew Keeler. His closest friend. A colleague in his architectural firm. If it weren’t for Andrew’s intelligence, you’d have immediately pegged him for a horrible bigot. He was full of complaints about how Asian immigrants were causing the work environment to deteriorate. He’d go on tirades about Asians who’d forfeited their claim to rights.

Why weren’t they working to protect those rights?

They were selling themselves outright.

Andrew had been the one who taught him that as soon as the clock hit 5:00 p.m., it was time to stop working. Doesn’t matter if you just have one last comma to add to a document. Just close it.

Don’t bother to put the cover on your pen. From 5:01 p.m. is your time. It isn’t included in the salary.

That’s what Andrew was like. No. That’s what they all were like. When it was time for lunch, they’d get up in the middle of a meeting, and if a meeting ran overtime, they’d want compensation. Of course, no one could demand an extension of their work hours, and if anyone did, then—naturally—this would have been grounds for complaint to the union. This strict precision of theirs . . . As they held rigidly to their work hours, so did they hold to their leisure and freedom. The distinctions were absolutely clear-cut for them. They had no reason to hurry, no reason to run around frantically. All this explained why a project he’d worked on to reconstruct bridge piers, which would have taken a couple of months in Korea, went on for more than a year. What kind of construction was this when the workers would leave a nail they were about to drive in and drop their

38 _list : Books from Korea

hammer when it turned three o’clock?

Han-Yeong did not know exactly when he started to find their sort of precision smothering. “As time went on” captured it best.

As time went on and he was trying to emulate their lifestyle, problems he hadn’t expected began to crop up. Ultimately, they were Australians, and he was an immigrant. But that did not explain it adequately. The issues were trivial, almost inexplicable. He wouldn’t have been able to talk of the feelings of collapse raging inside him even to someone who had had identical experiences.

When he first took his job, for example.

Someone spelled his surname as You, and everyone cackled. Only with the passage of time—five, six, seven, eight years later—did their amusement strike him as an insult. Who would understand? And then there was that inexplicable feeling of frustration when Andrew opened up to him about his troubles with his girlfriend and asked in mid-sentence with great seriousness whether Han-Yeong could possibly understand. No, it wasn’t just a feeling of frustration about Andrew. He’d had similar experiences with almost everyone. Sometimes it was language, sometimes lifestyle, sometimes the way they’d grab their bellies and double up with laughter over things he didn’t think were funny at all . . . Ultimately he found himself unable to understand them owing to all sorts of differences. But his desperation was trivial.

What if the reasons for his alienation had been more serious? (pp. 25-30)

Writer’s Note

Diaspora, Our Modern Fate

ⓒTom Langdom

I

am writing this in San Francisco, California.

San Francisco is populated by a multiethnic, multicultural group of people who have experienced various kinds of diaspora. A few days ago, there was a Daesan-Berkeley Writer-in-Residence Event hosted by the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley. One person in the audience, a Korean who’d immigrated to the United States 10 years ago, asked why Korean literature does not draw from the lives of immigrants like them. “We have so many stories to tell,” she said.

Perhaps because of the generation difference, the juniors and seniors at Berkeley, who were in the “Modern Korean Fiction” class I participated in, tended to think of diaspora as an interesting new challenge and an opportunity to grow. The class was a mix of students from Korea, Korean-Americans, and Americans of other ethnicities who seemed to be the products of voluntary diaspora. I wonder what kinds of stories they will produce when they start writing their own stories. I also wonder how the personal histories of biracial Koreans with Southeast Asian parents who grew up in the Korean countryside will be recorded when they write their stories in Korean.

My novel, Rina, is a story about a girl who

escapes from a country loosely based on North Korea and traverses the tough landscape of Asia.

Rina, the main character, is reminiscent of a North Korean defector, but could in fact be any woman in our globalized reality who is crossing borders as we speak, braving all manners of voluntary and involuntary diaspora. I thought about everything that could possibly happen when a girl who was born and raised in the margins of Asia tries to cross a national border. There’s no guarantee that all kinds of horrible things such as starvation, murder, drug abuse, prostitution, trafficking, explosions, fraud, or betrayal would not befall her. And the replacement families, love, death, and parting that take place under these horrid circumstances are also things she would not be able to avoid. Rina could be read as a bildungsroman since Rina grows up as she journeys across borders. I dealt with big, delicate topics such as division, capitalism, industrialized mechanized civilization, environmental issues, culture and customs, gender, and the body. In any case, I wanted to create a narrative that deals with diaspora, borders, and women in a unique tone.

In the future, the topic of diaspora will evolve from its original meaning of displacement to include elements in everyday life. The scope will broaden and awareness and sensitivity will increase.

Many stories can be derived from it, such as the misunderstandings or limits of cultural assimilation, where adjusting to the society and becoming fluent in the language is not enough to form a sense of belonging. Since the social class of the agent of diaspora affects the situation after the displacement, polarization in a diasporic community will also be an interesting topic. Whatever the reason, the nomadic lifestyle—freedom to frequently relocate, traveling to find work—will spread much more quickly in the future. Diaspora has become the fate of our society today, but it continues to intrigue as both a literary topic and a life choice.

“Kang highlights the fact that life has not always been as it is today, that it is constructed of and maintained by artifice.”

— Ryoo Bo Sun

by Kang Young-sook writer

Vol.24 Summer 2014 39

Excerpt

Rina W

inter brought unrelenting blizzards that turned the ashen landscape into a dream-like winter wonderland. When the snow was particularly heavy, they couldn’t even leave their houses, the front doors having vanished. The people with pulmonary problems had the worst of these winters. Mornings were spent shoveling snow and clearing roads. If they stopped to rest for even a moment, the snow would catch up with them. The world became lighter and brighter and the people became crazier.

“I love the industrial complex forever. I’ll bury my bones here!” they would yell as they floundered in the snow. There was so much snow that some people started to show serious signs of oxygen deficiency.

It was here that Rina received two gifts that would haunt her for the rest of her life: acute sensitivity to sunlight in both her skin and eyes. Nowhere outdoors was safe for her, so she would sit at home and curse like a sailor, tears streaming from her eyes.

Winter seemed like it would never end. They were isolated time and again by the snow. No one was able to leave the industrial complex. Everyone slept late, except for one old man who woke up early every morning to quietly clear away the snow that had piled up overnight. He seemed to be the only sane, living one among them. But sometimes even he looked like a corpse. The snow blocked the roads and the people from the west side had no way of bringing food over. Without any money to bet, and nothing other than money to bet, they staked their sick, diseased lives. They dealt cards and sat quietly, each person looking down at his or her own hand.

It would get so quiet that even the mice that had accidentally crept in would tiptoe along the walls.

No one said it out loud, but they were all secretly waiting for the phone to ring—the phone with the broken cord that someone had brought to use as decoration—and they hoped that help would be on the other end of the line.

One day, like a miracle, a helicopter flew over the industrial complex. In a quiet so deep you could

40 _list : Books from Korea

hear the snow falling, the helicopter was deafening.

They all ran outside, yipping for joy at the thought of eating as many canned goods as they wanted. The helicopter dropped off a few sacks and flew away.

Everyone ran over to look. They were chock full of black electronic chips—no soft bread, no canned meat. The first ones to rush up to the sacks felt their pride had been wounded. They tried eating the chips, but ending up spitting them out.

The kids made a snowman and positioned it in front of the houses. They made the snowman’s eyes, nose, and mouth out of the black chips so that Rina woke up in the morning to a snowman covered in electronic chips guarding over her. The kids built more snowmen every day. As long as there were chips, and as long as it kept on snowing, they made more and more replicas each day.

After that day, the helicopters came regularly.

The people followed them around the first few times, but the sacks never held anything useful, and they gave up after a while. It was always mysteriouslooking machine parts. The industrial complex had become a dump for trash that was difficult to dispose of elsewhere. The people shook their fists and cursed at the helicopters.

“If you keep mocking us like this, we’ll get you!”

Trapped inside her half-destroyed house, Rina spent her days singing to herself in a low voice. The four boys had by now turned into surly looking teenagers with pimply foreheads. They sat around reading books or looking at fliers they had found in the city. The dilapidated industrial complex was so boring that these hot-blooded young men were on the verge of going insane. Sometimes, Rina would entertain them with stories of her own boredom back in the days when she’d worked at the youth vocational training center.

“At night, when I got out of work, I’d be terrified to walk back home because of a rumor that there was a man who kidnapped the smart girls and ate them.

One day he appeared and he did try to eat me. I told

him to hurry up, before I got cold.”

At the punch line, the boys, who had been pretending not to pay attention, would clutch their heads and yell, “Stop lying Rina! God, that’s the most boring story ever!” Rina made the boys stay inside and listen to her. So the boys began going to the bathroom indoors.

“Rina, your stories are boring as shit. I think my head’s gonna explode. Please stop! Jesus, I hate this fucking shithole of a dump.” When Rina ignored them and continued with her stories, they began to fight with each other. Rina would throw whatever was in her reach at them.

“OK, fine, I was making that one up. I’m really sorry, kids.” But no matter how hard Rina tried to apologize and console them, they would punch each other until all the anger and frustration was punched out.

