Not many people will be posting Christmas Day reviews, but mine is a blog that never sleeps (besides, what better present can I give you all than another review?). With that in mind, Merry Christmas, and happy reading ;)
*****
One of the best discoveries I've made during my look at Korean literature is O Chong-hui (Oh Jung-hee), a writer whose stories of ordinary people stand out among the many works I've read this year. She's known as a master of the short form, so I was interested to see how a longer piece would read - hence the book covered in today's post. It's a work which begins simply enough, but as O is not an author who creates happy shiny people, we know that there'll be some darker tones just around the corner...
*****
The Bird (translated by Jenny Wang Medina) is set in Korea in the 1990s. Young U-mi and her little brother U-il have been abandoned by their mother, with the father then forced to venture far afield for work, promising to return one day. After some years spent with relatives:
"Father had arrived without warning to take us away. I could hear a voice solemnly and tragically recounting my fate just like in a fairy tale, saying how it came to be so that one day they had to leave the house. It was as if I had always known that there would come a day when I would have to follow that call to leave unquestioningly."
p.21 (Telegram Books, 2007)
For the two children, life is about to change. As well as being reunited with their father, they are about to encounter another surprise in the form of a new mother...
With a clean new room, even if it is devoid of luxuries, and friendly new neighbours, it looks as if life has turned a corner. However, the reality is that the high hopes are unlikely to last. Neither the father nor his new wife are the type to stick around when times get tough, and the events to come will have their effect on the two children. They're used to being by themselves, but can they really survive all alone?
The Bird is a little different from the majority of the stories I've read by the author, mainly in its focus on the children (especially U-mi). The story starts innocently enough, a story of life in the nineties for poor working-class kids. The reader soon warms to the clever U-mi, who is doing her best to look after herself and her brother in the absence of parent.
She can expect little help from her father. He's a dreamer, ambitious and violent by turns, but he's also a man caught by the times. In order to survive, he needs to keep moving to where the work is (which, to be honest, probably suits him...). After a few drinks, his violent streak appears, and the events the children witness are bound to leave their mark. A question which repeatedly haunts the reader is that of the mother's whereabouts, and while U-mi accepts her father's story, the reader is a little more suspicious...
In any case, U-mi has no time to speculate as she needs to look after her younger brother. U-il is a dreamer, an innocent, slightly backward boy, who is obsessed by a cartoon character, to the extent of believing he too can fly. Again, what seems like an innocent, childish belief will later be shown to have a more sinister origin.
For the first half of The Bird, I felt that it was a book more aimed at teenagers, not bad but perhaps lacking in range and emotion, with U-mi's limited voice restricting the story. Of course, I should have known better - O is a writer known for her depth, and slowly, gradually, the optimistic tone turns sour. To start with, it's little things, such as the children's destructive tendencies (for example, in cutting faces from photos) or the treatment of poor Mr. Bear, the take-home toy from U-mi's class at school.
The last third of the book then casts away all pretence at the innocence of youth as disturbing events begin to pile up in a masterful development of a descent into darkness. There's violence, sexual awakening and painstaking description of the filth of the underclass (there's one scene in particular which might be rather distressing for westerners...). By the end of the book, I'd have to say things have turned almost Ogawaesque - and I mean that in a good way ;)
The writing is excellent, and Wang Medina has done good work in capturing U-mi's young voice. The book begins with fairly simple writing that gradually darkens as the story progresses, more from the content than the style. A nice touch is the childlike use of the word 'Mummy', a choice I found a little questionable at the start - by the end, the word seems almost sinister and mocking...
The title isn't merely drawn from U-il's dreams of flying as there is an actual bird involved. Belonging to the children's neighbour, Mr. Yi, the tiny creature is kept safe in a cage, high above the floor:
"If I put it on the floor, she'd get eaten by a rat faster than I could move a muscle. And birds are meant to live in the heavens like angels or fairies aren't they? What's so great about a dirty, muddy world of land that's swarming with bad people who want to catch you for their dinner?" (p.36)
The Bird is an apt symbol of the theme of the novel, a creature representing hope and freedom, but one who is unlikely to ever obtain it. Just like the bird, U-mi is likely to have a bleak future - the story, however is a very good one. Chalk up another success for O Chong-hui :)
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 :)
Today I'm taking a short break from German Literature Month to return to my major project for the year, my self-education in the world of Korean literature, and this review looks at more work from an excellent writer I discovered this year. It's a wonderful collection of stories, definitely a book I'd recommend - and it's rather pretty too :)
*****
O Chong-hui's River of Fire and Other Stories (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, review copy courtesy of Columbia University Press and Australian distributor Footprint Books) is a nice selection of stories from a writer described in the afterword as the current matriarch of female Korean writing. This collection of nine stories is a kind of retrospective, a journey through her writing career, from her very first attempt at being published in the late sixties right up to a story from the mid-nineties.
