INTERVIEW

• Writer, Park Wansuh Vol.5 Autumn 2009

  Park Wansuh, one of the leading figures in the Korean literary world, has made remarkable achievements both in terms of literary sophistication and general popularity. The JoongAng Ilbo reporter Shin Junebong recently interviewed the woman who has captivated Korean readers with vivid reconstructions of her own experiences during the Korean War and insights into human nature.   The poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, often cited as candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the poet Kim Ji-ha, for whom existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre signed a petition demanding his release from prison in 1974, are leading Korean writers who enjoy a degree of recognition outside the country. But there is another Korean writer without whom the history of modern Korean literature would be incomplete, even if she is not well known outside her native country. It could be argued, in fact, that her name belongs above those of Ko, Hwang, and Kim in the roll call of modern Korean writers. The author in question is 78 year old novelist Park Wansuh, born in 1931 in Gaepung-gun, Gyeonggi-do (province), in what is now North Korea. One of the leading veterans of the Korean literary scene, Park’s achievements both as a writer of literary fiction and a popular author are remarkable. By the time they reach their seventies and eighties, most writers’ creative desires are no match for those of their youth. Park, however, published two storybooks for children earlier this year and is showing no signs of neglecting writing, her life’s work. One day in late June, while summer rain soaked the ground, I used the publication of the storybooks as an excuse to visit Park. She lives in the village of Achiul, in Guri, just beyond the eastern limits of Korea’s capital, Seoul. It’s a quiet place where, unlike the loud monochrome of high-rise apartment blocks in Korea’s big cities, the green of trees and forests dominates and the sound of a flowing stream can be heard. The lawn in Park’s garden smelt fresh, and the apricot tree to one side was dropping small, red fruits around the base of its trunk. Park greeted me with her characteristic broad smile, saying, “I don’t eat the apricots straight away, but store them up in the fridge and make jam with them later on.” The Three Wishes, one of the two storybooks recently published by Park, is a collection of 10 small episodes. The other book, Thank You for This World, combines Park’s skill as a masterful writer with watercolor illustrations in subdued tones. The book’s hero is Bokdong, a fifth grade elementary school student. When Bokdong’s mother dies during childbirth and his father leaves for America in search of a way to make a living, Bokdong ends up living with his grandmother and aunt. Bokdong, thoroughly bright and innocent, is mature enough to understand the perspectives of all the adults around him, including his aunt. Eventually he travels to America, at his father’s invitation, where he manages to untangle his father’s emotional knots in the few months of his stay. Above all, Bokdong’s story will go down well with readers of his age, thanks to the specific and vivid way it realistically reflects their psychology, their daily lives, and the vocabulary they use.   Reportor Shin Junebong and novelist Park Wansuh   In fact, Park states in the author’s note that: “It was an actual event in the Korean War (1950-53) that incited me to write this book.” An episode introduced at the end of the book, in the style of a frame narrative, is a heart-wrenching story that is hard to get past without crying. An American officer fighting in the Korean War is on the retreat southwards one winter when under a bridge, he finds the naked body of a woman frozen to death. A newborn baby is crying next to her, swaddled several layers deep in its mother’s clothes. The woman, a pregnant refugee, felt the pangs of labor and had no choice but to give birth to her child before allowing herself to freeze to death in order to save the baby. The officer takes the child back to America with him, adopts it and raises it, sparing no affection; but the child keeps his adoptive father and friends at arm’s length and becomes gradually more tied up in knots. At his wit’s end, the boy’s father takes him to Korea, deliberately choosing winter as the time to visit, and goes to find the grave of the boy’s birth mother. After lying down on his mother’s grave and wailing with grief, the boy resolves to change. He grows up to become a doctor, develops a new kind of medicine and works to help children in developing nations. Terrible experiences of the Korean War and a writing style that vividly reproduces them: I will mention these things again later on, but I think they are the nutrients that have fed Park’s growth into a masterful writer with a huge influence in the Korean book market. Foreign readers may not realize the extent of Park’s power in the Korean literary market. I asked Park about the sales figures for her major works. “As far as I know, Thank You for This World (2009) and Three Wishes (2009) have sold about 20,000 copies each,” she answered. “The short story collection Kindhearted Bokhee, published in 2007, sold about 200,000 copies, and the novel Who Ate All the Shing-ah? (1992), considered one of my leading works, has sold about 1.5 million copies up to now.” Park also mentioned how “a staff member at Columbia University Press, who wanted to publish Who Ate All the Shing-ah? in translation, claimed there was ‘no way a work of fine literature could sell so many copies’ and went to check the figures again.” She also added that, “in 2007, at the Seoul International Book