One of the boys was a thumbsucker. He would whimper in his sleep, especially after he’d been in a fight. He made sucking noises on his thumb. Rina crawled up to him and tried to pull his thumb out of his mouth. He was a big kid who acted like a baby sometimes. No matter how much she scolded him, his hand would always instinctively move toward his mouth. One night, Rina lay down next to him and put her nipple in his mouth. He seemed to relax for a second, then woke up in a fury.

It began to snow even more often. The helicopters kept coming, but by now, the people knew they cried wolf, and didn’t bother opening the sacks. Then, one day, they heard shouts from outside. “Come out, everyone, come on out! Food!”

It was indeed—this time, the sacks were full of cookies, candies, sausages, and cheese. Everything looked fresh. The people tied rope around the sacks and dragged them into their half-destroyed houses.

They put all of the food on their tables, one by one, evaluated the quality of each item, sampled them all, ate until they were full, then ate more. Rina sat on her bed and ate what the boys fed her. She couldn’t taste the sweetness, and her tears refused to stop flow-

ing. The canned fruit salad was the most popular item. Fruit, and what’s more, fruit that looked like actual fruit. The welcome and gratitude expressed by the people that day would have moved even the most indifRina ferent of gods.

Kang Young-sook Perhaps that was Translated by Kim Boram why the snow fiIllinois, Dalkey Archive Press nally stopped that Forthcoming 2014 night.

Rina was ill for a few days. It would have been nice if they’d saved her some food, but despite their promises, the people ate until you could see the bottoms of the sacks. Then they suffered because they were unable to relieve themselves. Rina didn’t want to open her eyes or lift a finger. Everyone asked her if she was sick. Rina didn’t feel like answering, so she shot back “Who the hell isn’t sick around here?” and turned around to face the wall.

She woke up in the middle of the night from the noise of wailing sirens. Her clothes were drenched in sweat and chills ran down her spine. She wrapped herself in a quilt and went outside. The snow had been packed so tightly that she slipped on it several times.

The entire industrial complex was covered in white snow. The snowmen with their electronic chip faces were walking somewhere. Rina followed them. She wandered the grounds in pursuit of the sirens ringing in her ears and it was only around dawn, her body blue from the cold, that she returned to her sleeping, halfdestroyed house. (pp. 318-323)

Vol.24 Summer 2014 41

Excerpt

Sugar or Salt W

Seo Hajin

e had been at the lakeside that day. It was in K’s neighborhood. K, her husband, and I were each holding a fishing pole, but the lake was just still. The sound of birds and of trees shifting in the breeze shook the forest and dissipated, and we gradually grew tired.

K was the first to put down her fishing pole. Fumbling in the basket on the grass, she sighed, “Whew.” We had been planning on catching fish and making spicy Korean fish soup, and all the basket contained was a few pieces of kimchi “I’m about to starve to death. I’m going to run home quickly and grab something to eat.” As K’s figure disappeared over the road, I felt that our surroundings had been blanketed with tranquility. Putting down the fishing pole and turning around, he opened the thermos and asked, “Would you like some coffee?” At soon as he asked, he made a strange face.

That morning, I had put salt instead of sugar in his coffee. Salt and sugar were in identical bottles with the same cork lids. Looking at K’s round letters spelling out sugar, salt, I picked up the bottle labeled salt. K, making an omelet, was busy playing with a stray cat who had just walked up, so she didn’t see what I had done. I furtively tasted the coffee. It was salty and bitter, and it tasted unspeakably strange; nevertheless, I silently put the cup in front of him. After taking a sip of the coffee, a peculiar expression appeared on his face.

“The oil probably wasn’t hot enough. Isn’t that omelet a little greasy?” K asked.

“No, it’s fine. The soup is good, too. I thought you might be a terrible cook, but you’re actually quite good at it,” I said with a calm face. The soup, which she had made with frozen vegetables and chicken, tasted metallic. Sipping my soup, I didn’t take my eyes off his face. If he had said, “You must have put salt in the coffee. It tastes weird,” then I only needed to say, “Oh, dear. I guess I was confused because the bottles look the same.” Escaping my eyes, he picked up the newspaper on the table. With an indifferent face, he quietly and slowly sipped the coffee. Cutting up sausages and putting bacon in my mouth, I stared at him fiercely. Every time a sip of coffee traveled down under his Adam’s apple, I felt as though some part of

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me also was also being swallowed with a gulp.

“He likes Korean food, but he hardly eats the soup I make or things like that when I cook them. I guess it’s because it’s not like his older sister’s cooking.”

K made some more comments on the menu, but he only smiled faintly and kept quiet. Maybe he grew up in an environment with no regard for a sense of taste. I thought of his father, who had been an almond farm worker, the tan-faced old man had never taken a break, working from dawn till the middle of the night until he had set up his own dry-cleaning shop, and his wrinkled sister who was fine with being called his father’s wife.

This taciturn man, who supposedly had never slipped below first in his class, who had received a scholarship to complete his studies, and was immediately recruited

by Boeing upon graduation. I was afraid of this man who didn’t even blink an eye about coffee with salt. I feared that K was going to become thin and pale with him, that she was going to become just like him.

My back tensed at the sight of him. I knew he was looking at me and that he knew I had done it on purpose. Then something broke the surface of the boundless water. The floating cork was pulled deep down under the water and a heavy feeling reached the tips of my fingers.

Just as he said, “I think you got a bite,” the reel started unraveling at a good speed.

“Loosen it up a little first,” he called out, coming over to me. A carp or a bass or whichever type of fish had taken the bait was running away, further out into the water, with all its strength. On the surface of the water, it created a long stream of waves.

“Now, wind the reel back in slowly,” he said. While reeling it in once or twice, I saw a dark object suddenly jump up on one side. I screamed unwittingly. It was my first time fishing, and I hadn’t known what to expect.

The fish nosedived again and the reel took the brunt of it, loosening and making a whistling sound.

Although he shouted, “Slowly, slowly,” the reel wouldn’t budge an inch.

“Is it stuck somewhere?”

Approaching me from behind, he stretched out his arms to hold the fishing pole.

“They drag it into the rocks.” He lifted his arm up high to lift the pole. “It’s heavy, isn’t it? It’s a big one.”

He seemed excited. Even his breath became wild. As he came close to me I noticed that his eyebrow was drawn up sharply. The fishing pole suddenly cracked and he, who had been keeping me from falling over onto my back, fell down… All these things happened at once, as if they were predetermined. I tore open his shirt and unbuckled his belt. I plunged my hands in deep.

An unknown ruthlessness possessed me. A cold wind blew in the forest. The sky I looked up at was endlessly blue and gorgeous as I held his slender back.

A deer, passing by under a tree, looked at us. Looking down the path where K had disappeared, I waited, hoping both that she showed up and that she didn’t. His wild movements, which seemed angry, stopped, and he looked down at me with helpless eyes. He stretched his hands out over my head and took off a fallen leaf sticking to my hair. It was a blood red maple leaf.

“Do you want to come down with me to the lakeside for a while? I want a smoke.”

I walked along the street, following K. Without the neon bar lights, the street was dark. It was hard to get the lighter to catch because of the strong wind. I stood close to K and opened my coat. Inside my coat, K, lowering her head, lit the cigarette carefully.

“One for me, too,” I said.

K was delighted. “Since when? You used to be repulsed by a woman who smoked.”

When had that changed? I couldn’t remember. I had left the country the day after that afternoon by the lake. K’s husband, who stayed with K for several more years after that, left her in the end.

“Marlboro Lights, I like this cigarette.”

It tasted strong and intense. It was the kind K’s husband used to smoke as well.

“I secretly smoke in the backyard away from my kid. I wear a shower cap on my head and gloves in my hands. Isn’t that pathetic?”

I suddenly missed that boy who was the selfappointed man of the house. Although the rain had stopped, the night air was still humid and damp.

“He… got remarried soon after. I heard that he might even have a child.”

I stared at K’s trembling hand, though her voice was steady and indifferent.

“I still don’t understand why he did that.”

The Good Family (Collection of short stories including “Sugar or Salt”) Seo Hajin Translated by Ally Hwang and Amy Smith Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press Forthcoming 2015

I listened silently to her words…that he seemed like a different person. I heard how he never held fishing pole, his only luxury, anymore. I heard that they still talked to one another, sometimes, because of their child. K’s tone was low, sad, and monotone. It seemed like he wasn’t really an ex-husband at all. It felt like she may not actually have a boyfriend. K would never really know what had happened and why it happened to her.

“I don’t mean that I regret it. Where would I have gotten such a good son if not from him? And if I hadn’t come to this country, would I ever have become interested in the homeless and people like that?” K asked, throwing the cigarette butt far away. The spark bounced and disappeared. K’s husband, his back looking small, thin, and pitiful, flashed across my mind and disappeared.

“Did you say your flight is tomorrow morning?

When are we going to see each other again?”

“I’ll probably come back soon,” I said. It was impossible for me to know if I would contact K again, if I would meet with the man who used to call me H again, if I would shut up the memory of K and the man in the attic of my mind. I threw away the cigarette butt, following K. The cold wind blew in from the ocean. K frowned, standing to face the wind. Her distorted face suddenly looked like an old woman’s. A wind blew inside me as well. Agony, sadness, pleasure, and something unknown were sucked into the whirlwind.

“By the way, when did you change your name? The front desk didn’t recognize it.” K asked, turning around and walking.

