INTERVIEW

• Waking in Dawn’s Hours, Awaiting the Words of a New Day: Novelist Shin Kyung-sook Vol.4 Summer 2009

    Shin Kyung-sook has been faithfully carrying out the role that has been asked of her as a writer. She has restored real characters long overshadowed by history and social issues, more specifically women, to Korean fiction. She has not only pioneered new styles of fiction but has secured a wide readership for them, as seen in the huge success of her latest novel, Take Good Care of Mom. Journalist Han Yun-jeong met with Shin Kyung-sook to talk about her writing and her life.   Shin Kyung-sook is an important writer that cannot be overlooked when discussing Korean literature of the 1990s and 2000s. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she has been a leading force behind Korea’s literary trends during these decades. Shin stepped into the limelight as a writer in 1993, when a prolonged series of military dictatorships finally came to an end in South Korea and a new civilian government took power. Korean fiction, at the time, was dominated by realism, which had been firmly established over decades of artistic struggle against authoritarian rule. Readers, however, were growing tired. It was at this time that Shin Kyung-sook presented readers with her second story collection titled, Where the Harmonium Once Stood (1993). Her distinctive style, subdued and delicate, immediately captured the attention of critics and readers. It was the moment of arrival for the then 30-year-old writer, fair and tender in her looks and her sensibility. Shin said, “For seven, eight years after making my literary debut at 22, I had several different jobs while I continued to write. I read a wide range of fiction, but works that other people found fresh did not quite have that effect on me. At the time I was filled with the urge to break out of the boundaries of the traditional narrative, captured by the desire to write something that, even with the cover gone, people would recognize as mine after reading just five pages.” Back then, Shin was strict about reading all works written by her favorite writers, which included Yi Chongjun and Oh Jung-hee. This period of intensive reading allowed her to establish her own distinctive style, one that is sad and at the same time beautiful, hesitant and at the same time firmly pushing forward, in order to speak the unspeakable and to show the unshowable. With great precision, she brought life to familiar details and reaffirmed their significance, focusing on the individual, in most cases a woman, an aspect that had been overlooked in the fiction of many Korean writers who had come before her. Shin’s breakthrough story, “Where the Harmonium Once Stood,” is a first-person narrative told by a woman who has fallen in love with a married man. When the man proposes that they flee to another country, she is forced to confront the memories of her father bringing home his mistress. Written with heightened lyricism – so much so that Shin kept asking herself as she wrote, “Can I really call this a story?” – the story takes the readers, as all great literature does, to a world where one can arrive at only when one pushes away the text and delves into the depth of human existence. The novel A Lone Room, which Shin published two years after the second collection, allowed her to make an important leap as a writer. As the novelist Hwang Sok-yong described, the book was a “dual-sided exploration, of both life and writing” – an autobiographical story of a woman’s experience surviving the most difficult period in the course of Korea’s industrialization, and at the same time, a story of a writer painfully confronting the past in order to tell her story. Shin Kyung-sook was born in Jeongeup, in a remote part of Jeollabuk-do (province), where she grew up and graduated from middle school. At the age of 16, when her family could not afford to send her to high school, she moved with her cousin to Seoul, where her older brother lived. In Seoul in the late 1970s, the drive toward industrialization was at its peak, with rampant labor exploitation and human rights violations taking place under severe working conditions as the Park Chung-hee regime, a dictatorship that had fed on a blind pursuit of growth and development, charged on toward its demise. “It had been ten years since my first publication and I was desperately caught up in the idea that I would not be able to write anything without confronting this very painful period in my life,” Shin confessed, “Most of the time I am probably the most ardent reader of my own books, but in the case of this novel, it was so painful to write that I did not read it until ten years later when the publisher issued a new edition.”   Journalist Han Yun-jeong and novelist Shin Kyung-sook   The book was followed by a series of novels – The Train Leaves at 7, Violet, Yi Jin and most recently, Take Good Care of Mom – each eagerly awaited and embraced by both critics and readers. All of Shin’s novels, whether they be a coming-of-age story, a romance, or a historical novel, take on a distinctive color, based on a unique style and structure, and a profound depth that only Shin is capable of. Her characters are, in most cases, good, unhurried, contemplative, and non-calculating. Shin seems to believe, despite her early conflicts with family and society, that human nature is based on goodness, that people somehow end up doing wrong rather than intending to do wrong. Perhaps that is why her books are so loved. Looking back at her 23 years as a writer, she comments, “When I was starting out, I was tense and overly sensitive, too eager to write something unlike what anyone else was writing, whereas after A Lone Room, I have been trying to write out of empathy for the other, to pursue the kind of writing that compensates and embraces, rather than antagonizes.” More than anything else, Shin Kyung-sook has been faithfully carrying out the role that Korean literature has been asking of her. She has brought real characters, more specifically women, back to fiction, which had been dominated by the grand epic of history and social reality. She has not only created new styles of literature but secured a wide readership that has allowed her to spread this new aesthetic. She was at the forefront of bringing new readers to Korean novels in the 1990s, and now, amidst much talk of a crisis in publishing with Korea emerging as Asia’s new filmmaking capital, Shin remains a strong force in keeping the fiction genre alive. Her work has been introduced to many readers overseas as well. A Lone Room has been translated into French, Japanese, Chinese, and German, with English and Spanish versions underway; Yi Jin was published in China and is being translated into French; A Deep Sorrow has been translated into Thai; and many of her stories have been collected in various anthologies in a number of countries. Many around the world still associate Korea with war, division, and military dictatorships, but Shin’s books have a more universal appeal that can speak to a wider readership. As was the case with Korean readers who first encountered her stories in the early years of her career, readers overseas will experience the same pleasure and a sense of self-recognition in her books. We may wonder, at this point, what Shin’s life is like. She says, “Writing things down has always been a natural habit for me since I was young.” And to keep her well of stories from going dry, she always wakes up in the early hours of the dawn. In the tranquil hours while the rest of the world sleeps, she contemplates about herself and others, and quietly starts writing. Shin says, “If I could be born again, I would like to do the kind of work that uses the body more, like making sculpture with a hammer and chisel or building a desk with a saw or even dancing. But for now, in this life, I love myself as a writer.” Writing fiction, for Shin, is dreaming, her most powerful weapon against life’s transience. Her dream as a writer is “to write a book so beautiful that there isn’t a single sentence you can throw out, from the first to the last.” It would not matter if it were in fiction or another genre. She will continue to write until she has written that book.   By Han Yun-jeong