Fair, an elderly gentleman from the countryside brought a copy of The Naked Tree, published in 1970, and asked me to sign it.” As expected from a writer known for her modesty, Park revealed the sales figures for her books with reluctance. Our conversation naturally turned to the question of why, in Park’s opinion, her works are so popular. “How should I know?” she answered. “A lot of works that I have expected to be popular among readers have met a lukewarm response.” She soon added, however, “My stories contain characters of a variety of ages, and I think perhaps readers of various ages generally think the stories are about them as they read.” “I think the era I have lived through is a story in itself,” said Park. “I have written my books with the thought that they should be colorful, honest testimonies to their time, because a book is something that can remain buried in a secondhand bookshop for any amount of time before being brought out again later to see the light of day.” Of course, of all the experiences that Park recalls, that of the Korean War is the most powerful. “I’m the kind of person that forgets what she did yesterday,” she said. “But I never forget the things I experienced during the war, even if I don’t write them down.” A general overview of Park’s story is that she was permanently separated from her mother and elder brother. The North Korean army, perhaps judging that Park and her sister-in-law would be useful due to their youth, sent them to North Korea.     But Park remembered the way her mother had begged her not to cross the Imjin-gang (river) from South to North Korea at any cost, as this would mean that they would never see each other again. Just before crossing the river, Park ran away into the mountains. On her way back to Seoul, where her mother and brother were, Park walked at night to avoid bombing by American planes and hid by day in empty houses, staying alive by surviving on grains of uncooked rice. But when she got back, she lost her brother. “As I experienced so many things I would never have thought humans could do to each other,” she said, “it seems I was thinking to myself, ‘I must never forget this, I must remember it at all costs.’”   1. Park Wansuh’s novels published in the U.S.A., Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Hungary, and the France 2. Park Wansuh’s novels published in China 3. The Three Wishes Park Wansuh, Maumsanchack, 2009, 175 pp. ISBN 978-89-6090-052-3 03810 4. Thank You for This World Park Wansuh; Illustrator: Han S. Oki Kidsjakkajungsin, 2009, 159 pp. ISBN 978-89-7288-939-7 73810 5. Kindhearted Bokhee Park Wansuh, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 302 pp., ISBN 978-89-320-1814-0 03810   Korean literary critics judge Park’s works to have “the sincerity of I-stories.” Originally from Japan, the “I-story,” is a fictional genre whose works are written like a diary, recording the things that go on around a hero who is unquestionably the author’s other self without the use of any other particular novelistic device. The death of an older brother, for example, is a principal recurring motif that can be found in works such as The Naked Tree and To the Dream of a Mountain. But not everybody that has been through terrible experiences becomes a writer. “As an elementary school student, I grew up listening to my grandmother, grandfather, and mother telling me Korean children’s stories that had come down through the ages, such as ‘The Tale of Simcheon’ and ‘Janghwa and Hongnyeon,’” said Park. Her mother particularly liked the Chinese roman fleuve, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and not only often told parts of the story to Park, but also liked to speak of those around her as if they were characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. “That guy comes across just like Cao Cao,” she would say, for example. Or she would play around in the kitchen, saying “Cao Cao, take this sword.” Park’s mother gave her special treatment, unlike most families at the time, which discriminated against daughters. In contrast to the dominant view at the time, which was that educating girls was a waste, Park’s mother sent her to school so that she was able to enter Seoul National University, later to become the most prestigious university in Korea. She fed Park tasty morsels of food, not normally given to daughters in those days, saying “a girl has to eat good food if she’s going to make good food for her family later on.” Such a caring environment probably provided strong support for Park in becoming a writer. “She has died now, but my mother is still a strong source of support to me,” said Park. When asked which of her works have been introduced to overseas readers, Park said, "I think it's very difficult to understand the literature of a country without having an understanding of its history." As an example, she told of how even in the case of Japan, a country extremely close to Korea in terms of culture and history, it is difficult for her works to be accurately translated into Japanese. "When the prose of my fiction is translated into a foreign language, the particular flavor of the words seems to be lost," she continued. In which case, it seems that complete understanding and appreciation of Park's works by foreign readers can only be possible in one of the following two ways: either such readers must acquire by themselves a broader understanding of Korea's history and culture; or a "perfect translation," like that described by Walter Benjamin, where a work's vital poetic features, down to its most mystical elements, are transferred intact, must be produced. Neither of these can be achieved in a short period of time. By Shin Junebong(reporter for The JoongAng Ilbo)