“A long time ago,” I said. (pp. 226-231)

Vol.24 Summer 2014 43

Excerpt

Time to Eat Lobster W

hen Kŏnsŏk returned from Tra Tinh he immediately came down with a high fever. This was the first time he had ever gotten so sick during his stay in Quang Tui. It felt as if every nerve in his body was about to break, and hot iron beads seemed to be rolling around and making a racket inside his skull. At first, he found it bearable. It wasn’t so bad to moan and groan and shed tears all night. It seemed that there was no time like being sick when you could so unapologetically pity yourself. The body proclaims its presence, so real and demanding, and appeals to your love of self in a way that seems impossible to resist. Kŏnsŏk was experiencing an utterly selfish episode of selfhood and pain. Tears ran down his cheeks and bone-rattling chills wracked his body.

But, as he gritted his teeth and suffered, he found the power to forgive someone he had come to very much dislike: himself. No one could hear his moans.

They seemed to carry all the regret and despair he felt towards himself. So Kŏnsŏk left his body alone in his house for two full days.

Nguyen Thi Lien came to visit him two days after Kŏnsŏk had become bedridden. When he awoke from a deep, medicine-induced sleep, he found Lien sitting at his bedside. Manager Oh had sent him the cold medicine from the hospital affiliated with the company. Probably Hieu had hinted to Lien how Kŏnsŏk was faring. She closed her lips tightly and didn’t say a word. When he tried to put his hand on her lap, she pushed it away heartlessly.

“Do you want to die of total exhaustion?” Lien hissed.

Kŏnsŏk smiled faintly. He hadn’t eaten anything since he had come back from Tra Tinh. He had even thrown up the eggs he had eaten on the way back from Tra Tinh. His last meal was some bread he had eaten in the car on his way to visit Lui. Lien went out and soon came back with a tray.

She brought a bowl of soup she had made by boiling chicken broth with bamboo shoots in it. After

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Bang Hyeon-seok

putting the tray on a table, she grabbed him by his collar and propped his body up forcefully.

Kŏnsŏk shook his head and said, “I don’t have an appetite.”

“Are you planning on leaving a single woman to die alone?”

“Do you want to marry me?”

Kethon, this was the first time he mentioned this word meaning marriage. The word had been taboo between them until now.

“I won’t let you die until that happens.”

Lien pretended to be calm, but she was blushing.

Perhaps, because she was aware of it, she glared at Kŏnsŏk and thrust the spoon into his mouth.

“Don’t you know you have to eat something before you take medicine?” she said.

Only after he had finished most of the soup did Lien release him so he could finally lie on her lap after taking his medicine. Warmth he had never experienced before dampened his cheeks. There was no warmth in his memories of his mother. There wasn’t even a single photograph of him taken on his 100th day celebration or his first birthday. It was only when he looked through the things left by his brother that he realized he actually had a few family photos. He was clearly present in the family photo, his brother’s one remaining possession, but there was something unfamiliar in that scene. His mother and brother stood on either side of Kŏnsŏk, who stood in front of the college entrance ceremony hall with flowers in his hand. That photo must have represented, for his brother, the bill for Kŏnsŏk’s four-year college tuition. There was no graduation photo, which should have been the receipt. Instead, Kŏnsŏk found a different family photo of his brother.

Of course, Kŏnsŏk wasn’t in it.

Kŏnsŏk thought of his brother’s other family photo and asked Lien, “Shall we live together?”

“You know we can’t yet.”

She shook her head, as expected. Kŏnsŏk

remembered how Lien’s mother had once sneakattacked his house. I cannot let my daughter live with a Korean. Lien, this cannot be. You will be cursed. Somehow, Lien, always so brave and strongwilled, didn’t say a word to her mother.

“Until your family approves?” Kŏnsŏk ventured.

“If you want to marry right away, marry another woman,” Lien said. “I won’t hold on to you. Don’t worry.”

After taking the medicine Lien gave him, Kŏnsŏk fell asleep in her lap.

When he awoke the telephone was ringing and he was sweaty. He picked up the phone with much effort and Lien rushed out of the bathroom. She put a wet towel on Kŏnsŏk’s forehead as he lay in bed with the receiver in his hand.

“Did you take the medicine? How are you doing?”

It was Manager Oh. “I feel a little better.”

Although a pain that seemed to be wrenching all his bones out of their joints ran through his entire body, it was much more tolerable than it had been during lunch.

“Well, I’m guessing it’s not an endemic like malaria. I don’t think you’ll die. If you don’t feel too bad, why don’t you take care of Manager Kim’s case?”

Kŏnsŏk looked up at the calendar. Manager Kim had to present himself at the police station the next day.

It was Lien, not Kŏnsŏk, who called Pham Van Quoc.

“They’re really asking too much of someone who’s dying with fever pains…” she grumbled and snatched the receiver from Kŏnsŏk’s hand when he picked it up to call Pham Van Quoc. Lien sighed deeply. She breathed in sharply a few times and bit her lower lip, as if she had made up her mind about something. Then she asked him something unexpected.

“Do you really want me to live with you?”

Kŏnsŏk nodded.

“You’re aware that you would have to come to

my house to live?”

Kŏnsŏk nodded again. She was an Ede, a tribe that still maintained a matriarchal family structure.

“You won’t regret it?”

“Not at all,” he said.

After making sure of this, Lien volunteered to call Pham Van Quoc herself. She didn’t use the landline in his room. She went out with her cell phone and came back to tell him that Pham Van Quoc would visit them soon. She smiled mysteriously at Kŏnsŏk.

He wondered what was going on.

“We’ll settle everything today,” Lien said even more mysteriously.

Whatever she had told him, Pham Van Quoc arrived before even thirty minutes had passed.

He entered Kŏnsŏk’s room and greeted him enthusiastically, clasping his palms together and shaking them up and down. (pp. 164-168)

Time to Eat Lobster Bang Hyeon-seok Translated by Jeon Seung Hee Portland, Merwin Asia Forthcoming 2015

Vol.24 Summer 2014 45

Reviews

Unparalleled Insight into War The Shadow of Arms Hwang Sok-yong Translated by Chun Kyung-ja New York, Seven Stories Press, 2014, 576p ISBN 9781609805074

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T

here is a line in the first few pages of Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms that carries with it the brunt of the Vietnam War: “Just two weeks of carnage, of thirst and heat had transformed the fighting men into burnt-out tin cans.”

Hwang’s language is unadorned and direct, his metaphor effective. It conveys a hollowness, of both body and spirit, that foreshadows the horrific military brutalities, the moral corruption, the soullessness wreaked by a hellish war and captured with staggering precision in the novel, based on Hwang’s experience as a Korean soldier contracted to fight for the Allied Forces.

A “burnt-out tin can” can also be used to describe a translation; a text that has lost its soul, has lost its voice, in the process of being rendered into a new language, and all that remains of it is an empty shell.

We were loath to let that happen to The Shadow of Arms, and took great pains to find the novel’s voice in English, scouring military dictionaries, reading dialogue aloud, comparing our translation as it developed against the French version, even delaying publication several times for the sake of getting it right. As translators and publishers of literature in translation, we have a greater responsibility than perhaps we often realize; we are pulling foreign writers, usually comfortable and celebrated in their own countries, into our local literary landscapes, and we are determining how their voices shall sound in our language, how they shall be perceived and therefore received by our readers. It’s an untold burden, and one we shoulder gladly because these voices deserve, and sometimes need, to be heard. That of Hwang Sok-yong, as this novel exemplifies, is one that should resound the world over.

It is this Korean novel that grants us unparalleled insight into a war that has haunted the United States for decades.

We have grappled with our troubled history in countless Vietnam War memoirs and novels. And to a lesser extent, we have sought to comprehend our hand in a

nation’s suffering in works by Vietnamese writers on the same subject. Only through Hwang’s detached perspective are we able to step back and understand the conflict with a clearer eye and within a greater context. The narrative, which follows a young Korean corporal on his assignment from the US Army to keep an eye on the black market that, as it becomes increasingly obvious, lies at the heart of all military and guerilla strategies, reveals the capitalist motives underpinning American involvement. We see morality drowning in greed, humanity in barbarity, duty in self-interest. We see a Vietnamese family torn apart by two brothers’ opposing loyalties, a love abandoned for love of country, an individual struggling to remain indifferent to the atrocities of a war that doesn’t directly concern him.

And we see ourselves, as a nation that has committed horrendous acts, and more importantly, as human beings who, in the face of what we know to be wrong, must choose to remain indifferent and at a safe distance or get involved and put ourselves in the line of fire.

Those who choose to read translated works are curious about other peoples, perspectives, cultures, and lives beyond the borders of their own language. The paradox is that translations often shape our understanding of our own identities, plurality being the closest we will ever come to finding universality in the human experience. We read translated works because we are looking to know the other.

In translation we read ourselves. Never has this argument been better made than with Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms.

by J.T. Lichtenstein editor, Seven Stories Press

Words Splitting on the Page

I

first heard Kim Hyesoon at Poetry Parnassus, the global festival of poetry which took place in London’s Olympic year. Kim Hyesoon shared the stage with Seamus Heaney. It was the last time I heard Seamus Heaney read in public and the first time I heard Kim Hyesoon, and even at the time it felt momentous. Heaney read some of his best-known poems. graceful, lyrical, and contemplative. The birdlike Kim Hyesoon wove a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before.

