Top 10 "not about the country's divsion" Korean translations

As I have written elsewhere, translated Korean modern literature tends to cohere around a few themes, primarily those of colonialism, civil war, and separation. While this is completely justifiable from the perspective of the last 100 years of Korean history, it can also render Korean literature, from the outsiders’ perspective, a bit monochromatic. In order to, in one place, indicate some of the other colors of the Korean modern-fiction palette, I have here 10 works, all available online or in Korea, which move away from the common and history-borne themes. Many of these books have been reviewed elsewhere on this site, but I wanted to make list of books that escaped the ‘literature of national division’ (pundan munhak) and dealt with more universal themes.

1) I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-ha.
Kim may be the best current writer in translation (his other works in translation include Photo Shop Murder and I Wonder What Happened to that Guy in the Elevator) and I Have the right to Destroy Myself may be his best work. A post-modern meditation on meaning, art, and death, it features an artist of suicide and a tangle of modern love and art.

2) Deep Blue Night by Choe In-ho.
Choe sets his novel on the West Coast of California and puts his two main characters on that most American of journeys, the road trip. As Hyeong, the narrator, and his friend Jun-ho stagger down the California coast, exhaling dope-smoke and desperation along the way, they shine uncertain light on Korean-American culture, the larger culture in which it lives, and the emptiness of a life lived without meaning.

3) A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball by Cho Se-hui.
Dwarf is the classic tale of the price of Korean modernization and economic growth and in that theme, though set in a classically Korean setting and culture, Cho writes a book important to any country that is modern or in the process of modernization. A dwarf, already diminutive and insignificant, is slowly driven to death, his home stolen, and his family dissipated as “urban renewal” comes to Seoul. Powerful, political, and tragic.

4) Our Twisted Hero by Yi Mun-yol
Our Twisted Hero is a retrospective meditation on power. Narrator Pyongt'ae Han moves to a new school and is bullied by, Sokdae Om, who rules with carrots and sticks, keeping nearly perfect order. Han rebels. For this, he is ostracized: Om has created an all-powerful cult of personality. Han works his way back into Om’s good graces and perversely comes admire him. When Om’s reign crashes down at the hands of the even greater power of a new students other students turn against Om, with only Han refusing to completely repudiate him. There is an oddly tacked-on ending, but otherwise a powerful analysis of how power can work.

5) Who Ate Up all the Shinga by Pak Wan-suh
A brilliant “autobiographical novel” by Pak Wan-suh which not only follows her family history, but also follows the key events and decisions that made Pak into a novelist. From the country-side, not even imagining anything else, the narrator/Pak is pulled to the big city of Seoul, to school, and eventually into the nightmare of the Korean war. The focus, however, is on Pak’s family, and often her amazing/amusing mother and the kinds of vacillations and hypocrisies that were necessary to navigate life in that complicated and quickly shifting time in Korean history.

6) Rain-shower by Hwang Sun-won
Rain Shower is a short story by Hwang Sun-won (Hwang also wrote the seminal but monumentally depressing novel The Descendants of Cain). Sonagi is a brief but a heavy rain shower that suddenly comes down usually on a hot afternoon. In Hwang’s story, the rain shower symbolizes the short and tragic love of the boy and the girl. The story begins with the boy encountering the girl playing by the stream on his way back home they fall in love, and endure the tragic/romantic fate of many other teen lovers. This work is only available in collections, as it is very brief. It is available online at the extremely useful website of Brother Anthony of Taize: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Shower.htm

7) The Camellias by Kim Yu-jeong
Three stories in a slender volume that all focus on love and although the stories are not western in any sense, they all describe a love that seems, to a modern eye, a “free” one. In The Camellias love is chosen across class lines, in The Scorching Heat love is lost to a fate as simple as nature, and in A Wanderer in the Valleys we see a love that causes a wife to metaphorically risk every wolf in the human valley. Kim covers a wide emotional range: The Camellias is a pastoral comedy, The Scorching Heat is a bathetic tragedy, and A Wanderer in the Valley is a story of love and peril. A great book for the tortured romantic in any reader. ;-)