FICTION

• Candlelit Table Vol.45 Autumn 2019

  That’s how we bought two apartments in a complex handpicked by our daughter-in-law for its proximity to good schools. We chose a small apartment for ourselves as it’d be just the two of us old folk living there, and a larger one over 130 square meters for our son’s family of four. Once that was settled, everything else was smooth sailing. We could’ve easily put some distance between the two apartments as the complex was so big—our daughter-in-law clearly wanted us to—but we were old folk with some spine, and the knowledge that we had the upper hand gave us the nerve to pick units in face-to-face buildings where one’s front balcony would be visible from the other’s back balcony. My wife was happy with the arrangement and said (I don’t know where she heard the phrase) the ideal distance between parents and children who live apart was t be close enough for soup to stay warm. I browbeat her to never say such nonsense out loud; it was exactly the kind of thing that’d make our daughter-in-law feel pressured to bring over a hot dish every now and then. Instead, I used the phrase “close enough to check each other’s lights.” “I didn’t plan on buying a place so nearby in case it’d trouble you. But you never know what’ll happen to old people, and if one of us dotards were to die, you two are bound to feel the burden. Even if you can’t pay us daily visits, I imagine you’d at least want to know that ‘Oh, those folks are still alive today’ by checking our lights. You owe us that much as our children, wouldn’t you say? And when we see the light switch on in your window, we’ll take it as a sign that our babies have come home safely today and sleep in peace. Living close enough to check each other’s lights—why, I can’t think of a better way for idle old people to communicate with their busy children.” My daughter-in-law wasn’t going to take my subtle sarcasm lying down. She was such a little miss perfect you couldn’t dig a fingernail into her defenses. “You shouldn’t be saying that already when men will soon have an average life expectancy of ninety-five.” Her tone was quite pedantic. My old classmates from high school couldn’t possibly know the full truth of my situation and practically drooled when I told them I lived near my son’s family, close enough to check each other’s lights. They said any children willing to live so close to their parents were filial. I realized that my friends weren’t saying I had a good son just to comfort me, but out of real envy—people’s opinion must count for something because I wound up feeling content, as if I had planned an exemplary life after retirement for myself. I even felt boastful. And once I got to spend more time with her, I saw that my daughter-in- law wasn’t just a cunning child. She absolutely hated troubling or worrying even her own parents, which was why she came off as a little cold, but she was impeccable when it came to matters of principle. Once or twice a month without fail, she invited me and my wife over for dinner and made sure our grandkids joined us. She had raised them, a boy and a girl, into clean, healthy, and polite children. Everyone was jealous when I mentioned these things at reunions, things that were supposed to be perfectly ordinary. To sit your kids down at the same table with their grandparents, despite their busy private tuition schedules, and regularly at that, was apparently a rare show of filial affection.     It all sounded like hogwash the more I listened. While I’d lived out in the boondocks to be sure, I hadn’t been a slash-and-burn farmer nor had I taught Confucian texts in some valley of Mount Jiri; I had been the head of an institution that taught children just enough of the basic morals to go out into the extant world and not have too much trouble functioning as a decent human. How had the world changed so wickedly that someone like me couldn’t begin to make heads or tails of it? At least my child wasn’t the trailblazer for change in that wicked world. I’d realized that only because I often got to meet my city friends. But the envy and admiration of others didn’t fool me for long. Taste—the most honest of the five human senses—was the first to speak its mind.   