In April 2014, Kim returned to the

I’m OK, I’m Pig! Kim Hyesoon Translated by Don Mee Choi Northumberland, Bloodaxe Books Ltd. 2014, 160p ISBN 9781780371023

Southbank Centre to read from the poems published in I’m OK, I’m Pig! and Modern Poetry in Translation.

Kim Hyesoon has a following in London despite her rare appearances there, and the reading sold out very quickly. As editor of Modern Poetry in Translation I was particularly interested to notice that the crowd that gathered at the Poetry Library was not the usual poetry audience; they were younger, they knew Kim Hyesoon, and they wanted to hear her read.

Perhaps this cult status is due to the fact that Kim Hyesoon, in Don Mee Choi’s translation, really does bear little resemblance to anything else in contemporary world poetry. In one of a number of fascinating prose pieces accompanying the poetry selection, Choi describes Kim writing out of the blackened space of state censorship.

There is a strong sense of a poetics bursting out of nothing, creating itself out of nightmares and grotesque horrors and coming from a dark place where all is forbidden, and therefore all is allowed.

The poems grow from a single point, you might call it a wound, and they split and diverge and swell like organic matter, following first one image, then another, flowering and withering like bacteria spread under the microscope: On a rainy night fishy-smelling pig ghosts flash flash busted intestine tunnel their way up from the grave and soar above the mound A resurrection! Intestine is alive! Like a snake! (from “Bloom, Pig!”)

In her prose Kim Hyesoon describes this as “like the way a ghost speaks, the Vol.24 Summer 2014 47

Reviews

way a subject speaks after its ‘me’ is erased. Language is freed to follow its organic ‘dancing’ course when the ‘I’ of the poet is suppressed, even to death.”

The images combine the hideous and repellent with luminous beauty. Her poetry is teeming with rats, rotting and fetid things, mutations and mutilations.

There is a sense in which this rottenness is simply the efflorescence of life—like a glass room with a bowl of fruit in the y that lingered with me long afterfor the observation center, designed owerful story unfolded, I enjoyed of the lifecycle of a fly. But in the long dark layers of every character. poem “I’m OK, I’m Pig!” which gives its tions of love and sweet adolescent time to your firstto heartbreak.” name the collection, the impulse is chief of Banana Writers darker, more conscious: Kim explains that the poem’s genesis came from es and silver melancholy of South Koreathe peopled with citizens burial alive of millions of pigs with freedom, and longing for love and foot-and-mouth disease, and her feeling ters have unforgettable voices— this was not much different from has so manythat fans.” al Book Award and torture of people in her thefinalist barbaric Heaven and Here country’s history which she had just read this poem the spreading t novel from bestabout.

-sellingInSouth after Momimagery , 2011) considers young is more like the nightmare that ferment...Shin’s uncomplicated sticks to the story, dreamer in her waking rs another calmly affecting hours that won’t be shaken off. eign and familiar.” rkus I had the privilege of reading aloud Choi’s translations at Kim’s reading, Look After and IMom could: feel just how good they .A raw tribute mysteries were:to the adventurous, witty, but also rhood.” lyrical and powerful. I can’t recommend mes Book Review this extraordinary collection enough. mplished, and often startling, many seasons...Every sentence is

by Sasha Dugdale most unbearably affecting story of editor, Modern Poetry in Translation at reminds us how globalism— r souls apart and leave them here to turn.” l Street Journal

Loss Is the Tie that Binds I’ll Be Right There Shin Kyung-sook Translated by Sora Kim-Russell New York, Other Press, 2014, 336p ISBN 9781590516737

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woman receives a phone call early one morning informing her that a beloved college professor is dying. The jolt of this impending loss sends her tumbling back into memories of her youth, when her life and the lives of

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her friends were transformed by loss.

She begins with the now eight-yearlong loss of a lover and then vaults us back to the beginning, to the loss of her mother. Jung Yoon, the narrator of Shin Kyung-sook’s latest novel, I’ll Be Right There, recounts how she was sent to live in Seoul while still a teenager, as her dying mother believed that letting go was better than holding on. In so doing, Yoon loses not only her mother but also her childhood friend, Dahn, who moves to another city for college and soon drops out to join the military.

After her mother’s death, Yoon locks herself up in her room, trapped in the grief her mother hoped to prevent.

When she finally returns to school, she meets the lighthearted Myungsuh and mysterious Miru. One day, Yoon is caught in the middle of a demonstration as it is being put down by riot police and has to accept help from Myungsuh.

This moment of violence marks the start of their friendship and their explorations of the quieter corners of a city under siege.

Though the novel’s eventual epilogue contains uplifting notes of friendship and remembrance, this is not a light tale of how love and friendship can overcome loss and violence. Despite the hours the four friends spend together, they cannot be easily rescued from their grief. Even the professor who tries to inspire them to free themselves is haunted by his own regrets and missed opportunities. In the world of this novel, loss is the tie that binds, and not everyone survives the torment. For those who do survive, as Yoon discovers through a phone call, the past will catch up with you.

For readers of Shin’s best-selling

Please Look After Mom, this book will be both familiar and new. Shin shows off her range between the two books while also treading familiar themes. Certain details have a way of returning in Shin’s works. Here, too, are night trains, the dazzle of Seoul, poetry and literature, the visceral pleasure of pulling a cluster of potatoes from the soil, country mothers, caring female cousins, that person in our lives that we wish we could hold onto just a moment longer but they are already lost… This recurrence is key to understanding Shin’s work. Those who’ve had the pleasure of reading A Secluded Room will recognize this. In it, she writes: Maybe that’s what writing is. Maybe as long as you are writing, no time is past.

Perhaps, like salmon shredding their fins as they swim back up the cataract they once traveled down, those who write are fated to flow against the current by revisiting painful memories in the present tense.

Salmon return. Even as they guard their wounds, they risk their lives however they must to swim back up the cataract and return to the beginning—yes, to return.

Following a path already traveled, feeling for the tracks they left, retracing the same road over and over.

Shin is an obsessive writer in the best sense of the term. Her writing is unremittingly haunted and haunting, circling back to wounds that refuse to heal, to grievances that refuse to be appeased, never quite describing the horror itself but lingering over the details of the objects and instruments of torment.

This sense of obsession and recurrence was something I sought to preserve while translating I’ll Be Right

There. Repetition is often treated as an obstacle to be eliminated from English so that the story may move forward unimpeded, but grief, by its nature, resists forward motion—it goes where it has to go and lingers if it must. How interesting then that one of the most repeated elements of the book is water. It figures into nearly every scene, from snow to fog to rain to steam to waves to wells to canals and, finally, to its absence. Even the verbs Shin uses mirrors this obsession.

Words are not just sound waves, they also drip and seep and ripple, dry up, pool, and overflow. It is this behavior of water that shapes the momentum of the book, sometimes freezing in place, sometimes scattering into droplets, and sometimes surging forward.

I’ll Be Right There is, of course, a Korean novel, but it is perhaps best understood as a distinctly Shin Kyung-sook novel, for it is Shin’s watery landscape that the reader must traverse. And circle. And return to, again and again. But as Shin knows intimately, there is as much pleasure as there is pain in the returning. Hers was a book that showed more of itself to me the longer I worked on it, and I hope that readers will enjoy the same unfolding of meaning.

by Sora Kim-Russell translator

Vol.24 Summer 2014 49

Reviews Passive Resistance

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hen faced with a novel like La Vegetariana (The Vegetarian), Western readers might wonder whether a political reading is appropriate. The plot can obviously be seen as a metaphor for the role of the family in Korean society and what could be seen as oppressive cultural strictures. Readers anywhere might wonder whether these strictures, linked to familial traditions but also the overbearing presence of capitalist society, represent the author’s critical vision or whether they function as a kind of crass realism: a portrait of a society racked by evident class tensions.

La Vegetariana Han Kang Translated by Yoon Sun-me Buenos Aires, Bajo la luna, 2012, 177p ISBN 9789871803316

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Han Kang astutely leaves both avenues of interpretation open: her criticism is not explicit; rather she chooses a cunning narrative strategy that avoids overt cultural or political statements.

Steering clear of both pious naturalism and dead-eyed psychology, she separates the novel into three different parts to offer three distinct perspectives.

In part one, Yeonghye’s husband describes his wife’s sudden transformation: she refuses to eat meat. This limpid, realistic first person narrative describes increasingly strange scenes from married life that eventually lead to a tragic event. It also testifies to the husband’s failure to understand a woman who has decided to reject the image that society seeks to impose upon her.

The narrator’s precise descriptions of Yeonghye’s dreams can be seen as revelations that offer psychological profundity to a metamorphosis that consists not only of rejecting meat but also resisting the idea of consumption as we understand it in contemporary capitalist society. We are left with no doubt that society has brutally impacted Yeonghye. It is her resistance, exemplified by her vegetarian diet, that upsets her family and leads her father to commit an act of irreparable consequence: he forces her to eat meat, driving her relationship with her family to the brink. The protagonist’s reaction is just as drastic: she slits her wrist in front of the whole family.

The second section focuses on the fascination of Yeonghye’s brotherin-law, an artist, with her birthmark.