8) The Ma Rok Biographies by Seo Giwon
It is not easy to make Korean history, which has so often been tragedy, into a farce, but Seo Giwon pulls off this unlikely trick in his The Ma Rok Biographies. In three short stories, all featuring protagonists named “Ma,” Seo portrays the random, absurd, and farcical nature of Korean history in three different eras; the pre-Japanese feudal system; under Japanese rule, and; during the Korean war. Seo finds people to be powerless, feckless, and silly; flotsam and jetsam on seas of indeterminacy. Finally, he also passes judgment on human systems and finds them wanting. This is a kind of absurdist/zen take on history, and often had me laughing out loud a thing that is not common when reading translated Korean literature. ;-)

9) Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee
Chinatown is the story is of a nine year old girl who comes to a greater awareness of sex and death. As the book moves along, the girl observes the relationship, family, and eventual death of a prostitute named Maggie, as well as the sad death of her own grandmother. As backdrop to these events, Oh gives us the seventh pregnancy of the girl’s mother. Oh blends these stories into a collage representing the circle of life. Chinatown, although it clearly lives in a post-war era, is a very personal story and is well paired with…

10) Toy City by Lee Dong-ha
Like Chinatown, Toy City takes place in the years following the Korean war and while it quite clearly references the war and its effects on society, it focuses tightly on a family forced from the countryside to the city. Yun, the narrator, is a fourth-grader. Yun’s father, a good farmer, is incompetent in the dity and Yun is forced to grow up quickly. Lee does a good job of sketching the “toy” city in which Yun’s family lives. This is a great story of a boy coming of age, and like Chinatown does for a young girl, Toy City does an excellent job of portraying what it is like to grow up, both in the specific circumstances of the city, but also just as a young man. You’ll want to make sure you get the new Koryo Press edition as it is more complete and translated a bit better.

The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances by Yun Ch'oe

Earlier, I posted (after prompting!) a mention of the fact that I had read one story of Yun Ch’oe called The Last of Ha’nako. I really hadn’t liked it that much, as it hinged on a pretty obvious plot twist, although one that might have not been quite so obvious in Korea, at the time Yun wrote the story.

Today I read The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances and I read an entirely different author. With an omniscient third-person narrator, always a good way to deal with a fractured story, Ch’oe relates the story of two lost souls, Bai and “Green Hands” who meet each other in near tragedy and once joined, work together to create beauty.

As in The Last of Ha’nako the ending becomes clear about halfway through the story, but it is not based on sudden revelation (and one that comes as no suprise), but rather it flows naturally from the events of the story. Bai and Green Hands create the “Winter Crysanthemum” a new, beautiful, semi-narcotic, and potentially quite valuable flower. The flower is a result of their love, dedication to handcraft, and partly to their desire to flee society. As the fame of their flower grows, that same society naturally encroaches the couple, and they find their brilliant creation threatened by extinction. Take the “flower” to be symbolic of their love (or not, really) and you have the standard elements of the “us against the world” love story. The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances has a bit more to say than just that.

Ch’oe masterfully mixes her elements of fairy-tale with descriptions of the ‘outside’ world that very deftly navigate space between parody and hard-edged description. As the flower becomes popular, photographers arrive, pa-jeong stands pop up, and cheesy nicknacks begin to proliferate.

Outside the village here is a wonderful scene in a government office as officials attempt to craft, in 40 minutes, a complete program with which to deal with the horticultural, social, and medical implications of the thirteen different flowers. This meeting concludes with the farcical,

“our forty minutes are already up. We’ll make that the conclusion and close this conference.”
“But what conclusion do you mean?”
“What we’ve just come up with.”

I hear echoes of Alice in Wonderland there.

Finally, Ch’oe introduces three un-named characters (They are known as K, L, and M, but might as easily be Paeckche, Silla, and Koguryo) each of whom hope to profit from publishing credit related to the flowers. This section is an amusing commentary on personal pride, patriotism, and idealism, and the possible infamy that can be associated with each. Individually, the 'letter-men' muses on how they might steal credit for the flower and how their name for the as-yet unnamed blossom, is superior to that of the others.