The first time we were invited to our son’s home, my wife marveled at and tasted each and every one of the neat, decorative, and mysterious fusion dishes on the table, even asking for recipes, but her interest slowly wilted until finally she had to wash everything down with kimchi juice when we came home. And she sighed that her grandchildren couldn’t be helped as they grew up knowing flavors only of that sort, but what of her poor baby? Then one day, when her Stinky Soybean Stew turned out especially good, she took it to our son’s place. She informed me proudly that he was all smiles and was delighted to get it, that she would do this again from time to time. She took joy in remembering one by one the dishes our son used to like and delivered them with increasing frequency. When she remembered that our son had liked scorched rice, she wailed, “Oh my poor baby, he can’t even have scorched rice at home,” going as far as buying a new stone pot just to make him some and dropping it off. My wife seemed to rediscover the fun in life with each dish she cooked and delivered to our son, but I watched her with a mixture of pity and apprehension and at times dropped her a hint: “My dear, too much is worse than too little, you know.” If I hadn’t, she probably would’ve done it every darn day. Sometimes she came back, unsuccessful. She supposed the whole family must’ve gone out to eat as the house was empty. Unable to feed her son the special dish she’d made with painstaking care and flair, she looked bereft, her shoulders slumping. I got annoyed seeing her so and shouted angrily, “You can’t just turn up at their door. Why do you think we live across from each other? If their window isn’t lit, that means no one’s home yet, remember?” “Oh yes, you’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?” To make sure she didn’t make another trip for nothing, I wound up acting as a lookout for any sign of light in my son’s window while she cooked up special dishes for him. Not because anyone told me to, but because I was as anxious as my wife. I hadn’t known this before when I’d glanced absently at the window, but once I looked in earnest I noticed that the light remained switched off on more and more days, which, curiously enough, tended to fall on the same days my wife cooked her dishes. As we received regular calls from either our son or daughter-in-law, we seized the opportunity to casually mention that they seemed to be coming home late these days. They replied that the kids came back at odd hours because of lessons, and as for themselves, they often arranged to eat out on evenings they were too tired to cook at home. The curtness of their tone felt like their way of saying, “We don’t want to be monitored,” so I fought back the urge to suggest they come eat at our place on such evenings.  Keeping tabs on someone wasn’t healthy, even if you were their parent. It dawned on me at some point that the unlit window of my son’s apartment looked different from the unlit windows of other apartments. It wasn’t pitch-dark, but an uncertain brightness, like the lingering glow of a campfire, seemed to flicker in its depths. I was reminded of a table lit by beautiful candles that added ambience to the fusion dishes laid out on it. Whether my grandkids were at that table too didn’t really matter. My mind could just be playing tricks on me. I wasn’t too young to go senile after all. But going senile early was nothing to boast about. I had to escape my delusions at once. Just as my wife had to promptly escape hers: the misguided obsession that she could hold onto her son’s heart through his taste buds. One evening when I sensed, rather than saw, a faint light like the lingering glow of a campfire, I slipped out alone pretending to go for a walk and, even though my wife wasn’t cooking anything special for our son that night, I went up to his apartment and rang the doorbell. I rang for a second time, then a third. No one answered the door, but I knew intuitively that there were murmurs inside, that the round peephole in the front door was turning into a pitiless eye. It wouldn’t do to tell my wife about an unverified hunch.   Deciding it was time for me to quietly take my leave, I got in the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor when a woman holding a baby popped out of unit 907, the one right across my son’s, and stepped into the same car. The woman gave me a friendly smile and I, feeling compelled to say something in return, asked, “Nobody from unit 908 must be in yet, eh?” to indicate that I wasn’t some old coot riding the elevator up and down with nothing better to do, but had stopped by unit 908 for a legitimate reason. “You mean the mister from the unit opposite? Oh he’s in. He just came over to ask for a stalk of scallions actually.” My wife ought to know. But not in the shocking manner that I had to find out. “Let’s have some ambience in here like young people do.” If I said that, turned off every light in our apartment, and adorned the table with a beautiful pair of candles shaped like a boy and a girl facing each other with a smile, would my wife get it then? For her, getting it would be easier than accepting it.  My reflection in the shop window looked too tired and heavy for someone holding only two candles. (Excerpt from pp. 182-188)  