After spending months in a psychiatric hospital, she moves in with her sister and brother-in-law before renting out her own flat. He, obsessed by the

birthmark on her buttock and its effect on his art, decides to convert Yeonghye into a muse. However, when his passions overwhelm him he ends up corrupting his model, causing another tragedy. This nightmare leads into the third act, which sees Yeonghye back in the psychiatric institute. She is no longer resisting actively, instead opting for a blanket refusal: the passive resistance of an “I would prefer not to” stance. Her new tactic is to mimic the behavior of a vegetable, nourished by light alone, which is a theme that runs throughout the novel; light is the sole source of spiritual succour. This transformation, told from the point of view of Yeonghye’s sister, is perhaps the most powerful of the book.

At the end of the day, Western readers can happily ignore the critical dimensions of the novel and the content themselves with a gripping depiction of the fatalism of mental illness. Or, to the contrary, they might read this as the story of a person driven mad by the toxicity of a difficult-tometabolize bourgeois life. Regardless, La Vegetariana is a novel that maintains an admirable balance, never resorting to moral judgements or ideological shrillness, and offers the readers the chance to revel in the rebelliousness of a dual reading.

by Oliverio Coelho writer and literary critic

Rivers of a Life

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he title of this book, Sept méandres pour une île (An Island at the Mouth of the River), both in Korean and French, brings to mind that time and place where the river of life dips into the sea of infinite whose ultimate horizon is death. The alluvium-rich island denotes an ever-evolving life.

After the river completes several sequences of exemplary loops and is on the brink of fleeting fullness, it looks like a vacillating “I” that is a human being, who is gradually taking possession of his “me” that is an island.

As a fluid narrator, he fights to become a real person not only as a living being

Sept méandres pour une île Yi In-seong Translated by Choi Ae-young and Jean Bellemin-Noël Aix-en-Provence, Decrescenzo Editeurs 2013, 315p ISBN 9782367270029

but also as a character and writer.

The seven tales recount various stages in a life not unlike that of our time and the “twists and turns” that characterize its important seasons. The original Korean narrows these seven periods down to three sections: the first four are entitled “A Dry River Bed,” the fifth is “Island in an Estuary,” and the last two evoke “Sea Waves at a River Outlet.” The beginning therefore depicts a stage that could be summed up into the word youth and at the other extreme a representation of the future, both as an experimental movie and an imaginary autobiographical short story. In between the two, is a pivotal experience imprinted with eroticism, where it is hard to determine whether the masks are falling off or are being set into place.

Yi In-seong is an intrepid writer. He is always exploring new ways to awaken the senses of the world, nature, men, souls, day-to-day realities and those that exist in the imagination, or maybe even in dreams. He is as much a poet as a novelist, as much a philosopher as a fiction writer, but he never comes across as bossy. He seems to you to be a fraternal writer, and one can sense his eagerness to narrate his writings face to face, both to watch for your reaction and to convey his confidence in the power of writing. He is a generous and manifold personality.

The ensuing product is therefore rich and hence enriching, prompting you to take the step towards wholehearted collaboration. The author comes forward less as a person than as a piece of writing authored by a genuine writer who is striving towards greater awareness of his journey as a guide or pioneer looking to share his experience with the world.

When you truly become immersed in the river of Yi’s book and emerge from its glistening waters, you will feel the sheer pleasure of joining the narrator as he mounts a phoenix, which may even drop you off on the island of all hopes.

by Jean Bellemin-Noël professor of French Literature, University of Paris 8

Lessons Hard Learned

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he novel Na Krayu Zhizni (Aging Family), written by the wellknown writer Cheon Myeong-kwan, introduces us to the life of a small Korean family. A mother, sons, a daughter, and a granddaughter are living with difficulties, haunted by a series of misfortunes, losses, and trouble.

In-mo, the younger son in the family, narrates the story. He is a 48-year-old intellectual who likes to ruminate on his life and ruins himself by drinking. He once showed great promise in cinema, which made his family proud. Unfortunately, those expectations were not met and the very first movie he directed failed ignominiously; his wife left him and he went bankrupt.

Unable to deal with failure, the frustrated filmmaker gradually goes to pieces drowning his sorrows in drink.

In-mo no longer has any moral right to look down on his older brother Hanmo, who is constantly in and out of jail, nor his superficial sister Mi-yeon, the owner of a café with a dubious Vol.24 Summer 2014 51

Reviews reputation.

Brothers and sister never tried to understand each other when they were kids, and nothing has changed now as they gather in their mother’s small apartment—unhappy, frustrated, and defeated by life. Mother “could only meet her children when they creep up to her to lick their wounds, and feed them well.”

It is interesting that the reader will never learn the name of the grown children’s mother. She is just Mom. And what mother does not dream of returning to the time when she was needed by her children? When she would reconcile them with each other;

Na Krayu Zhizni Cheon Myeong-kwan Translated by Seung Jooyeon and Alexandra Gudeleva Moscow, Natalis, 2013, 287p ISBN 9785806203572

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when she looked for solutions to their problems; and when she tried to teach them how to love one another.

In Na Krayu Zhizni, the mother tries to make that dream come true.

She suddenly becomes energetic and youthful, cooking and feeding her shiftless adult children without rest. She tries to solve their problems, smooth things over, and help as she did before.

Nevertheless, everything falls apart.

Peace never visits their house. The brothers fiercely hate each other and their sister despises them both. Mi-yeon is more concerned about her personal life than about the education of her daughter Min-gyeong. It seems that their mother’s desire to see the peaceful faces of her offspring sitting down for a meal together is not feasible.

However, changes finally occur when Min-gyeong runs away as tension in the house reaches its limit. The family is reunited by their problems and worries.

With reluctance and no small effort, they begin to look for ways to interact and live according to once forgotten rules. Through hatred, pain, and fear, they gradually find the way to light and love. Even maximalist Min-gyeong, after going through hard times, comes to the same simple and clear conclusion that her family, even the worthless uncles she disrespects, will protect her in difficult times and that this is the most important thing for anyone.

“Probably, Mom has seen life as an incredibly scary monster, she could not understand the reason behind the failures that have befallen her children,” reflects In-mo. Within a few months, he changes, as does everyone else. However, their mom is no longer there. Mother, being “on the edge of life,” in the literal

sense of the word, managed to keep her children, who stepped on the brink, from taking a final, fatal step.

by Irina Madiy president, Natalis

Alienation Without Pity

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can’t remember having cried at the end of a novel before, particularly one in which nothing much happens.

No One Writes Back is a beautiful gem that works its slow magic on you over the course of 152 numbered paragraphs of which the shortest is only three words, at least in the English translation. The blurb on the back of the book rather undersells it, pitching Jang’s writing as “…this sly update of the picaresque novel.” I had to look up what a picaresque novel was, and still have no idea why it might need a sly update.

This novel can in fact easily stand on its own without being put in a particular literary context. And unusually for many Korean novels and short stories that have made it into an English translation, No One Writes Back can speak to a world audience without the need for a Korean primer.

There are only two terms, White Day and Chuseok, that might lead a person with limited contact with Korean culture to head for a search engine, but both words and their significance are perfectly well explained on Wikipedia, and maybe these days do not need a footnote anyway. Otherwise, this poignant novel, in which nothing

Nonfiction

No One Writes Back Jang Eun-jin Translated by Jung Yewon Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013, 199p ISBN 9781564789600

much happens but which talks about human communication and family relationships, speaks to people regardless of language and nationality.

It is a fine choice to be included in Dalkey Archive’s first set of translations in their Library of Korean Literature. It deserves to stand well on its own as a novel, not as something to be studied as world literature.

The novel is a road trip: a man, Jihun, and his dog, Wajo, travel from motel to motel, the direction determined largely by whichever way the blind dog feels like walking when they set off in the morning. Along the way they meet a woman, an exgirlfriend, and many strangers. Any time Jihun befriends a stranger he asks them for their address so that he can write to them. And if he is given

their address, he gives the stranger a number by which he will refer to them, filing them away in his mind together with details of their lives. Each day in his motel room he writes a letter to one of the people he has met on his three-year journey, setting out his thoughts and experiences of the previous day.

We never get to read any of the letters Jihun writes to the strangers, but during the time we share with him we do get to read four letters to his family – his mother, father, brother, and sister – which cast light on his family history and to a certain extent explain why he decided to go on this aimless journey. We also learn more about Jihun as he gradually befriends a novelist – known only as “the woman” or “751” – with whom much of the journey is spent. We long for the two people to form a more permanent connection, and speculate as to whether 751, who is writing a book as she accompanies him, has actually written the book we are reading.

The pacing is leisurely, congenial, and pleasant, and as Jihun returns home we get a revelation and a satisfying resolution, which makes you want to read the book all over again and tell everyone else to read it too.

by Philip Gowman London Korean Links

Everyday Life in Joseon-Era Korea Organization of Korean Historians Translated by Michael D. Shin and Edward Park Kent, Global Oriental, 2014, 296p ISBN 9789004261129

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veryday Life in Joseon-Era Korea is a translation of the first volume of a two-volume work that was originally published in 1996 and has been a steady seller ever since. It falls in the middle ground between a research monograph and a general history text of which there are currently too few on Korean Studies despite growing demand. Consisting of 23 chapters by 22 authors, the book provides a refreshing perspective on the Joseon period by shifting focus away from the elites and toward the commoners and the oppressed.

First, it gives vivid accounts of everyday life, detailing the daily lives and annual rituals of farmers, shopkeepers, and itinerant merchants.

