Where Are the Hui-Jae's of Yesteryear?

I just finished reading The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, the third novel by the Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin to be translated into English.  It doesn't seem to me as solid a work as Please Look After Mom and I'll Be Right There, but then it was originally published in 1995, before either of them.  But I'm not sure that's quite fair, because it doesn't feel like a beginner's work either: in particular, Shin uses time very skillfully -- she clearly put a lot of thought into the novel's structure.

So why doesn't The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness work as well for me as its sister novels?  I may have to reread it to answer that question, but one thing that occurs to me is its use of the death of one of the narrator's friends, which Shin circles around very much as Joseph Heller did with Snowden's death in Catch-22.  The character and her situation feel real enough, but I had the feeling that I've seen this done too often before, though offhand I can't name many examples.  It's a horror-story convention, I think, where something too awful to think about haunts the protagonist, and is only faced near the end, as the climax.  Yet what happens to that character, while I can understand why it haunts the narrator, is not, unfortunately, that out-of-the-way.  It reminds me of a similar revelation scene in Marge Piercy's novel Braided Lives, which like The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is also semi-autobiographical, the story of a poor working-class girl who achieved her ambition of becoming a writer.  Given the far greater horrors of the period Shin is writing about, namely the late 1970s and early 1980s, the climax feels anti-climactic to me, and its political dimensions are not developed. It's probably unfair to judge Shin by the standards of US second-wave feminism, but I guess that's what I'm doing.  Since Shin is sensitive to politics in general, and she's certainly concerned about the vulnerability to abuse of her young factory girls, I don't think it's really that unfair to ask for more thought in this case.

Which doesn't mean I think Girl is a bad book.  Like Shin's other novels I've read, it's packed with period detail, the feel and sounds and smells of moving from the South Korean countryside to an electronics factory in South Korea under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship.  The characters are fascinating and credible. The workers' attempts to unionize, though legal under the Republic's constitution, are fought tooth and nail by the company, with government backing of course.  The narrator is also stunned by national events: the assassination of President Park by one of his men in 1979, just a few years after his wife was assassinated, the Gwangju uprising and the heightened repression of the 1980s.  When the narrator describes watching Park's funeral on TV and reacts to the sight of his young daughter Geun-hye, now orphaned by violence, I was stunned, because I remembered that Shin was talking about Park Geun-hye, who is now, since 2013 the President of South Korea.  (First woman president there, too.) The novel was written in 1995, so the ramifications of that fact weren't and couldn't have been intended at the time.  It's like a surreal coincidence, too outrageous to be invented for fiction -- it can only be mentioned because it's true.

Shin's narrator jumps around in time from her youth in the 70s and early 80s to her present, as a succesful and respected novelist in the 1990s.  She reflects a great deal on her writing, and on Writing; these reflections are for me the weak parts of the book.  She struggles with the book she's writing, which is the book we're reading; she struggles with her past and the nation's past; she struggles with her craft; she's ambivalent about her public.  And the climactic revelation, which is meant to "explain" the writer's block she contends with, seems anti-climactic, even or especially if it's true.

One aspect of the book that pleased and moved me was the narrator's relationships with other women, mostly her co-workers but also her cousin, who lives in a single rented room in Seoul with the narrator and two of the latter's brothers.  (Since I know that part of Seoul somewhat, I enjoyed trying to visualize it thirty-five years ago, as Shin evoked and described it.)  Though the narrator has a forbidden romance going with Chang, a young fellow from her village, it doesn't really seem to engage her that much, nor do other entanglements with men that she alludes to now and then during the novel.  Women alone stir her imagination, and she writes with remarkable intensity about her feelings for them, about their bodies: how they look, how they move, what they do.  It's what I think Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick meant by homosocial desire: a desire that isn't erotic/genital but is no less compelling and even consuming for that.

And yet there's a striking scene near the story's end, when the narrator (I'm not sure we ever learn her name, and I hesitate to identify her with Shin), riding the train from her village to Seoul, encounters a young man both sensuously concrete and as resonantly symbolic as a visitation from Hermes:

In the seat next to mine, a boy sat sound sleep.  His hands grasped the armrest to keep from rocking.  He had dirty fingernails.  They looked like they were stained with oil, or were unwashed, filled with scum.  His profile gave off a cold impression, his forehead covered by his locks.  The boy slept and slept until the train pulled into Suwon.  When they announced that next stop was Yeongdeungpo Station, I stirred him awake.