FICTION

• Please Look After Mom Vol.4 Summer 2009

  Shin Kyung-sook’s latest book Please Look After Mom is a novel about a mother gone missing and her family, told from the shifting points of view of the family members. The following excerpt is from the opening of the book’s first chapter.   It has been a week since Mom was lost. Gathered at Older Brother’s home, your family decided, after much deliberation, to print a flyer and hand out copies around where Mom was lost. You would start with drafting a copy for the flyer. The old-fashioned way. A member of the family was lost, not just any member but the mother, but there were very few things that the rest of the family could do. File a missing person report; search the nearby area; ask anyone on the street if they had seen this person; Younger Brother, who runs an on-line clothing store, posts details on the internet about how and where Mom was lost, along with her photo, pleading for anyone to get in touch if they saw someone resembling her. You wanted to go search any place that Mom might have gone, but you knew that there was no place in this city that Mom could go on her own. You’re a writer, so you should draft the copy, Older Brother said, appointing you to the job. A writer. You turned red below your ears, as if you had been caught doing something you should not. Will one of the sentences that you compose turn out to be helpful in finding Mom? When you wrote July 24, 1938, to state Mom’s date of birth, Father said that Mom was born in 1936. He said that only her citizen’s registration had it down as ’38, and that actually she was born in ’36. This is news to you. Father said that back then, this was common practice. Because many babies died before they were a hundred days old, families waited for two or three years before reporting their births for the family register. You were about to change the number 38 to 36 when Older Brother said that since this was an official document, you should say Mom was born in ’38. This was a flyer that we were putting together on our own, it was not like we were working at the Community Center or the District Office – did I have to write down what was on the records rather than fact? You questioned this, but without saying anything, you changed back the number 36 to 38. Thinking, What about July 24, then? Would this be the correct date of Mom’s birthday? Since a few years back, your mom had been insisting, Don’t make separate plans for my birthday. Father’s birthday was a month before Mom’s. There was a time when, on birthdays and other special occasions, you and the rest of the family in the city traveled back home to the town of J. The entire immediate family made 22. Mom liked the rowdiness of having the whole family over. Once a get-together was planned, she made new kimchi a few days ahead of the date, got meat from the butcher at the market and prepared extra toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste. She squeezed sesame oil, and roasted and pounded in a mortar separate batches of sesame seeds and perilla seeds, a bottle each for each sibling to take when they left. When she was anticipating the family’s arrival, your Mom took on a distinctly more energetic mood as she chatted with neighbors or with people she ran into at the market, her gestures and words suggesting a sense of pride. Her cellar would be lined with rows of glass bottles of various sizes, containing plum or wild berry juice that Mom had made according to season. Her earthenware sauce jars were filled to the top with salted fish – yellow croaker, anchovy gut, clams. When word went around that onions were good for health, she made onion juice; when winter approached, she boiled pumpkin slices with licorice to send to her family in the city. Your mom’s house was like a factory where she was constantly manufacturing something for her family in the city, every hour, every season. Where sauces got made and bean paste fermented and sticky rice pounded.      * Above translation by Jung Ha-yun is not an excerpt from the Vintage Contemporaries edition (2012).

ESSAYS

• Giving Voice to Fragile, Introspective Souls: About Shin Kyung-sook Vol.4 Summer 2009

REVIEWS

• [ENGLISH] The Violent Violation of Violets Vol.61 Autumn 2023

• The Talking Cure: Stories Told to the Moon by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.47 Spring 2020

• A Korean in Belle Époque Paris: The Court Dancer by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.42 Winter 2018

• Loss Is the Tie that Binds: I'll be Right There by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.24 Summer 2014

• Revisiting the Stories of Shin Kyung-sook: The Blind Calf by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.13 Autumn 2011

• Ways To Love This World: Moonlight Tales by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.20 Summer 2013

• An Ode to the Wounded: I'll be Right There by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.9 Autumn 2010

• Miseries Turn into Memories: Unknown Women by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.15 Spring 2012

• In Search of a Lost Mother: Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.3 Spring 2009

• History Personalized: Lee Jin by Shin Kyung-sook Vol.1 Autumn 2008

BOOKS