Second, the book examines how the momentous changes of the period affected the lives of commoners and other non-elites. Third, it shows that some of what is thought of today as Korean tradition actually developed or became widespread only in the Joseon era, including kimchi and soju.

by Michael D. Shin lecturer, Robinson College at Cambridge

Vol.24 2014 53 Vol.24 Summer Summer 2014 53

Korean Literature Essay Contest

What It Means To Be Cold

ideals give those ideals up: “There at the table, before dipping his spoon in, a young man crossed himself…

A new arrival… As for the Russians, they’d forgotten which hand to cross themselves with.”

Fetiukov, a prisoner with Shukhov, has forgotten what it means to be human. He is motivated solely by LTI Korea supports the Korean Literature Essay Contest, which aims to gain shallow desire. He practically licks the boot of another a worldwide readership so that Korean literature may take its place among the prisoner in hopes of getting a drag on a cigarette: literatures of the world. We’d like to introduce the grand prize essay in the young “Tsezar, slobbered Fetiukov, unable to restrain himself. adult division. The designated title was Our Twisted Hero by Yi Mun-yol.

‘Give us a puff.’ His face twitched with greedy desire.”

One can be sure that he did not last long in the gulag. o asks Shukhov one day during his 10 year Meanwhile, Shukhov retains his ideals and stays imprisonment in a Siberian gulag in Alexander human. At meals, “He removed his hat from his cleanSolzhenitsyn’s book, One Day in the Life of Ivan shaven head—however cold it might be, he could Denisovich. Placed in a machine designed with precision never bring himself to eat with his hat on.” He offers to destroy the body and spirit, Shukhov’s fellow challenges to the guards who strip search him in the prisoners strip away their humanity in an effort to Siberian winter four times a day: “Come on, paw me survive. It does not work. A veteran of the gulag states as hard as you like. There’s nothing but my soul in my early on, “The ones that don’t make it are the ones who chest.” Shukhov fights the necessary fight to keep his lick other men’s leftovers.” Faced with an impossible humanity. It is a way of rebelling against the gulag fight, Shukhov alone wages an all-out war against the without explicit antagonism. He is rebelling against very core of the gulag—that which seeks to destroy the the idea of the gulag, which wants nothing more than humanity of its prisoners. to break his spirit. He refuses to bend.

A thousand miles and two Pyongt’ae’s classmates, knowing decades apart, Han Pyongt’ae is “How can you expect full well that they were Sokdae’s faced with the tyranny of an unjust a man who’s warm serfs, rationalize their serfdom. system that only he is willing to to understand a man Pyongjo, whose father’s expensive fight against in Yi Mun-yol’s Our gold lighter was effectively stolen by who’s cold?”

Twisted Hero. Om Sokdae, the Sokdae, stays silent when the teacher sadistic tyrant, imprisons his class in a totalitarian confronts the class. Asked if anybody had been slighted society with calculated politics, the promise of

by Sokdae, the students respond forcefully: “No one!” protection, and when necessary, brawn. Most students Again and again, they submit to Sokdae’s injustices. are nervously complacent with Sokdae’s rule, but the In the end, neither Han Pyongt’ae nor Shukhov outsider Han Pyongt’ae sees it as a social injustice. explicitly win their battles. After a day of theft, fear, Although Pyongt’ae is partially motivated by his own and backbreaking labor, Shukhov is simply glad that desire to be the most respected student in the class, his “they hadn’t put him in the cells…And he hadn’t fight against Sokdae is mostly philosophical from the fallen ill.” He never thinks that he resisted against the start. After being demeaned by Sokdae on his first day gulag. The adult Han Pyongt’ae, in his own eyes, is a of class, Pyongt’ae says, “What had happened violated failure. It took an outside savior to free Pyongt’ae and completely the principles of reason and freedom by his class from Sokdae. No such savior existed in the which I had been reared all my life.” The battle was on. adult world, and a familiar injustice returned: “It was Both Pyongt’ae and Shukhov fight against their as if I had been thrown into a cruel kingdom that ran incarcerators while those around them submit. The things as it wished. Here Om Sokdae began to reappear populous literati in the gulag who so often spoke in from the dim past.” His fellow students, willing

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to unquestioningly flow along with the current of society—with all its vices—were now rich. Pyongt’ae bitterly states, “I wanted to squeeze into a corner of their rich table. But my very urgency buried me that much deeper into the slime of my life.”

But the reason one reads Our Twisted Hero and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not to hear how an infallible hero slew his enemy single-handedly. It is to hear how an ordinary person retained, at all costs, the most important thing in a world of blood, tears, and solitude: his humanity. This act turned out to be of utmost importance. With One Day, Solzhenitsyn exposed the horrors of the gulags to readers in both Russia and the West. Yi Mun-yol, with Our Twisted Hero, was the first writer to negatively portray South Korea’s post-totalitarian democracy. Both writers stuck to their ideals and decided that they would fight for their cause by simply writing the truth, no matter what public sentiment might oppose them.

The lessons these books carry have not faded over time. The next time our government allows bankers to ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens, spies on us, and has an approval rating of nine percent, we should wonder what culture put that in place. Was it Shukhov’s unwillingness to sacrifice his humanity?

Was it Pyongt’ae’s willingness to denounce what he sees as an unjust system?

In the end, both books give us the same warning, as applicable today as it has ever been: a man who submits willingly to unjust imprisonment has wrought the iron of his cell with his own mind. When Shukhov asks us

what it means to be cold, we may not understand, but we must always remember what it means to be warm when the water begins to freeze.

by Samuel Walder student of Computer Engineering University of Illinois ※Reproduced with permission from The Sejong Cultural Society.

Annual Plan for the Korean Literature Essay Contest Taiwan, National Chengchi University April 2014—Sept. 2014, EunGyo (Park Bum Shin) Italy, University of Rome April 2014—Oct. 2014, The Poet (Yi Mun-yol) Turkey, T.C. Erciyes University April 2014—Oct. 2014, The Muslim Butcher (Son Honggyu) France, Korea Culture Center in Paris May 2014—Oct. 2014, The Island (Lim Chulwoo) Vietnam, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City May 2014—Oct. 2014, Princess Bari (Hwang Sok-yong) Czech Republic, Charles University in Prague June 2014—Sept. 2014, Your Republic Is Calling You (Kim Young-ha) and The Poet (Yi Mun-yol) ※The detailed schedule for the contest is not fixed and thus the contest will

also be held in some countries that have yet to be included on the above list.

For more details, please visit www.klti.or.kr

Winner’s Statement: Our Twisted Hero is powerful and absorbing. Something I like most about it is that Yi left his characters with uncertain futures at the end.

There is doubt and fear within the uncertainty, but there’s also hope. And that hope which lies within uncertainty can be much more powerful and beautiful than blindly stated optimism. Many authors feel like they have to present conviction in their works, but Yi (and Solzhenitsyn, whose book I compared to Our Twisted Hero) knew that the truth can be serrated and ugly. Yi used his full talent to present the truth, and that’s what makes his work so special.

Vol.24 Summer 2014 55

Excerpt

Our Twisted Hero

About Yi Mun-yol In the times of turbulent change that have swept across modern Korean society, Yi Mun-yol has become an important writer, showing us how the gaze of literature must capture something of the world and convey it creatively and artistically.

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hen I came home from school that day, I began again to examine carefully this new order and environment. A certain mental paralysis, the result of being thrown suddenly into a very strange school environment, and a feeling of being threatened by the rigidity of this new order, which now suddenly was weighing down on me, filled my head with a kind of fog; everything was so fuzzy that I couldn’t think.

Although at twelve it’s still easy enough to treat everything with the innocence of a child, I had the feeling I wouldn’t be able to transfer into this new order and environment. What had happened violated completely the principles of reason and freedom by which I had been reared all my life. I had not yet experienced directly the full brunt of Sokdae’s order, but I had more than a vague presentiment of the irrationality and violence I would have to endure after accepting it. It all seemed like a horrible prearranged plan that was destined to become reality.

However, the prospect of fighting was dreary beyond belief. Where would I begin, who would I have to fight, and how would the fight be conducted?

—it was all so daunting. It was clear that there was something wrong, that there was enormous injustice in a system founded on irrationality and violence.

But it was too much to expect me at that time to have either a concrete understanding or a concrete response. To tell the truth, even today at forty, I don’t have the complete confidence needed to handle this

56 _list : Books from Korea

sort of thing.

Not having a brother, I told my father about Sokdae. I wanted to describe what I had had to put up with from Sokdae that day and get advice about what I should do in the future. But my father’s reaction was unexpected. I had barely finished describing Sokdae’s strange behavior and was just about to ask a question in the hope of getting advice when Father suddenly said in a voice filled with wonder, “That boy is really something. You said his name was Om Sokdae, didn’t you? If he’s like that already, he’s surely heading for great things.” Obviously Father didn’t recognize the existence of any injustice here at all. Hot under the collar now, I told my father about the monitor system in Seoul. I described how things were decided reasonably by election and that no restraints were put on our freedom. But Father seemed to interpret my attachment to reason and freedom purely as a sign of weakness.

“What a weakling you are! Why do you always have to be in the crowd? Why do you believe you can’t be monitor? Think of how things would be if you were monitor yourself. What better example could you have of what a monitor should do?” He went on then to advocate fixing my sights on the monitor’s job, which Om Sokdae now held, telling me not to be angry at the unfortunate situation the class found itself in, nor at the system that had created this situation, nor at the bad management of the system.