• The Naked Tree Vol.39 Spring 2018

  Chapter Four In my heart, however, a nasty thought swirled. The war isn’t finished yet. It will continue for many, many years, and disaster will strike everybody equally. I just happened to receive my share earlier than others. “You must be tired. Why don’t you go to bed?” I said to my uncle. After spreading out a mat for him in my room, I lay down beside my mother for the first time in a long while. Still, we had little to talk about. My mother let out a low sigh. “Did Uncle give you any money?” I asked. “Yes. He said it was for our living expenses.” “How much?” “I don’t know. It’s over there. You can count it later.” “Did he eat here?” “Yes.” “What did you cook for him?” “Nothing special. I just served what we usually eat.” Had my mother, once such an expert hostess, become demented? “What did he say about my job?” “He complained that we’ll have a hard time marrying you off now that you’re working there.” “Do you think so, too?” “No.” I turned my back to her. My uncle’s cough filtered through the walls intermittently from the other room, as if he couldn’t fall asleep either. I couldn’t tell whether my mother was asleep or not as I couldn’t sense even her breathing. The bleak wind set the shutters clattering, and the sliding door hummed. The wind swished through the house, making grotesque sounds here and there. I pulled the quilt over my head. Still, I could hear the wind, the wind that shook the haunted house, that rushed through the hole on top of the roof of the servants’ quarters, that trampled the broken tiles, that shuffled through the broken pieces of the rafters, that dislodged the clay underneath, that shook the loose wallpaper and spider webs, that stirred the piles of dirt. The sound of the wind rattled my eardrums mercilessly, even when I put my hands over my ears. I couldn’t help but think of Ock Hui-do. He’s different from the others, he’s different from the others, I chanted. Perhaps I was attempting to knock on the door to a new life by repeating it.   Chapter Five A Christmas tree stood in the center of the arcade, and colored lights flashed on the Santa Claus and the four reindeer that pulled his sleigh. The arcade was bustling more than ever, packed with shoppers, and the Korean products section was in utter confusion. Housecoats and pajamas with embroidered dragons and peacocks on them sold like hotcakes, and the small flower baskets were gone in no time. The owners of the Korean products section enjoyed the unprecedented business, and the salesgirls in the American products section were indiscreet in their restlessness, making dates with GIs, talking about the coming parties, and bragging about the presents they would receive from America. Outside the PX, the streets were as desolate as ever, weighed down by the dark, anxious atmosphere of a city so close to the front line. Nobody was stupid enough to be caught up in the spirit of a foreign holiday. The portrait shop was doing a good business as well, and I kept busy with my work the whole day, but I made some stupid mistakes because my heart fluttered at intervals. I was fraught with anxiety. Mine was not like the others’ Christmas-season excitement, however, and my anxiety wasn’t solely due to the war or the darkness in the streets. I had begun to think I was in love with Ock Hui-do. The thought was painful at times, sweet at others, and frightening once in a while. I couldn’t figure out exactly what my feelings were, but I couldn’t drive the idea out of my mind. Tae-su bustled around on the heels of the sergeant who was installing the Christmas decorations. He would call out “Hi!” to me in English from unexpected places like the top of a ladder or the frame of a display window. Sometimes he winked at me, and he liked talking about silly things, his overall-clad behind perched on my desk in a friendly manner.      Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University.Translation copyright © 1995 by Yu Young-nan.Reprinted with permission from Cornell University. Photo ⓒ NOH Suntag, reallyGood murder #BIK0404, 2008