"Have we passed Yeongdeungpo?"  Only then the boy opened his eyes, startled.  His body was frail but his eyes were big and bright.  I told the flustered boy that we'd made a step at Suwon Station a while back and would be arriving soon at Yeongdeungpo, and the boy folded himself into his seat again, saying "Oh," sounding relieved.  "If I get off at Yeongdeungpo Station, I can go there by subway."

The boy offers to help her take down her heavy bag, full of food packed by her mother.

He effortlessly fetched the bag and placed it on the floor. His body giving off the scent of a skilled steel worker.

"Thanks."

The boy smiled shyly.  Revealing a row of teeth, white like pomegranate seeds.  He didn't sit back down but headed straight to the door.  He carried nothing, not a single bag, and I noticed from behind that he had a sturdy build.  While I oscillated between hesitation, anticipation, and resignation, the train arrived at Yeongdeungpo Station.  I shifted seats to where the boy had been sitting.  How nimble.  He had already made it to the far end of the platform.  When he was asleep, crumpled up in his seat, he had seemed pitiful, but now, striding down the platform, he was full of vigor.  It occurred to me that perhaps he was no longer a boy.  With his mop of hair lifted off his forehead, his long profile, which had seemed cold somehow, reminded me of a giraffe.  The train started and he began to run, as if he were racing the train.

Ah! My eyes opened wide.  Was this a mirage?  They were a beautiful pair of legs.  Faster than the steel wheels on the train.  They were perfectly toned and tempered, ready to run at the speed of seventy miles an hour.  The boy's beautiful legs left the platform before the train got out of Yeongdeungpo Station. A sigh of relief escaped from my mouth.

I'm not sure what to make of the clumsiness of the writing here, whether to blame Shin or the translator for it. (A giraffe?)  But the scene is powerfully vivid despite the writing, and I have no idea what it means or how it fits into the book as a whole.  It seems to connect to nothing else, in this novel or in the other books of Shin's I've read.  It may be one of those visionary outbursts that lift a story into the stratosphere for no reason but the sheer rush of it.  It works, even if it makes no sense.

I'll Be Right There

While I'm at it, let me add another book I've read lately that I liked a lot: I'll Be Right There, Kyung-sook Shin's latest novel to be translated into English, just published in the US.  I was very impressed by its predecessor, Please Look After Mom, and I'll Be Right There is even better.  (Alert, for those who might be concerned: a possible Spoiler below -- not for I'll Be Right There, but for the recent Disney animated feature Frozen.)

I'll Be Right There follows three South Korean college students in the early to mid-1980s, when South Korea was still ruled by a military dictatorship, with tear gas wafting through the streets almost daily as police chase, beat, and kill dissidents.  It begins when Jung Yoon, the principal narrator, gets a telephone call from one of the other two, informing her that their beloved literature professor is dying.  Jung Yoon begins to recall her college days, when she first attended Professor Yoon's class and met the handsome Yi Myungsuh and the beautiful but mysterious Yoon Miru.  Gradually the three become inseparable; while there are romantic/erotic sparks between Yoon and Myungsuh, Yoon is intensely and physically fascinated by Miru and vice versa.  I don't mean to suggest that there are "explicit gay overtures" between them; what I find interesting is that Shin puts friendship, between women or between women and men, in the foreground in a way I don't see often enough in today's fiction.  The core relationship in the book is a triangle, but without competition or jealousy among those involved.

(The proliferation of Yoons in that paragraph might confuse some readers, not least because the publicity for I'll Be Right There puts the author's name in Western order, with her surname (Shin) put last, but in the text of the novel the names are in Asian order, with the surname first.  So Yoon is Jung Yoon's first name, but it's Miru's and Professor Yoon's surname.  Nor are Miru and the Professor related: in Korea there are many surnames, but a few (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for almost half the population, and Yoon is the eighth most common.  Until fairly recently, Koreans with the same surname couldn't legally marry, even if they were very distantly related if at all.)

By chance, I saw Disney's Frozen last night, for the second or third time, with a Mexican friend in his twenties who was delighted by it.  Frozen breaks with the convention that only erotic relationships count by making a heterosexual friendship (between Anna and Kristof) win out over a heterosexual romance (between Anna and Hans), but even more by reminding the audience that "love" doesn't only mean only an urge to copulate: the "act of true love" that breaks the deadly spell in the story's climax isn't between a man and a woman but between two sisters.  (I'm having trouble parsing the facial expressions on the sisters' faces, especially Elsa's, on Frozen's website, though: it reminds me of the looks butches used to give femmes on the covers of 1950s lesbian pulps.)  The interest between Kristof and Anna (which parallels that between Myungsuh and Yoon) is taken for granted, but not really developed, compared to other relationships that are at least as important.

