The next stop on my cruise through the history of Korean literature is the latest book from my recent visit to the local university library. It's a book which comes highly recommended (e.g. by Charles over at Korean Literature in Translation), and having read it, I can see why. A great collection of stories, this is definitely a book more people should be aware of :)
*****
Wayfarer - New Fiction by Korean Women is a 1997 anthology from Women in Translation Press, edited and translated by (of course) Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. It introduces eight female writers from South Korea, each represented by one story. Originally released between 1974 and 1994, the stories are a representation of the influence female writers are having on Modern Korean Literature.
The title comes from a story from O Chong-hui (and an excellent one it is too) about a woman trying to rejoin society after a traumatic incident. However, I won't say too much about it here as it was one of the stories I featured in my post on the Modern Korean Fiction anthology earlier this year, and one that piqued my interest in female writers from the country.
Even if we overlook O's story, though, there are several other great pieces, with a few common themes. One of those is the struggle women have with gender roles, with So Yong-un's excellent 'Dear Distant Love' being a prime example. It features a woman obsessed with a no-good lover, a man who walks all over her (and took her daughter away soon after the birth). Yet somehow she still feels a need to treat him as a (Korean) husband should be treated:
"Before Han-su could knock on the door, Mun-ja recognized the sound of his steps and went out to welcome him. She helped him off with his coat, she removed his socks, she brought a basin of hot water and washed his feet, and each of these objects turned the color of gold."
'Dear Distant Love', p.125 (Women in Translation Press, 1997)
It's a twisted tale, and poor Mun-ja is a martyr to her no-good lover, a woman who believes that no sacrifice is too great for the man she has decided to devote her life to...
A shorter story is Kim Chi-won's 'Almaden', which describes the life of a Korean woman at a bottle shop in New York. The story alternates between the dull description of her work routine and her fantasies of the rugged man who comes in every day for a bottle of cheap wine. Almaden (her name for the man, but actually the brand of wine he drinks) comes to be a symbol of escape from everyday life, representative of the life she'd like to lead if only she dared.
A more subtle approach is provided by a writer I've encountered a couple of times before, namely Ch'oe Yun. In 'The Last of Hanak'o', a man on a business trip to Italy attempts to pluck up the courage to meet up with a female friend from his younger years. As the story evolves, events of the past are revealed, slowly emerging from the mist:
"It is forbidden to venture near the canal railing on stormy days. Take precautions in the fog, particularly the winter fog... Then enter the labyrinth. And bear in mind, the more frightened you are, the more lost you will be."
'The Last of Hanak'o', p.11
These words start the story, taken from a sign near the Grand Canal, but they could just as easily refer to the man's struggles to come to grips with the past. This one is a wonderful tale of men struggling to deal with women for who they are, a story with a nice (if fairly obvious) twist in the tail.
Not all the stories are as good, though. Two later pieces which look at the role of housewives are the weakest of the eight (perhaps I'm not the right reader for this kind of story). Kong Son-ok's 'The Flowering of Our Lives' looks at a woman struggling to come to terms with her relationships with her mother and daughter, preferring drinking to looking after her daughter. Meanwhile, Park Wan-suh's 'Identical Apartments' provides another typical tale of a housewife dying of boredom, never satisfied, whether living with the in-laws or moving into a new apartment. Once again, as I've discovered several times before, Park's privileged whinging proves not to be to my taste...
However, the remaining stories are much better, and the final two summarised here have a more political edge. Kong Chi-yong's 'Human Decency' portrays a magazine journalist working on two different stories: one is on a former artist, a beauty who has written a book on meditation; the other deals with a recently released political prisoner. This second assignment brings back memories of the journalist's own time as a protester in the 1980s:
"How single-minded we children of the 1980s were to believe that right would triumph whatever the circumstances; how firmly we grew up believing that justice would win out in the end."
'Human Decency', p.75
The question here is which story she should prioritise in a country that would prefer to forget the past...
There are more politics on show in Kim Min-suk's 'Scarlet Fingernails'. In this one, a woman gets to meet her father for the first time after he has spent decades in prison for being a suspected spy from the North. It's an excellent story looking at the problem of guilt by association, an issue which was only recently resolved. Many of the family members resent the prisoner, not because of the years he's spent away from them, but for the shadow he has nevertheless cast over their dreams and ambitions.
Even if not all of the stories were to my taste, Wayfarer is a great collection, one I'd definitely recommend. Some similarities in style are evident across the stories, one being the gradual reveal, switching between the present-day setting and pivotal moments of the past to colour in the whole picture (perhaps the influence of O Chong-hui on later writers). There's also sterling work, as always, by the Fultons, including an introduction giving a background of female writing throughout Korean history. While I would have enjoyed more stories (eight is a fairly small selection), the overall quality is unquestionable - Wayfarer is well worth a read and a great first step into the area of female-written Korean fiction :)
As I noted in my post on O Chong-hui, the Modern Korean Fiction collection, in addition to containing some wonderful stories, proved to be an excellent starting point for finding new books and authors to explore. The collection only had a few stories by female writers, but those were some of the better ones in the book, and Ch'oe Yun's 'The Gray Snowman' was definitely one of my favourites. So would Ch'oe's other work measure up to that one? The answer is a resounding yes...