• To Dream of a Mountain Vol.32 Summer 2016

  Sister-in-law changed the dressing for the bullet hole in Brother’s leg in the main room. His calf was skinny but the hole was fresh and deep. The old gauze dressing, a centimeter wide, spiraled out endlessly from the hole, and the new one seemed to go in inch after inch with no end in sight. The suffocating pain of watching probably added to that feeling. It was difficult not to wish the bullet had pierced his heart instead. It was a fiery yet chilling thought. Brother asked what I saw outside. “Nothing. I didn’t see anyone,” I replied. “We’re the only ones left. There are no signs of other people. Seoul is completely empty, but it looks like the North Korean army hasn’t entered yet.”  “That can’t be. Why don’t you go out and check?” Brother asked his wife. She wrapped the old dressing that was stained with sticky ointment and blotches of dark blood in a sheet of newspaper and went out. Brother’s anxiety made the waiting seem to last forever. When she returned after making us wait for a long time, she reported something completely nonsensical. “There’s a well right in front of the house. The water looks quite dark and deep.” “I want to know if you saw any people! Any North or South Korean soldiers?” Brother cried. She shook her head. Unable to stand Brother’s pestering, the three of us, including Mom, rotated in and out to watch the movements of the outside world, but we didn’t see a soul. His anxiety increased by the day. He didn’t even let us cook rice or go out. “D...don’t you see which flag is on the flagpole? A...are you stinking blind?” Brother started to stutter. It was a weak, empty sound, as if he were drawing it from inside, but to me, it sounded like an outcry. What he wanted to find out so anxiously finally became very clear to me. He didn’t want to know if there were other families aside from our own in the city; he wanted to know whose rule we were under. We were sent out in turn to find out if the sky we had over our heads belonged to the Republic of Korea or the Democratic People’s Republic. Other buildings besides the prison had flagpoles, but nothing fluttered on them. The South Korean army retreated after evacuating all the residents and left Seoul empty, but curiously, the North Korean army hadn’t made its entry yet. Was Seoul in a political vacuum, then? A vacuum state of ideology? Brother couldn’t follow the political right or left, lost favor with both, floundered in the cracks, and ended up like this. A world with no ideological pressure should have felt euphoric to him, but he was more afraid of that euphoria than of being accused as a commie. As I watched him turn pale, grow anxious and lose his ability to speak by the minute, I thought that euphoria should swiftly brush past like a hallucination; stretching it on day after day was much too long. The water in the well in front of the house was indeed dark and deep. The cylindrical wall of the well was frosted white, and it seemed pure, even holy. The well’s mouth, which had a rope hanging from it, was a cement pipe that came up to my chest. I was often surprised by the clear reflection of myself in the gloomy surface of the water. Did anyone ever imagine a world in which nobody had to take sides? My image in the well undeniably, unflinchingly reflected that I, too, was fearful. Just because I wasn’t stuttering didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. Our family couldn’t eat a bite until evening. We were all huddled on our bellies under the blankets because Brother wouldn’t let us light a fire since the smoke would escape from the chimney. Fortunately, there was some used coal and cold rice in the kitchen. Before it got dark, Sister-in-law lit the coal in the brazier and boiled the frozen rice that had swelled like plump white lilac blossoms. We could feed my young nephews, but we adults barely quenched our thirst with cloudy rice soup. We didn’t feel hungry and the little ones strangely didn’t fuss either. Brother’s stuttering didn’t get better. He seemed to be aware that it was getting worse. He often just stuttered and didn’t finish his sentence. Listening to that was torture. His wife must have felt worse. She and I meandered outside to avoid Brother and eventually squatted on the kitchen floor. “We’re so lucky. There is a well in front of the house and there’s plenty of firewood, too.” She must have been afraid that she also might start to stutter like Brother; she spoke slowly and clearly, as though she were fingering Braille letters. How could we be so unlucky? I could go crazy thinking about the misfortune that followed us around for two, three days until only our family was left in the city. How could she say we were lucky? But I meekly agreed with her. I could feel the presence of misfortune near us, so I thought we had to appear relaxed and bold in front of that monster. The kitchen ceiling was made into an attic so the floor was deep. When we opened the plank door, stones the size of a cornerstone were stacked into stairs so we could step on them as we came down. Rash-like scabs of mud peered through the scraped spots of cement on the wood stove over which two iron cauldrons and one nickel cauldron hung. The iron cauldrons were permanently fixed, but the nickel cauldron was removable. The bottom of the stove was a coal furnace decked with an iron plate that collected the ashes. Underneath the raised wooden floor at the entrance of the kitchen was a pile of powdered coal that had blackened the kitchen floor, but the lids of the iron cauldrons gleamed as if they had been polished with sesame-seed oil. On the raised floor itself, however, a dining tray with a broken leg, a cement-mended jar, a half-broken sieve, an earthen steamer, a gourd bowl, a tin pail, a box and other things were haphazardly scattered about in neglect. We crouched down as if we were miners trapped at the end of a mineshaft relying on each other with no hope until all these things sunk into darkness. “I gave him some sleeping pills after dinner, so he should be able to sleep,” she said to me when she noticed me trying to make out the noises in the room. There were some painkillers among the medicine that we got from Gupabal Hospital. I think that was what she was referring to. “He should feel better after he gets a good night’s sleep,” I comforted her quite cheerfully. “Where do you think the front is right now?” she asked with a sigh. She, too, must have felt frustrated that we didn’t know for sure whose rule we were under. I wondered what the front line looked like. It was a place where mortal enemies were stationed with their guns fatally aimed at each other. It would be impossible to cross the invisible line without being riddled with bullets. But Brother did it. If he left as a people’s voluntary soldier and returned to the South Korean army region, he must have crossed the line somewhere at least once. Did he think he was invincible? It was only natural that he came back as a total wreck. The leg wound was only symbolic. There was no way to avoid my love for Brother and when this love overlapped with my cold aversion for the dead, I felt an anxious and repulsive shudder. “Wait. I hear something.” pp. 13-18     …  Gyoha was an area where two large rivers met. Big and small brooks that flowed to the river drenched the large, fertile fields of this village. We walked slowly along the melted river. The fact that there wasn’t a single place to run to for cover even if a plane suddenly flew by made us walk even more leisurely. We were amazed and felt like we were in a different world when we saw a woman washing clothes on the riverbank and little children playing and poking something into the mudflats. I didn’t