In the end, only their hatred that someone else gets credit remains, and they successfully conspire to destroy the Wind Chrysanthemum. In fact, they proudly trumpet their venal reunion as evidence of their sincerity and probity. This is an amusing take on the traditional notion of modern Korean Literature that re-union, the end of diaspora, is innately a good thing.

In her clever way, in quite palatable text, Ch’oe delivers a message parallel to that of The Descendants of Cain by Hwang Sun-won, without the un-subtle “happy ending” of that story,* that loyalty and love have difficulty standing before treachery and evil.

The story ends in a romantic, or sad depending upon reader’s disposition, moment, with the two lovers setting out for the “North Pole,” and freedom.

As I noted in my previous comments on this work, it is available at: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/klt/97wint/choeyun.htm

Of published in The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories
Which you can find here http://www.rienner.com/title/The_Golden_Phoenix_Seven_Contemporary_Korean_Short_Stories

Definitely worth the short time it takes to read.

*Both works discussed are translated by Suh Ji-moon, who partners with Julie Pickering on The Descendants of Cain work

"Trap of History"

Jeong-Hyun Shin's The Trap of History should have been a contender. Instead it’s underlying reactionary politics render it worthwhile to read, but better to distrust.

The first issue is Shin’s palpable dislike of Korea, in the present and as a recent historical concept:

During the nineteenth century, however, the Korean people failed to transmute their energy to higher and more subtle levels; instead, they abandoned themselves to the national vices -moral, economic, and political corruption; factional struggles; and the inflating of the elite class, thus severely straining the political and social system of the nation. As a result, the twentieth century has been the worst of times for Koreans.

This is the oldest sort of complaint, the equivalent of an old man hollering to keep children off his lawn, then slumping back into his rocking chair and murmuring about “the good old days.”

Or as Cicero put it, “o tempora, o mores!”

The second issue is that this stain in his brain leaks, as stains do, out to tarnish what he thinks of modern Korean literature:

“Unfortunately, I cannot in these works find any intelligible set of ideas for how to transcend the present, how to move out of the pasts, how to reconcile the past with present life, and how to create a national self.” (xiv)

This is an interesting view of what literature should do and I’m not sure it is consonant with Shin’s claim, which is key to his dismissive attitude about current Korean lit, that previous Korean literature had been good.

Certainly what Shin describes (with approbation) as:

literature, old myths, religious rituals, and nursery rhymes were elevated to the form of hyang-ga, songs, si-jo, ga-sa, and finally the modern forms of the novel and poetry. (x)

do not seem primarily to be literature of transcendence, rather the literature of acceptance of the 'old days.'

Further, Shin’s ultimate point, “For more than half a century the literature has been largely concerned with the expression of some anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise.” (xv) seems accurate but largely without importance since for the last half century the country of Korea has largely been concerned with the expression of anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise and it is largely because of this approach that Korea has been able to remake itself in the remarkable fashion it has.

Historically, this is where Korea is, and that can’t be escaped by longing for the good old days.

Shin is a literary moralist in the old-fashioned sense. When he discusses “A Fire” by Jin-gun Hyun he concludes that the narrator’s final act of revenge is flawed because “the fire at Sun-i has discovered in the end should be used creatively and positively to break her own fetters.”(8) This borders on the absurd, given the already well-limned territory of control and pain that that the narrator is trapped in. If the story doesn’t have some notion of human perfectibility in it? Shin will pan it.

Shin also has an annoying habit, one I’ve detected in several other essays of Korean critics, of beginning his essays with tangential discussions of various theorists (From Umberto Ecco to Andrea Dworkin), before finally veering back to the literary work under examination. My favorite introduction leads off Chapter Five. Shin weaves Heraclitus, Macbeth, Achilles and Adam, Faust and Confucius, into a perfect cotton-candy of analysis, all of which leads up to a conclusion something like, “The Koreans have a different, and not worse way, of addressing fate.” To return, for a moment, to Macbeth, it is sound and fury, signifying nothing. As a new reader to Korean criticism I make the snap, and probably incorrect, judgment that this kind of writing is to prove some kind of minimum daily requirement of western literary thought. If that is what it is, it is pretty unnecessary.