It begins with 'The Toy Shop Woman', O's debut piece and one which won the 1968 New Writers Award. The story follows a young, emotionally-scarred woman as she raids a classroom for money and objects to sell, before walking to an old toy shop. As is to become O's trademark, the story slowly widens the scope, allowing the reader to see what has brought her to this point, a story of family hardship - and a collection of dolls. A clever, female-centred, multi-layered tale, it's very different to a lot of Korean writing
This female focus continues in the following stories, each of which features a housewife trapped in a dull relationship. In 'One Spring Day', a woman waits for a husband to return to their run-down home, a place of both comfort and boredom:
"Peace filled our home, imbued my relationship with Sungu, a peace absolute and invulnerable in which no leaf on a tree could be disturbed. But what had I sacrificed for it? Our relationship was like stagnant water - stale, peaceful."
'One Spring Day', p.18 (Columbia University Press, 2012)
Things are very similar in 'A Portrait of Magnolias', in which a woman with a troubled past attempts to move on from her cheating husband. Sadly, post-separation life is no better than the sad time she spent as a housewife.
In the title story, a couple find themselves trapped in a working-class existence, and while the wife does her best to keep things together, the man is only too eager to escape each night, unable to stand life in the apartment:
Even though he took an artisan's pride in his work, I was surprised at the loathing I detected in his voice.
"All I ever hear is the machine, whether I'm at home or on the bus. I feel like the pedals are attached to my ears. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Your breathing at night - that gets me thinking of the machine too. It really bothers me - I don't want to be stuck in a cage like a squirrel turning a wheel for the rest of my life."
'River of Fire', p.59
The pressure of monotonous work is crushing him, and his only outlet for the stress is a rather unusual one...
A later story, 'Morning Star', has a slightly different style. It relates a night out with five old university friends, reunited after years apart. The five are now middle-aged, each with their own families, jobs and disappointments, and the evening on the town, followed by a night spent drinking at home, allows the five to see how their lives have changed over the years - not always for the better. O switches the viewpoint between the characters, allowing the reader to see what each thinks of the others (it's not always positive).
It's in the longer, later stories that O really impresses, though. The broader canvas lets her develop the stories at a slower pace, also allowing her to insert a more detailed back story. In addition, these later, longer stories can be slightly edgier and more political. 'Lake P'aro', a story I first read earlier this year, is a perfect example of this. A middle-aged woman goes on a journey to a recently drained lake, seeking inspiration for her writing. This pleasant excursion is gradually overtaken by flashbacks to the woman's life in America, where her family moved after her teacher husband was fired for reasons unknown. The different strata of Korean history are shown in the buildings uncovered in the lake - rocks from the Kingdom of Koguryo, rice fields from the colonial period, roads from the military regime. The moral of the story seems to be that all political systems are eventually outlasted by the stones...
This idea of the contrast between present-day life and the distant past appears again in 'Fireworks'. This one is a particularly good story describing a day in the life of a family, a day on which an event celebrating their town's 'promotion' in status to a city is being held. I loved the starting scene in a classroom, a beautiful description of a lazy sunny afternoon where the students struggle to maintain interest in the teacher's dull, date-heavy history lesson:
The teacher rose and methodically erased the blackboard.
"Yi Yongjo, tell us about the founding of Koguryo."
Yongjo stared at the blank surface, desperately racking his memory. All he could remember was what he had read in a comic book - the story of Prince Hodong and Princess Nangnang, a magic drum that boomed in the absence of any human touch, and General Yon'gaesomun, who wore half a dozen daggers, who when mounting his horse used a servant's back rather than stirrups.
'Fireworks', p.98
Poor Yongjo has a preference for stories over dry dates, and it's this focus on real life over 'important' historical facts which permeates this charming story.
Earlier this year, I was able to try more of O's work: her story 'Wayfarer' in the Modern Korean Fiction collection, and several stories (including the excellent 'Spirit on the Wind') which you can find online for free. She's very much a story writer, having written just the one short novel as far as I'm aware, and the forty-page story/novella seems to be where she's most comfortable, and at her best. Over the course of her career, she's become a highly influential writer (and a very good one!), amassing an impressive body of stories concerning the role of women in society and the trauma of a country still healing its scars...
At this point, though, it's only fair to give a special mention to the Fultons, who are supreme translators in the field of Korean literature in translation. As a married couple working together, it's tempting to compare them to the Pevear and Volkhonsky translation team; however, unlike P & V, the Fultons are bringing untranslated works into English and not just making American versions of Russian classics which have already been translated. In addition to translating O Chong-hui's stories, Bruce and Ju-Chan have also worked their magic on writers like Ch'ae Yun and Cho Se-hui. However, it's with O that they've really made a mark :)
A great writer, great translators and a beautiful-looking book - it all makes for an excellent addition to my K-Lit library. O is definitely a writer I want to try more from, but sadly there's not all that much out there (she's a writer whose focus is definitely on quality over quantity). Here's hoping I manage to stumble across some more of her work soon...