even remember the last time I saw children playing outside. Plus, they seemed like normal children, not starving orphans. I made Sister-in-law rest on a hillock and went down to the mudflat. The children were catching crabs. They were toying with the crabs they had strung on a line after battling numerous bites. I was a glutton for crabs ever since I was little. I would lose my mind at the sight of seasoned female crabs and scarf them down in a second. I also loved the fried male crabs. The flesh of the crabs was delicious but the shells that covered their flesh were all so indiscriminately and hideously ugly. Like a true aficionado, every time I ate crabs, I marveled at the intelligence of the primitives who first discovered the soft flesh inside those ugly shells. From afar, it looked like what the children were playing with were king crabs. But as I got closer, I realized they were neither king nor shore crabs. They were smaller than the king crabs but bigger than the shore crabs. They were much uglier than other kinds of crabs with needle-like hair spiking out from their legs. But in my eyes, they looked delicious. Right now wasn’t the season for king crabs but in the olden days when they were in season, the royal family ate crabs from this region of Paju. I approached the children and asked what kind of crabs they were. They said they were mud crabs. “Can you eat them?” “Who would eat a crab like this?” “Then why did you catch them?” “So we can play with them. There are tons of them here.” “Do you die if you eat them?” “Why would you die? You don’t eat them because they’re not very tasty.” Of course they would turn up their noses to inferior crabs. After all, this was the home of crabs for kings. Surprisingly, the children didn’t seem even a bit suspicious of new refugees like us. There was quite a large village nearby. There were people walking on the road and working in the fields. It felt like a dream to see a village functioning normally like this. It didn’t look like there were vacant houses but we didn’t want to go anywhere else. One way or another, we wanted to latch closely onto a place with a lot of people. Not only were we envious of the prosperous atmosphere, we could also sense a secret bustling of freedom that was a bit ahead of its time. But on the hill that overlooked this village a North Korean flag flapped in full, ostentatious display. There was also a square, two-story building with a large front yard that looked like an elementary school or a town hall. I had never seen a North Korean flag waving so boldly anywhere in Seoul or Gureongjae, but I didn’t believe for a second that there might be an authority figure in there. The audacious waving of the flag only looked shamelessly deceptive; I didn’t feel at all threatened by it. Except for the flag, there were no other signs of North Korean control—no soldiers, no signs for the National People’s Congress office or the youth league. I think Sister-in-law liked this village, too. But we were hopelessly trapped in a quagmire where we longed for people and feared them at the same time. We made it a point to decide whether we were going to act as leftists or rightists before we mingled with anyone. We felt nervous otherwise. We were going around peeking in people’s homes when our eyes met a landlady who was hanging laundry in the yard. She was wearing a bright wrapped skirt and a traditional blouse. “Hello, can I help you?” she asked in a familiar Gaeseong dialect. “Hi, we are refugees.” “We are refugees, too. Where are you from? We are from Songdo. We were on our way to another town but we fell behind the group so we decided to stay here.” “We are from Gaeseong. We fell behind too and got stuck in Tanhyeon-myeon this whole time. They told us that there might be a battle in the mountains and sent us here. Do you have an empty room we can use?” I chattered away and cut Sister-in-law off as though it was my turn to lead. “Oh, I am glad you came! We have lots of empty rooms. What are you waiting for? You can just grab any room, and it’s yours! You don’t have to worry about saving face. Look what kind of world we are living in!” said the woman as she led us to an empty room. It seemed like there were plenty of empty rooms but I didn’t think there were many empty houses. The men had fled and only the women remained behind in the house we chose. She said we were the first refugees in this household because there were many vacant houses around. There was no need for people to stay in a house with an owner. As I had guessed by the Gaeseong dialect, the refugees here were of a different type than we were. I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them we were refugees who defected from our escape to the north. The best thing was to let them know that we were no different from them. It was such a shame that our differences could easily become a reason for hostility. Since it wouldn’t be too long until the world changed again, we decided to make sure everything was well planned and under control. I acted like a refugee from Gaeseong just like I had blunderingly told the woman earlier. We were originally from Gaeseong so that wasn’t difficult. How nice it would have been if all refugees were considered equals. Being a refugee was already an exhausting task but since refugees fleeing north and south had opposite ideologies, it could cause problems. But we were the only ones who were actually anxious about keeping things straight. What the other women in the house really wanted to know was what we had in our bundles. As far as I could tell, they had grown used to exchanging grains for clothes and fabric with other refugees. One young woman prepared her wedding gifts this way without so much as lifting her finger. When they found out that we had more grain than fabric, they looked at us with confused eyes and asked us why we were carrying such a heavy load. This was such a different world. In the evening, the village maidens gathered in the main room around a lamp to work on their embroidery. This looked like a whole new world from the perspective of a runaway who had been chased by war and fear of hunger. The maidens embroidering pillowcases and garment covers as their future weddings gifts in a village with no prospective grooms seemed unreal and otherworldly indeed. The next day, I borrowed a feedbag from the landlady and headed out to the riverbank. The bank was more like a mudflat probably because the mouth of the river wasn’t too far away. There was plenty of water but it was still like a lake and it was hard to tell which way it was flowing. When I took my shoes off and went into the mudflat, my body felt numb with the cold. But the warmth of the spring air made it bearable and it even reminded me of that famous line from a poem, “The water of spring filled every pond.” Then I started to catch crabs just like the way the children taught me when we first entered the village. The feedbag wasn’t sufficient to hold the crabs, and some escaped, poking me all over as I carried them home. When I put a little bit of soy sauce and stir-fried them in the thick iron cauldron, there was no better dish in the world. I didn’t even remember the last time I tasted fresh meat. The traces of my battle with these crabs left all over my body whet my appetite even more. Sister-in-law and I ferociously conquered the rough hard shells like starving demons and devoured the inner flesh until our stomachs were stuffed. I would remember this as the most unforgettably delicious, yet the most pitiful meal I’d have for decades to come.      pp. 105-110 Translated by Hannah Kim (The first edition of this title was published in 1995) For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