Watching Frozen last night, I was struck again by how dark it is, with treachery, violence, and endless winter treated as real threats.  ("Oh -- I'm impaled!" says the magical snowman Olaf cheerfully when he realizes he's carelessly run onto a giant horizontal icicle.)  I'll Be Right There is even darker, set as it is against the backdrop of the Chun dictatorship.  Jung Yoon's mother, we learn early on, died of cancer just before Yoon entered college, and sent her to live with a cousin in Seoul to spare her.  Many more important people in the novel die by various kinds of violence, and Yoon herself is caught in the crowd when police attack a student demonstration with tear gas, driving them into a enclosed area to to round them up.  Yoon escapes, but many others don't.  Grief runs through the characters' lives, and if the overall tone is positive, its hopefulness is hard-won.

I'll Be Right There is well-written, and translator Sora Kim-Russell has done a wonderful job.  (It seems to me that the quality of translations from non-European languages has improved immensely in the past couple of decades.)  It's not only about grief and suffering; aside from love and friendship, it's also about literature as a broadening force for the intellect, and for that matter the rewards of living in the city.  I responded strongly to this passage from page 71, for example:

I made the right decision to learn about the city by walking around it.  Walking made me think more and focus on the world around me.  Moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, reminded me of reading a book.  I came across wooded paths and narrow market alleyways where people who were strangers to me shared conversations, asked one another for help, and called out to one another.  I took in both people and scenery.

I know many of the areas of Seoul that Yoon explores, so reading I'll Be Right There filled me with longing to return.  Someday.  I'll be right there.

Super-Omma: The Guilt Museum, Korean Style

Just a quickie for now: the latest book I've read is Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mom (Knopf, 2011), very well translated from the 2008 Korean original by Chi-young Kim. It's the story of an old woman who goes missing one day in Seoul Station, while visiting her grown children with her husband. Anyone who's struggled their way through rush-hour subway crowds will understand how someone could get separated and lost, especially an illiterate country woman who's had a few small strokes and gets confused easily.

Because of the prevailing climate against "spoilers," I'm not going to tell the book's outcome, which is not really a spoiler, because Please Look After Mom isn't a plot-driven novel. It's really about the characters: the unmarried older daughter, a writer who travels around the world and still is surprised when one of her novels is transcribed into Braille for blind Koreans; the married younger daughter, a pharmacist; the oldest brother who became a (reasonably successful) businessman instead of a prosecutor as Mom had hoped; the husband, who'd failed his wife so many times before finally losing his grip on her hand in the crowd one day in Seoul Station; and, of course, Mom herself, the archetypal Korean country woman, who never seems to stop working, cooking, cleaning, gardening, sewing, mothering. The prevailing mood is guilt, since, as usually happens in such a situation, everyone reacts to Mom's disappearance by thinking that it could have been prevented if only he or she had behaved differently, slowed down, treated Mom with a little more consideration, paid more attention to her needs instead of taking her for granted. It'll resonate for most people who've had (or been) a mother.

It's still a specifically Korean story, embedded in the national history of Japanese occupation, postwar division, civil war, dictatorship, cataclysmic economic development, and transformation from an agrarian to a high-tech industrial urban society. While Ma (if I'd been the translator, I'd have chosen "Ma" over "Mom," since "Ma" better conveys the Korean "Omma" [accented on the second syllable]) is a supermom, she reminds me of some Korean mothers and grandmothers I've met, and I didn't feel that she was an idealized figure; Shin managed to keep her human, and any American whose parents lifted him or her to social mobility on their shoulders will probably feel a twinge of guilt on reading the book. Shin braids in an immense load of detail, so the novel doesn't feel like a mere upbraiding of an ungrateful child ("After all I've done for you ...! Just wait till you have children!"). I also recognized much of the city landscape from my visits to Seoul, which helped my own experience reading it.

I now see that Mom was adapted for the stage in 2010. Kyung-sook Shin is a country girl herself, born in 1963 in a village in the impoverished southwest of South Korea. (Jeolla Province, for those who'll recognize its significance.) She's done well for herself as an author, winning many literary prizes, culminating in the translation of Please Look After Mom into nineteen languages after it became a huge bestseller in Korea. I liked it, and it could be a good introduction if you haven't tried contemporary Korean fiction before. I hope the translation's success will lead to more of Shin's writing appearing in English soon.