Sometimes, also, his analysis is perverse. When Shin argues that the traduced maiden in “The Lunatic Painter” represents “how ordinary people become dead in the course of daily life” he seems to miss the actual point, that the death of her “inner light” is absolutely not in the context of daily life. Despite this, Shin begins there and builds a progressively more breathless argument that radically misinterprets part of the story. It often seems that Shin’s analysis precedes his reading.

Shin’s belief that Koreanness includes some kind of inherited racial history is clearly carried through his analyses. Reviewing Yi Saeng’s “The Wings” Shin argues that, “There is no denying that we feel some limitation in Sang Lee's use of interior monologue; because of the narrator's limited mental space the monologue does not reveal his cumulative memories and wishes.” (39)

That is, of course, nonsense, Yi presents his narrator as living in a permanent present haze as part of his presentation of the character and his numbed disconnection. Why Shin believes that each and every character in a story should be a walking talking representative of the cumulative social and political history of Korea is unclear, but it is an unfair and profoundly philistine concept.

Shin seems to know this elsewhere. When he argues that (about the narrator of “The Wings”:

There is an everlasting horror in the narrator's life. He may never become liberated, may never find utopia. He is confined in his wife's world.

Shin explicitly admits that this character is unnaturally bounded in, yet at the same time he wants him to be the vast canvas of Korean history. These thoughts are paralogical.

Moralist that he is, Shin gets in some good digs at narrator’s wife, and these are well earned. Shin is a good writer and often a skilled critic; but one wearing blinkers.

This blinkered condition is demonstrated in his analysis of “Kapitan Lee” which is one of the most amusing, if derogatory, stories of a collaborator in the canon of such stories (if there is one?)

Shin says:

on the way to be servile yet again to another foreign power -- he falls into a reverie on his long history of servility to foreign power

Kapitan Lee certainly serves any ascendant foreign power, but he is not servile in the dictionary sense, rather he is cunning as a weasel, and this is not a difference without a distinction.

Shin wants to portray Kapitan Lee as a mere bootlicker. Lee certainly licks boots, but he is a cold-hearted opportunist, and that has an entirely different meaning than the one Shin tries to tack onto the horrible, but oddly attractive, Kapitan Lee.

It is a topic for another paper, but Shin also does an amusing job of assessing the narrator “behind” Kapitan Lee and how the two clash. Blinders on, Shin misinterprets that relationship, but it is clever that he detected it – I certainly didn’t, but the moment I read Shin’s analysis it came crystal clear.

Finally, there is Shin’s catastrophic misunderstanding of "Seoul: Winter 1964," by Seong-ok Kim. This is a classic story of the random anomic state of citizens (An and Kim) in a society governed by those with economic goals, and how this makes social, personal ties, meaningless.

Miraculously, foolishly, Shin says:

The setting is not delineated well enough; the characters are not fully developed; and their actions are not given enough motivation and conflict

This, of course, is precisely the point of the story, and Shin’s tin-ear for meaning is painfully revealed by his analysis.

"Tin-ear "might be unfair. But Shin’s moralistic streak, his desire for every story to show us some path from Gehenna to Paradise, shades his understanding of modern Korean literature, which has progressed far beyond simple stories of Good versus Evil.

Shin later claims that An and Kim are “are buried alive in history, which is painful in every sense.”

Of course the opposite is true – they are buried because they have no history, they float like leaves.

If you only have a moment to read “The Trap of History” this is the chapter to read, as Shin’s moralizing is most ridiculous and clear in it.

With all of this said, Shin is probably worth reading. I like him, well enough, merely on account of his dislike of the noise of modern life. He can sometimes see through a stories’ structure and get at the knotty issues below. The problem is that he might, with his prediliction for “good old day” Koreanisms, completely misunderstand what the problem is.

Still, Shin is brave enough to be a public intellectual critic in a culture in which that is not always a safe thing. Props to Shin for writing his work, demerits for his sometimes staid, if not regressive, analytics.