Korean Literature - Final Reflections

In her memoir The Language of Blood American-raised Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka reflects on the drama of what happened in her own Korean family and the events leading to her being left in an orphanage at the age of six months. She writes, "Almost every Korean family has such a story. The characters are always the same: starvation, lost family members, bitter cold, poverty, men unable to support their families, drunkenness, disappointment, despair."

I want to respond, "Oh, how true, how true!" I have no such family, no such experience - so how would I know?

I've read modern Korean literature!

By now I've read about 15 Korean novels and collections of short stories and novellas written by Korean authors and translated into English. I've only written about one of them so far: The Wings by Yi Sang on March 20. I had intended to write more, much more, but now it is summary time, and I must resign myself to the fact that it is too late. I will do my best to keep it short.

I was able to choose these books to read thanks to Charles Montgomery, former employee of San Jose Evergreen community College District, good friend in Korea, and guide par excellence to modern Korean literature in translation. For anyone interested in the subject, please ignore anything else I might write and go immediately to Charles's Korean Translated Literature (ktlit) website.

As Charles has often pointed out, the themes of most of the modern works of translated fiction relate to division, abandonment, betrayal, poverty, loss. Clearly these are writers' responses to the traumatic events of modern Korean history - colonization by Japan, the Korean War, the division of the country, the repression of the early governments of South Korea. In these stories characters mourn for or seek relatives or comrades lost during the war, deal with haunting memories from these events, struggle to survive desperate poverty, seek ways to escape situations they cannot cope with, and so on. It often seems that there is no other theme! So one has to know something about modern Korean history to grasp much that is in these books. (But reciprocally, the books also provide a way to learn more about the history from the inside of people's lives and feel the depth of its impact. Each successive book reveals a little bit more.)

There are other difficulties in reading these books. I have already written about the problem of reading a translated work and not being able to trust the translation. Another is being an outsider to the culture, not understanding that a look, or a word, or a word unspoken, or a gesture, or an argument, or a joke, or bottle of soju, or a vacant stare, or a statue of Buddha, or a chicken, or an apparition in the night, or the way a name is written, or a red dress, or so many things may have a meaning to Koreans that is missed or misunderstood by the uninitiated. That must be the case! That must be why so much in these books... often doesn't seem to make sense!

Actually the very first novel I read in Korea wasn't written by a Korean at all, but by Chaim Potok. Chaim Potok!?! Yes, he wrote a book, titled I am the Clay, about an elderly childless Korean couple who are among the thousands of poverty-stricken refugees fleeing the invading North Korean army during the Korean War. Even then I wondered, where did HE get the chutzpah to imagine what it was like to be a Korean during the Korean War?? He was so good at writing about what he knew - I had sometimes had my students read his book The Chosen, about young Jewish men growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in similar circumstance to how he had grown up, and even shared with my students Potok's comments about the value of writing about "what you know," and the way he admired James Joyce's choice to write primarily about Dublin. I then learned he had been in Korea for a short time during the Korean War as a chaplain, and he had written a novel about that too. So I read that book, but got no clue from it how he got himself into the minds and hearts of Korean refugees.

Then I read the books by Korean authors. I sensed that most of these books were better than Potok's. But - I never understood the characters in the way I understood the characters in Potok's book.

And then I figured it out. Potok's characters thought and acted like Americans do. Oh, he pretended they were Korean, with their pagan beliefs and ability to dog meat and the like, but their motivations, their reactions, their feelings all seemed perfectly logical, perfectly connected to what was going on around them - in a familiar Western way.

Not so with Korean books. Characters act - and I can't understand why. A character gets angry, or restless, and I can't see why. Something happens to a character, and I may think the character would logically be astonished, say, but then I read that the character is "abashed" or "suspicious." In The Gray Snowman, a messenger who has news of the fate of the main character's comrades in an antigovernment protest movement shows up. We've already been told of the "utter gloom" of the messenger and the "spirit of deep trust" that has emerged between them. Then "From her bag she handed me a thin, sealed envelope with worn edges. Instead of opening it in her presence I impulsively tucked it in my pants pocket and hurried out to the kitchen. The arrival of news, so long in coming, had made me giddy." Giddy?!? I don't get how the characters are seeing and reacting to the world.

Yet another difficulty is getting used to what seems an exaggerated passivity of the characters. Strange and often terrible things happen to these characters; they tend to be mystified by what happens to them, haunted by half-remembered past events, unsure of what is "real"; they choose actions more to see what will happen than to achieve something specific; they often act capriciously, without apparent motivation or understanding of why. In The Cry of the Magpies, the main character, a soldier having returned from terrible battles in the Korean War, beholds this recurring chain of events: magpies start to caw in the trees nearby, his mother starts coughing uncontrollably, and he starts wanting to kill his mother. "One more strange thing was that as soon as my mother's coughing stopped and I could regain some calm, I began to have doubts about what had just taken place. Did it really happen or was it only my imagination? Could it be that I had hallucinated?... Meanwhile the cawing and coughing went on and I usually succeeded in running out of the room before the thing I so dreaded could have any chance of happening... The turmoil in me, however, did not easily subside merely with running away... My body kept on trembling from this unbearable tension and extreme stress. The one consolation in suffering outside rather than inside was that I now did not have to worry about strangling her. Instead I unleashed my pent up fury on our dog, Blackie, whom I kicked and beat in a total frenzy." There may be all kinds of psychological or symbolic meaning here - but I find it hard to figure out. How did the tension and stress turn into fury? Who or what is he furious at? And Blackie?? Who kicks their own dog that they have named "Blackie" no matter how furious they are? Well, these musings are part of both the frustration and fun of reading Korean Lit.

Just for the record, here is a list of most of the books I read. Some books actually contain the title story and one or two other stories as well.

Yi Sang The Wings

Yi Mun-yol An appointment with my Brother

Twofold Song

Kim Dong-Ni The Cry of the Magpies

Ch'oe Yun The Last of Hanako

Lee Kyun-Young The Other Side of Dark Remembrance

Kim Yu Jeong The Camellias

Seo Giwon The Ma Rok Biographies

Kim Young-Ha I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Your Republic is Calling You

Lee Dong-ha Toy City

Yi Chong-jun The Snowy Road

Hwang Sok-Yong The Guest

Land of Exile - Contemporary Korean Fiction (An anthology)

Amazingly, 2 novels, Your Republic is Calling You and one I have not read yet, Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-Sook, are now being sold, even featured, at big US bookstores like Barnes and Noble. These books have themes a little more modern, a little more universal, a little more appealing to American audiences. I do believe Charles himself has had some influence in getting this literature selected and promoted and into the American market.

I wanted to find a Korean book that I could recommend to my book club, a book I thought the group would enjoy discussing. With the difficulties mentioned I haven't found quite the right book yet in the ones I've read, but who knows - maybe Please Look After Mom (my next read) will be the one. If not, it seems that more works with an appeal to western readers are being written and translated and promoted. I will keep reading!