Poor Dad! It’s only now that I think I understand him and the bitter taste of humiliation, the sense of powerlessness he was experiencing after being tossed from a plum job in the central office in Seoul and being made section chief of general affairs in the country administration. He had been nailed by an overzealous boss for staying at his desk and not rushing out to greet the minister when the latter came on inspection.

He must have had a greater thirst for power now than at any other time in his life. But he had always been the one who believed in reason, the one who scolded my mother for caring more about my ability to go out and give some boy a beating than about my grades.

Of course, at the time, I had no way of understanding all of this, so my father’s abrupt change left me at a complete loss. My confusion was all the greater since, next to my teachers, my father had always had the greatest influence on my decisions.

As a result, instead of learning how to deal with the impending fight, I was left confused about the very existence of the injustice itself, and this was crucial in deciding whether or not a fight was necessary.

Still, I listened attentively to my father’s advice, and as soon as I got to school the next day, I began to examine the possibilities. Father’s advice, however, was quite impracticable. Unlike in Seoul, where an election for class monitor took place every term, I was told there wouldn’t be an election here until the spring. There was no way of knowing how the class would be divided then. And even if I prepared for the election, someone like me, who had drifted in suddenly in fifth grade, had little or no chance of winning. Even if it were possible to win, the thought of the humiliation the other children and I would have to endure in the meantime was like a nightmare. In addition, Om Sokdae did not wait for me to prepare at my leisure for next year.

Our little clash that first day, even though it ended in my surrender, made a strong impression on Om Sokdae. It seemed to put him on his guard. Perhaps not quite sure of his victory the first day, he tried to confirm it the next day. Again it was at lunchtime. I had just taken the lid off my lunchbox when a boy in

the row in front of me looked back and said, “It’s your turn today. Fetch Om Sokdae a cup of water. Then you can have your lunch.”

“What?”

I had raised my voice without being aware of it.

“Are you deaf? Bring over a cup of water. We don’t want food to stick in the monitor’s throat, do we? It’s your turn today.”

“Who decided whose turn it was? Why do we have to fetch water for the monitor? Is the monitor a teacher or what? Doesn’t the monitor have any hands or feet?” I countered loudly, outraged. In Seoul, an errand like that would be considered an insufferable insult. It took an enormous effort on my part to stop myself from using foul language. Still, my bluntness made the boy hesitate. Suddenly, from behind my back, Om Sokdae’s familiar voice said threateningly, “Hey, Han Pyongt’ae, cut it out and fetch a cup of water.”

“No. I won’t.”

I greeted Sokdae with a stony refusal. I was so angry I didn’t even see him. He slammed the lid roughly on his lunchbox and walked over toward me, his face set in anger. (pp. 16-21)

Our Twisted Hero Yi Mun-yol Translated by Kevin O’Rourke Minumsa, 2012, 64p Kindle Edition

Vol.24 Summer 2014 57

LTI Korea Trip

Literary Tour

The Power of Literature from Jeollabuk-do Province I

n recent years, Korean literature has been increasing its global reach: Pansori, often referred to as Korean opera, was recently inscribed into the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List; the works of Ko Un, who has long been Korea’s foremost poet, have been translated into more than 30 languages and he is now every year mentioned as a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature; and Korean novelist Shin Kyung-sook captured the hearts of readers in Europe and the US immediately after her work Please Look After Mom was introduced in English. There is an observation worthy of mention about the recent trend of Korean literature’s growing popularity within the world literature community: among Korean writers who have obtained worldwide repute, a host of them hail from the Jeollabuk-do region. As it is with pansori, Ko Un, and Shin Kyung-sook. Furthermore, there are several other authors from the region that have just begun to move into the global spotlight: Ch’ae ManSik, Seo Jeong-ju, Seo Jeong-in, Park Bum Shin, and Eun Heekyung, among others. When these names

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are included, it is hard to deny that writing from the Jeollabuk-do region is increasing its global literary presence.

The literature from the region has not only come to represent Korean literature but has also emerged as an alternative voice that speaks for world literature. The recent rise of the region’s literature at home and abroad owes much to the geographical distinctiveness that runs deep through the literary works of the region. The literature from Jeollabukdo shares universal features of Korean literature and at the same time has qualities specific to the region.

To put it more conceptually, the unique qualities involve “femininity” and the “will of surmounting the symbolic order.” For a very long time the Jeollabukdo literary community has been the center stage for many female writers. Such epic songs as Jeongeupsa, Seonunsan, and Jirisan have been sung by women that were completely excluded from the masculine order but were in psychologically superior positions to men. This is by far unusual, given that much of Korean literature was dominated by male writers.

In addition, the region’s literature has a longstanding tradition in which every individual literary work shows a struggle against the symbolic order as a main theme. Although excluded from the symbolic order of each historical era, the literature from this peripheral region has dreamed of an altruistic order that is much more human compared to the central order. Particularly, the classic tales such as Chunghyangjeon and Shimchongjeon, which were produced based on the narrative pansori song tradition, are typical examples that not only represent satire and the spirit of criticism specific to the literature from Jeollabuk-do, but also portray maternal altruism that strives to embrace all that had been degraded to a “useless existence” as a result of exclusion from the symbolic order.

Beginning in the modern age, the distinctiveness and uniqueness of Jeollabuk-do literature started to exhibit its true qualities. On the one hand, the region’s literature became the cradle of contemporary Korean literature; on the other, it established itself as a touchstone and reflection of that literature. Korea’s

literary writers in general blindly admired and were intent on assimilating into Western literature. In contrast, writers from Jeollabuk-do took a different course. When modern Korean literature was generally influenced by literature transplanted from the West, the literature from Jeollabuk-do stood out as the sole resistant force to this trend. Traditionally, the region has strived to internalize Korea’s cultural traditions, while showing a much stronger will to negate modern trends than other regions. As a region, the non-conforming characteristics of Jeollabukdo that critically accepted Korea’s modernity have contributed to the development of the literary uniqueness in the region.

Modern literature from Jeollabuk-do is unique in its firm basis on traditional literature. The most noteworthy feature is that the literature coming from the region has unceasingly explored and presented post-modern values. Such values extend beyond a society that has human beings degenerate into the means not the end. Writers from the region have long internalized the “maternal power” that Vol.24 Summer 2014 59

has been inherited and developed by the literature from the region, and presented the inherited asset as a major force that can defeat a capitalistic order.

All writers from Jeollabuk-do can be likened as “sons and daughters of Jilmajae” or the “descendants of womenfolk in Seonje-ri.” Going even further back in time, these authors can be referred to as modern successors to “Shim Chong,” the filial daughter who always forgave and embraced the very menfolk who cornered her into a deadly situation. Their inheritance of such an all-embracing, maternal language in a modern way enabled them to develop a unique literary style that distinguishes their works not only from other korean writers but also from any other members of the world literature community: pansori of Chunhyangjeon, Ch’ae Man-Sik (Murky Waters and Peace Under Heaven), Seo Jeong-ju (Jilmajae Myths), Ko Un (Ten Thousand Lives and I, Ko Un), Choi Myeonghee (Honbul), Shin Kyung-sook (A Lone Room and Please Look After Mom), and Eun Heekyung (A Gift from a Bird and Life Unperturbed). It is not too much to say that the power of the culture of Jeollabuk-do, which has long preserved a unique

Jeollabuk-do Province: it is the birthplace of Korean writers who have gained global recognition and serves not only as the cradle of, but also as a reflection of contemporary Korean literature.

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and highly advanced culture, is one of the most influential factors that has enabled authors from the region to gain global repute.

Not long ago, a media source in Sweden— the country of the Nobel Prize—referred to poet Ko Un as the “Emperor of Gunsan.” The reason they gave such a nickname to the poet is perhaps because the Swedish media wanted to credit him with magnificently symbolizing Gunsan, a port city in Jeollabuk-do, through Ten Thousand Lives, his collection of poems comprised of 30 volumes. To put it differently, it means that Ko Un was named the “Emperor of Gunsan” because Gunsan is a place and at the same time the poet’s hometown Gunsan came under the spotlight as the “birthplace of the emperor” because of Ko Un. In this sense, Jeollabuk-do Province turned out the “Emperor of Gunsan” and then continued to produce many emperors such as the “Emperor of Jeongeup” (the birthplace of Shin Kyungsook), the “Emperor of Gochang” (Seo Jeong-ju and Eun Heekyung), the “Emperor of Namwon” (Choi Myeong-hee), and the “Emperor of Iksan” (Park Bum-shin). And these “emperors” are promoting the region, their spiritual hometown, as a historically significant place where new values that might save humanity are created.

by Ryoo Bo Sun literary critic and professor of Korean Literature, Kunsan National University

LTI Korea Trip Visit the _list website to view photo galleries.

History, Literature, and Tradition Intersect

T

his past April 2014, LTI Korea Translation Academy class traveled south to Gunsan, Jeonju, and Gochang. We went on a historical tour of Gunsan; visited the literary museums of three of the giants in Korean literature, Ch’ae Man-Sik, Choi Myeonghee, and Seo Jeong-ju; stayed overnight at a hanok, a traditional Korean house; and were dazzled by an overload of incredible food throughout.

Over the course of the two-day trip, I saw hundreds of mounds of graves. They seemed endless—on the hills running along the highway, between the patchwork of different colored and textured soil, many overlooking the highway in groups, laid out uniformly in family plots, husband next to wife, their children below. A physical map of their family tree. With my face pressed against the bus window, I watched the graves pass by in a blur.

