There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun (afterword)

Afterword

The three stories in this volume span the first decade of Ch’oe Yun’s career as a creative writer. The title story, appearing first in the summer 1988 issue of Munhak kwa sahoe (Literature and society), was her very first published work of literature (she had previously published literary criticism). In its sophisticated and polyphonic narrative, its inspiration by one of the most horrific events in modern Korean history, and its skillful treatment of trauma, There a Petal Silently Falls is one of the strongest debut works in modern Korean literature.

Interested, like Bakhtin, in polyphonic narratives, Ch’oe tells this story in three voices: a third-person narrative from the viewpoint of an inarticulate construction worker, the firstperson narrative of a traumatized girl, and a plural firstperson narrative related by a group of college students who are retracing the girl’s steps in an effort to locate her. Although the novella was inspired by the Kwangju massacre of May 1980, it is not about that event as much as it is an inquiry into how such outrages can happen. A central theme in the

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story is the psychology of abuse and violence at the level of both the individual and the state, with the construction worker and the girl representing the victimizer and the victim, respectively. The structure of the story is cyclical, with both the girl and the student group en route to possible healing and closure.

“Whisper Yet” (Soksagim soksagim, first published in November 1993 in Hanguk munhak [Korean literature]), is a retrospective narrative that takes up a familiar motif in post– 1945 Korean fiction—that of a divided land. In this story the division is both geographical and ideological, featuring an ironic bonding between the narrator’s father—an antiCommunist refugee from North Korea living in the South— and Ajaebi, a pro-Communist native of the South who is a fugitive. The narrative frame consists of the narrator’s silent dialogue with her daughter during a vacation in a countryside orchard, much like the orchard where the narrator spent her formative years in the company of Ajaebi. During this vacation, the narrator reconstructs the story of Ajaebi’s life as orchard caretaker, separated from his own family by his fugitive status.

“The Thirteen-Scent Flower” (Yolse kaji irŭm ŭi kkot hyanggi, first published in the summer 1995 issue of Munhak kwa sahoe), is a bravura piece that displays Ch’oe’s familiarity with postmodern writing and her concern with the commercialization of contemporary South Korean society. Ch’oe is a strongly intertextual writer, having authored stories with such titles as “Hanyorŭm naj ŭi kkum” (1989, A midsummer day’s dream), “P’andora ŭi kabang” (1991, Pandora’s box), “Woshingt’on kwangjang (1993, Washington Square), and “P’urŭn kich’a (1994, Blue train). Sharp-eyed readers of the present story will notice a reference to Albert Hitchcock, several portmanteau words, and excerpts from a Wagner opera

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that may help situate the unusual relationship between Bye and Green Hands. (For the excerpts from the love duet in Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, quoted in section 9 of “The Thirteen-Scent Flower,” we have drawn on two sources: pages 175, 177, and 179 of the unattributed English libretto in the 267-page “booklet,” edited by Peter Quantrill, for the 2005 EMI Classics CD/DVD version of the opera; and the unattributed subtitles of the 2005 Opus Arte DVD version of the opera.)

Ch’oe Yun is a writer for the new millennium, an articulate and prescient observer of a traditional agrarian society caught in the winds of the political, socioeconomic, and cultural changes so skillfully parodied in “The Thirteen-Scent Flower.” She is also intensely interested in the possibilities of fiction and constantly experiments with her narratives— for example, in her ongoing project of very short quasiautobiographical writings collectively titled Chajŏn p’ap’yŏn (Self-fragments). As she approaches her third decade of creative writing, we can expect her to continue to push the thematic and narrative boundaries of contemporary Korean fiction.

Suggest ions for Further Reading Ch’oe Yun. “The Gray Snowman.” Trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. In Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon, 345–70. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

——. “The Last of Hanak’o.” Trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

In Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, rev. and exp. ed., trans. and ed. Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 276–96. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2007.

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Fulton, Bruce. “Ch’oe Yun.” In The Columbia Companion to East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua Mostow, 740–42. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Fulton, Bruce and Ju-Chan. “Infinity Through Language: A Conversation with Ch’oe Yun.” Korean Culture 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 5–7.

Scott-Stokes, Henry, and Lee Jae Eui, eds. The Kwangju Uprising: Press Accounts of Korea’s Tiananmen. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000.

Shin, Gi-wook and Kyung Moon Hwang, eds. Contentious Kwangju: The May 18 Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. See in particular the section titled “Literature” (92–97) in Don Baker’s essay “Victims and Heroes: Competing Visions of May 18” (87–107).