*****
The beautiful book in the picture is There a Petal Silently Falls (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, and Kichung Kim, from Columbia University Press, review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Footprint Books). It's a collection of three stories, a thirty-page tale sandwiched between two novella-length pieces, and the three selections come from a five-year period between 1988 and 1993. Each has a very different style, with the selection outlining the writer's ability to experiment with different forms and content matter.
The shortest piece, 'Whisper Yet', is about a woman on a family 'vacance' at a friend's orchard. Over the course of a lazy summer day spent with her daughter, memories of the woman's childhood home come back to her, in particular those involving a helper at the family's orchard. His name was Ajaebi, and he struck up an unlikely friendship with the woman's father (only later did she discover just how unlikely it was...).
It's a story set in the immediate post-Korean-war period, a clever piece about the secrets adults keep from children. However, it's also one whose underlying message is that having differing ideologies is not necessarily an obstacle to developing a friendship, with Ajaebi and the narrator's father being on opposite sides of the political divide. The politics here aren't especially foregrounded, though, and this is a lovely, subtle story which evokes memories of pleasant summer days in the sun :)
*****
The politics are much more evident, however, in the title story, perhaps the most well known of the three. In an emotionally-charged debut piece of writing, Ch'oe creates the story of a girl found by a construction worker as she is wandering the streets. The initial scenes are loaded with rape, violence and then silence, but as the story progresses, we are shown that the story is about much more than just one unfortunate girl.
In fact, 'There a Petal Silently Falls' is an allegorical story picking at the open wounds of the Kwangju uprising in 1980, when a large group of rebellious inhabitants in the southern city were slaughtered by government troops:
"As you pass by the grave sites scattered throughout the city, you may encounter her, a girl whose maroon velvet dress barely covers her, a girl who lingers near the burial mounds. Please don't stop if she approaches you, and don't look back once she's passed you by. If your eye should be drawn to the flesh showing between the folds of that torn, soiled dress, or drawn to something resembling a wound, walk away with downcast eyes as if you hadn't seen a thing."
'There a Petal Silently Falls', p.3 (Columbia University Press, 2008)
The girl is a shell-shocked refugee wandering ever-northwards, psychologically scarred after having witnessed her mother's death. In order to protect herself, she has draped a 'curtain' over her memories, a self-imposed barrier to help her forget what she's seen.
It's a story in three voices, with alternating chapters told from differing points of view. One strand follows the girl as she journeys towards Seoul; the second is told by the man who finds (and violates) the girl, only to be tormented by guilt afterwards; the final one is the voice of an uncertain 'we', which turns out to be student friends of the girl's missing brother. While assigning roles to these voices is a risky affair, it's tempting to see the girl as the people of Kwangju and the man as the state, sharing the character's post-massacre regrets (wishing that she - and the whole country - could return to normal). And the students? They are the voice of the ordinary people of Korea, following the rumours of the uprising as it spreads northwards in the form of the girl...
It's an excellently-structured piece of writing, utilising the chorus of voices to conceal parts of the story until the appropriate time arrives. There's a gradual release of details, and the full horror of the troops' attack on Kwangju only becomes apparent towards the end of the story. I'd have to say that as a first offering, it's a very impressive work.
*****
Five years on, 'The Thirteen-Scent Flower' also criticised Korean society, albeit it in a more general, and sophisticated, manner. The story starts as a kind of fairy-tale in which Bye, a young man obsessed with dreams of the Arctic, runs into Green Hands, a young woman with nothing to live for (but with a skill for tending plants). Having recognised the unique connection between them, off they go in his truck to the mountains, where they discover a rare, unnamed flower and settle down in the idyllic surroundings.
There's a lilting, fairy-tale quality to the story, aided by the discovery of the wondrous flower high in the mountains:
"Wind Chrysanthemum. Commonly known as the Arctic Flower. Hardy plant living in a land of bitter cold, your tender blossoms streaming in winter's north wind beneath high clouds; your delicate purple blossoms reaching out for the sunlight shining through the clouds, symbol of your thirst for life; your fifty-five petals ever mindful that your beauty is based on the number five; your snow-white scent a distillate of the manifold desires embodied in your small form, a sad dedication to the world."
'The Thirteen-Scent Flower', p.139
Having tracked the plant down, Bye and Green Hands begin work on developing different varieties, each of which has its own, inimitable scent, and the more their work progresses, the more people come to join them in their high-altitude community.
Gradually though, real life seeps into Ch'oe's fairytale. You see, when a flower as rare and beautiful as this is found, society demands that it be exploited for the common good. Pharmaceutical companies, perfume designers, botanists, resort developers - they all come flocking to the mountains to see how they can use the flower to make money. Everyone wants a piece of the magical and delicate flower, yet with a limited supply, not everyone can get what they want...
'The Thirteen-Scent Flower' is a critique of the commercialisation of modern life, a society where fairy tales are rarely permitted to have a happily ever after. Anything beautiful which is uncovered must be harnessed for the good of the people - that's what we call progress... It's a story which is as powerful in its own way as 'There a Petal Silently Falls', but in its subtle approach it's perhaps an example of a more developed writer.
*****
This book is a superb collection, and if I'd had the time (and energy...), I could easily have explored each story in a lot more depth. It's definitely a collection I'd urge you to try, and I'm looking forward to exploring the web to see if any more of Ch'oe's work has made it into English. Before that, there's one more thing I should do, though - head back to my trusty copy of Modern Korean Fiction and see which K-Lit author I should check out next ;)
*****
Footprint Books, as always, assure me that this book is available in Australia, either at bookshops or through their website :)