One of the most memorable sights we visited was the literary museum of Choi Myeong-hee, the mastermind behind the 10-book series, Honbul. In one of her quotes, the author describes her writing process as being fueled by the intensity of pulverizing her heart, willing it to converge at the tip of her fingers, and releasing it as words, each one compact and steely enough to engrave itself onto a rock.

Choi’s works are driven by deliberate, controlled, and measured diction. Perhaps it is the translation training I’ve been undertaking, but her struggle to find the exact word to acutely encompass her designs, regional culture, and Korean history really resonated with me.

When we visited the Midang Literary House, I was struck by something else altogether. Next to the literary house was Seo Jeong-ju’s childhood house, either preserved or re-dramatized. In the front yard,

there was a rock engraved with the poet’s recollection of his childhood, that he was raised 80 percent by the wind from his hometown. I felt a twinge of envy at seeing one’s childhood memorialized, forever monumentalized. Having left Korea after 6th grade, I am now realizing what a 13-year-gap means to a neighborhood in this age. Some literary theorists may argue for a deconstructive approach to literature and dismiss an author’s personal history, but I am not one of them. History matters.

I admit it: I spent the majority of my bus ride looking at graves and contemplating the life stories of those departed. Some may perceive it as odd, but I think it was a metaphor for the trip as a whole. Different eras, different families, and different regions, all with their own stories to tell, were represented by those gravesites. Since I began studying in Korea, this convergence of history, family tradition, and local customs have characterized my experiences and the literature that I have read. With trips like this or other experiences where my nose is not buried in a book but rather experiencing the history, the culture, and the world around me in person, I can seemingly become closer to the literature itself—filling in the gaps, connecting the stories, and achieving a better contextual understanding of an author’s experience. I now have a more cohesive picture in my mind of what Korea was, is, and will be in the future—a picture that would not be nearly as interesting had it been drawn solely from the words in history books and the literature we have read.

by Lee Ye Jin student, LTI Korea Translation Academy

Vol.24 Summer 2014 61

Culture Spotlight

Classic Korean Films Reach Out to the Masses W

Sopyonje ⓒKOFA

hen you ask Korean cinephiles what their favorite films are or who their favorite directors are, you are sure to get a list that goes on and on. That list is likely to be a global one comprised of big names from the US, Japan, the Middle East, Europe, and South America, now even India and Southeast Asia would be included.

Probably, the global list might include the names of Korean directors like Park Chan-wook, Bong Joonho, Hong Sang-soo, and Kim Ki-duk. Some other names, however, might not be included like Lee Man-hee, Im Kwon-taek, Shin Sang-ok, Kim Sooyong, Han Hyung-mo, or Yu Hyun-mok. It is not a story concerning cinephiles worldwide, but with Korean movie buffs in particular. Correspondingly, the presence of classic Korean movies is indeed negligible. Classic Korean movies are still an unknown territory even for movie lovers, with the exception of old-movie fans who can recall these classic films from their memories.

The Korean Film Archive (KOFA) is an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Culture, Sports

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Homebound ⓒKOFA

and Tourism, which is dedicated to discovering, collecting, restoring, and preserving films produced in Korea. Its main duty is to collect and preserve the data related to movies such as posters, still photos, scripts, DVDs, and soundtracks as well as films screened in Korea. Last May 2014, in celebration of its 40th anniversary, KOFA held a film festival entitled “Discovery, Restoration and Re-creation,” showing to the public for the first time Sorrow Even Up in Heaven (1965) directed by Kim Soo-yong. This classic Korean film was discovered at the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. Another lost classic, Love with an Alien (1958), which was found last year at the Hong Kong Film Archive without the soundtrack, was also screened at the opening ceremony of the film festival. Through creative efforts the sound was re-created with live music and performance.

KOFA strives to seek various ways of utilizing and conducting research on films in its archive.

The most common function is to screen movies, a major duty undertaken by the Cinematheque KOFA. The film archive also selects great Korean classics

every year for DVD distribution. However, these activities to promote Korean films to the public are bound to face geographical, temporal, and physical restrictions. Accordingly, it was natural for the archive to find an alternative way to make classic films more accessible. The solution was to provide online data services. Beginning in 2007, KOFA established its own VOD system at the Korean Movie Database to increase the availability of classic Korean movies for the general public as well as movie lovers.

Since then, seven years have passed. The KMDb VOD service, which first began with just over 160 Korean films, has now expanded to include more than 380 films. The online movie information service offers a variety of Korean films from different eras: from Sweet Dream (1936), which was long regarded as the oldest Korean film before the discovery of Turning Point of the Youngsters (1934), to the relatively recently produced movie Sorum (2001), which means “goose bumps” in Korean.

The collection of the KMDb VOD includes 12 films produced by rebellious Korean film director Kim Ki-young along with the restored version of The Housemaid (1960), which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. The KMDb also provides screenings of 18 movies by veteran filmmaker Im Kwon-taek, who even now is actively involved as a filmmaker. Among the 18 movies is his debut film Farewell Duman River (1962). There are a variety of methods that make movies more available, but when the choice of films is restricted to Korean classics, it is the KMDb VOD service that allows fans access to more films than any other online medium.

The Barefooted Young ⓒKOFA

In recent years, VOD services of classic Korean films have been expanding their user base through a variety of platforms along with the KMDb of KOFA. In May 2012, Google launched a classic Korean cinema channel, “Korean Classic Film Theater” on www.kmdb.or.kr YouTube. Through the YouTube channel over 80 films are now available for free. The classic films that are shown on the channel were selected among the films that had already been screened through KMDb youtube.com/KoreanFilm VOD; due to the characteristics of YouTube’s global availability, all the classic Korean films are offered with English subtitles.

In 2014, Naver, Korea’s biggest portal service provider, started to deliver a similar film streaming service through its TV Cast. A total of 63 movies tvcast.naver.com/ are now available for free. YouTube has served as koreanfilm a medium to allow classic Korean films to reach a global audience; it is expected that Naver’s TV Cast will continue to expand the audience base for classic Korean films at home, given that Naver is the most frequently visited portal domestically. It is noteworthy that all of these services are available on mobile devices. Movies provided by the YouTube channel can be readily seen on a mobile phone or tablet PC with the YouTube application installed.

Despite the limited offering of Naver’s movie service to mobile devices that run on an Android platform, the installation of the Naver media player application will ensure easy access to classic Korean films.

KOFA is now striving to prove wrong a longheld, deep-rooted perception that classic Korean movies are too unsophisticated and poorly made.

by Yoo Sungkwan Media Service Department, Korean Film Archive

Our Joyful Young Days ⓒKOFA

The Housemaid ⓒKOFA

Vol.24 Summer 2014 63

Afterword

W

riter Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a missionary of Korean literature in France. Le Clézio published a rave review of the Korean short story collection, Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi, in Le Figaro on May 15. He strongly recommended this book to French readers in his article, “Rush to Read,” that especially highlighted female writers.

Le Clézio has visited Korea several times and spent a year as a visiting professor at Ewha Womans University.

During his stay in Seoul, he read French translations of Korean literature, met with many Korean writers, and, quite unusually for a French writer, became an expert on Korean Literature with a deep understanding of the literary language of Koreans.

Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi is a collection of 10 Korean short stories published since the year 2000. This collection deals with various problems faced by Korean society today, such as the widening income gap, the conflict between Korean nationals and immigrant communities, and the dissolution of the traditional family brought on by changes in society. Le Clézio says, “Korean literature is written without affectation or self-pity, in a language that is durable, precise, and not self-satisfied, but always imaginative and allusive, with a hint of self-deprecating humor that characterizes the Korean people.”

Korean literature began cropping up in the French book market in the 2000s. Éditions Zulma published L’Invité, Shim Chong, fille vendue, and La Route de Sampo by Hwang Sok-yong, the representative writer of Korean realism. As L’invité was a finalist for the Prix Femina Étranger (for foreign novels), the French press began to notice Hwang’s literary accomplishments. When Hwang Sok-yong started serializing a novel online, Le Monde published an article entitled, “Un nobélisable mise sur Internet,” or “A Nobel Prize Nominee Online.” It must have seemed peculiar to the French that a Korean writer would gladly undertake an online serial novel—unimaginable for French writers—to communicate with younger writers. Éditions Gallimard has a collection of books called “Folio,” which consists of the choicest works by the most renowned writers all over the world. The one and only Korean writer who was included in this series is Lee Seung-U. Lee’s novels, La vie rêvée des plantes and L’Envers de la vie, are displayed in French bookstores along with the most famous writers in the world. Shin Kyungsook’s autobiographical novels, La Chambre solitaire, won the 2009 Prix de l’Inaperçu—Étranger (for foreign novels) in France. This prize is awarded to works that were unfortunately overlooked by other prize committees. Here’s what the judges of the prize had to say about Shin’s novel: “It is impossible to mix Annie Ernaux’s autobiography, a Proustian style, and the workers’ epic in the fashion of Zola. […] Nevertheless, Shin Kyung-sook has achieved this astonishing cocktail of power, passion and sensibility, and at the same time levity.”

Korean Literature Spotlighted in France

by Park Hae-hyun reporter, Chosun Ilbo

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Vol.24 Summer 2014 65

66 _list : Books from Korea