• “His House” Vol.5 Autumn 2009

  The following excerpt is from the short story “His House” in Park Wansuh’s short story collection Kindhearted Bokhee. The short story was first published in the 2002 summer issue of Literature and Society, and it was the basis of Park’s novel His House, published in 2004. The novel is a semi-autobiographical exploration of the writer’s first great love during her twenties.   That summer, even in the midst of the North Korean invasion, his older brother managed to maintain a stable status and avoid becoming a target of the purges. Still, as they say, we each have but two legs, and a man can only straddle one line at a time: when the People’s Army beat their retreat, he followed them north. It was a solo defection at first; he left his wife and children behind, along with his elderly parents. The world, however, was soon turned inside out again, and when the People’s Army returned that following winter, reoccupying Seoul, the older brother showed up too, ready to take his family back with him. His wife and children could have been willing, but his parents were a different story – their youngest had been conscripted by the South during the North’s retreat. In fact, it was his presence in the national army that saved the family from much of the harassment their eldest’s defection would have caused. It was quite a dilemma, no single solution presenting itself, and, in the end, the old couple chose to part ways. They decided that the father would go North with the older son and his family; the mother would remain, waiting for the youngest to come home. This is how the young man, returning with an honorable discharge and a wound in his thigh, found only his elderly mother left all alone in that huge house. She’d become a snowy-haired old granny in his absence, but he failed to take her in his arms or shed a single tear; instead he berated her, railing at her for staying behind just to reap the rewards of his filial gratitude. How free he would be if only that old woman weren’t around – just thinking about it suffocated him, and he continued to berate her, day in, day out. Just barely recovered from being turned inside out, the world, in the blink of an eye, was turned upside down again, and then, again, over once more; tossing and turning, rattling around the cracks of this topsy-turvy time, such things happened to our family, too. Just like they happened to his family. After all, when the gargantuan body of a so-called nation flips itself over and over, like a fish in a pan, how many of its subjects can possibly hope to survive unscathed? So, you see, we never felt even the tiniest bit sorry for one another. The pain we endured was an everyday kind of thing: a table set with rice and kimchi. If there’d been even one family left completely whole, a family with no one dead, no one lost, I don’t know what we would have done; unable to stand the smug complacency of such a sight, we might have hatched a plot to kidnap one of them ourselves – an only son, maybe. It was a sleepless night for me. The light of the carbide lamp quivering, pale across his beautiful face; his delicate expression, looking at once haughty and melancholy; his firm body, apparent even through the bulky parka: I felt a dangerous wind well up within me. Neither one of us ever wasted any energy on feeling sorry for the other, but I think we did sense something: the echo of fate, perhaps, reverberating through our parallel misfortunes. Like a girl who meets a gust of wind in the street and suddenly feels her skirt balloon up around her, I was torn; I yearned to soar, to float up into the air, but at the same time I wanted to yank my skirt back down, to sink to the floor in shame. To save firewood, everyone in our family slept together in the main bedroom. They were deep in sleep, these few survivors, and I listened to the rhythm of their peaceful breathing: two widows, two little ones. Actually, the relief of hitting rock bottom might have been something quite different from peace; but peace – it’s just so much holier than the grief of the survivor. And so I stood firm, fighting against my longing for the danger that whirled inside me. He waited for me almost every day in front of the American army base. The day laborers there were a motley crew, ranging from the truly ignorant to college graduates, but they all had one thing in common; they all had something to hide. Many were draft dodgers. It may not have been official, but with a military uniform and an ID full of curly English letters, all you needed were a few tricks and some big talk to evade any inspections. The worn and the ragged, so unsure of themselves, were always curious about the handsome young man, so suited to his uniform, so healthy, so confident. It would have been better if he hadn’t claimed we were related, calling me his young cousin. No one believed it. Any “disabled” veteran with all his limbs intact became the object of much envy and resentment. Let them think what they liked – we enjoyed such things. Our happiness was elevated by such things. The way silks and jewels are pointless if no one sees and envies them, a lover that fails to inspire envy might be no better than no lover at all. The handsomer he looked, the prettier I wanted to be. I could feel the sap beginning to rise in my body. He said I was like a pearl. Pearly eyes, pearly tears, pearly dew, pearly waves... No matter where you put it, it made the word shine. The winter of that year became the pearl of my life. Besides Angam Stream, there weren’t many places for lovers to go. We’d both just become university students, but before we ever had a chance to get used to that spot forbidden to high-schoolers, the war broke out, leaving Seoul in ruins. It was sheer luck that the theater survived. During wartime the theater was never heated. He would kneel down at my side and turn his woolen gloves inside out, putting them over the tips of my feet. If you turn just the palm of a glove inside out, the five fingers stay bunched up inside; when you put that on over the tips of your feet, it doesn’t matter how frozen your toes are – they thaw, softening, warming up gently. I wonder how he ever thought up something so marvelous. It killed two birds with one stone; not only did my toes get warmer, I got to taste the satisfaction of being cherished. We usually went to Joongang Theater, so more often than not we would launch ourselves out into the streets of Myeongdong once the movie was over. The roads were completely demolished and almost everyone had evacuated the city; even in the residential areas, most of the houses stood empty. The silvery lights of Myeong-dong in wartime felt something other than real. Under those lights, like a pair of fluttering moths, we drank in the freedom of it all. We found a fancy tearoom to frequent; we discovered an expensive bakery; we learned the fun of shopping for useless trinkets at a Western-style boutique. Myeong-dong had other diversions to offer, too. There was an extravagant, imposing jeweler’s, patronized by the kind of high-class women who set up house with American officers. In one spacious corner of the shop there was a cozy little alcove, decorated like a parlor. Even from outside you could see the customers there, wearing their sensual makeup, elegantly crossing their legs like western movie stars, delighting in the owner’s fawning. We never did see anyone just look at the wares, so we could never work up the nerve to go inside. But, you see, we didn’t need to; every precious piece of jewelry I marked as my own, standing there, glued to the shop window – it would all be mine someday. His extravagant promise meant more to me than any jewel.    * Translated by Chun Kyung-ja.

ESSAYS

• Park Wansuh in China Vol.3 Spring 2009

REVIEWS

• The Masterful Children’s Tales of Park Wansuh Vol.4 Summer 2009

• The Loss of Innocence: Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wansuh Vol.7 Spring 2010

• In Search of a Lost Past: Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wansuh Vol.19 Spring 2013

• The Dissection and Defense of Mankind: Kindhearted Bokhee by Park Wansuh Vol.1 Autumn 2008

BOOKS