*****
Footprint Books, as always, assure me that this book is available in Australia, either at bookshops or through their website :)
One of the standout stories from when I recently read the Modern Korean Fiction collection was 'Wayfarer', a wonderful story by O Chong-hui (AKA Oh Jung-hee) about a woman deserted by friends and family after a traumatic event. Eager to try more of her work, I looked around to see what else was out there, and if you're looking for a (free) taste of Korean literature, there is (of course) only one place to go - over to Korean Literature in Translation to see what Uncle Charles has found out there on the net. It turns out that there are a fair few of O's stories you can sample online for free - perfect for another Women in Translation Month post :)
*****
The first story I tried, 'Evening Game' (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé), was immediately recognisable as a work by the writer of 'Wayfarer'. It's a story about a woman past marrying age at home with her father, and O never shies away from making her character less than perfect:
"Dizzy from Anaemia and panting from the reeking smell that made me nauseous, I'd stood before the mirror, studying the fine wrinkles and filthy patches of ringworm on my dry skin. The stains on the gas range tarnishing the stainless steel would prove more malevolent and last longer than my memory of them."
Old before her time, she's trapped at home playing cards with her father every evening. Why? Well, there are some secrets in her past which will eventually be revealed...
Next up were a couple of shorter tales, one of which I uncovered for myself at the Acta Koreana site. 'Weaver Woman' (tr. Miseli Jeon) is a slightly atypical story looking at a woman and her largely silent husband, one with rain, flowers and symbolism which went flying well over my head. 'Garden of my Childhood' (tr. Ha-yun Jung), on the other hand, is recognisably one of O's stories. It follows a young girl roaming the streets of a country town, the new home of her refugee family as they wait for their absent father to return. A sub-plot of the mystery of the missing chickens reveals how the family is managing to adapt to their new circumstances - I think you can guess how that one plays out ;)
'Chinatown' (tr. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) is a longer, fairly well-known story, and acts almost as a continuation of 'Garden of my Childhood'. A refugee family moves from the country to the city to restart their lives in a poor, dirty neighbourhood. It's a coming-of-age story, a portrait of a young girl moving from childhood to puberty, but it's also a story which is built on images - the dirty children, bombed-out buildings and the 'Chinese' houses on the hill. Like much of O's work, it's a story within a story, and we move back and forth between life in the new neighbourhood and vivid memories of the move to the city. This is a story you'll find in at least two publications, but you can try it here for free, thanks again to the kind people at Acta Koreana.
*****
I've raced through the first four stories, and I had good reason to. You see, good as they were, the best one by far was a much longer piece, Spirit on the Wind (tr. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton). This is a substantial novella in four parts, and it centres on a woman who keeps deserting her husband and child, running off without warning, only to turn up again days (or weeks) later. The reader soon begins to wonder what exactly is wrong with her - have no fear, we'll soon find out...
Unusually for O, the first and third parts are actually narrated by the husband, Se-ju, an old-school Korean man who expects his wife to do everything for him at home. He loves his wife (and shows a surprising amount of support and faith in her), but as she disappears time after time, he comes to realise that he just can't do it any more:
"When she returned and our life resumed just as before, our wounds seemed at first glance to have healed. But with her next absence they would open up, more livid and deep than ever.
Those wounds never really healed. On the surface they may have received balm, but it was all a deception. Like a steady drip of water that undermines a foundation before one realizes it, those wounds had suffused our life, encroaching upon our dreams, our hopes, our trust in each other" (p.18)
While Se-ju himself has his faults, it's tempting to sympathise and believe that the wife is expecting a little too much from him...
Se-ju's wife, Un-su, is a bit of an enigma, and the reader initially wonders whether she's depressed or simply selfish. The truth, of course, is a little more complex. It's not giving too much away to reveal that childhood, war-related, trauma is at the heart of her problems, and it's not until the very end of the book that we find out just why she has to disappear so often. The second and fourth parts of the story are told in the third-person, following Un-su on her journeys, and the more we learn about her past (and her present), the more our sympathies gradually start to shift.
Spirit on the Wind is an excellent novella, beautifully written and translated (by the well-known husband-and-wife team of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, names aficionados of Korean writing will come across frequently). In their brief preface, the translators talk of modern K-lit as a literature of trauma, and this story is certainly a good example of that. However, it's also typical of a woman's struggle in a patriarchal society, with Un-su's issues exacerbated by her husband's attitude and pressure from other family members.
The book is also full of beautiful imagery, though, making Spirit on the Wind a joy to read. Again, the themes of the story provide links to the writer's other work, especially when, late in the story, Un-su returns to Incheon, the setting of 'Chinatown'. While I've enjoyed O's other stories, though, this one stands out in my mind as the best of her work I've read so far. It's one I would recommend as a good introduction to women's writing in Korean literature - especially, of course, as the PDF is available to download for free :)
*****
I did read one more story, 'Lake P'aro', but I'm leaving that one for another time. You see, there is a longer collection of the writer's stories available in English, River of Fire, (which contains 'Lake P'aro'), and I'm hoping to get hold of a copy in the near future. Stay tuned for more about O Chong-hui/Oh Jung-hee very soon :)
*****
Image (retrieved 23/7/14): http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Jung-hee (Spanish Wikipedia)
