Who Ate Up All The Shinga?, by Park Wan-suh (introduction)

Introduction Park Wan-suh (also romanized as Pak Wan-sŏ), although little known in the West, is by common consent the most notable female author in contemporary South Korea, where she is held in high esteem by both the literary establishment and the public for her skill as a storyteller and for the wit, compassion, and incisive social criticism evident in her writing. Her works not only have received numerous prestigious literary awards but also routinely appear at the top of best-seller lists; several have been successfully adapted for the screen. Remarkably, Park did not publish any work until she was almost forty. Her prizewinning first novel, The Naked Tree, created a minor sensation, however, not least because a debut by a woman her age was so rare. Since its appearance in 1970, Park has maintained a prolific output of high-quality work, with some 20 novels and more than 150 shorter pieces to her credit. Awareness of her talent is slowly reaching an international audience, as her writing is translated into a variety of languages.

Works available in English include The Naked Tree and two

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collections of short fiction, My Very Last Possession and Other Stories and Sketch of the Fading Sun, as well as a number of short stories that have appeared in journals or anthologies.

Park’s fiction has occasionally been described as reminiscent of stories told by a chatty neighbor. Although such a description captures the warmth and colloquial flavor of much of her writing, it belies her razor-sharp critiques of Korean society and her versatility and virtuosity as a stylist able to range with equal success from the earthy to the elegant. Her favorite themes include the tragedy of the Korean War, the hypocrisy and materialism of the middle class, and the concerns of women—topics that she embeds within lively tales about compelling, realistically drawn characters. Far from running out of ideas, Park has become even more accomplished and imaginative as she continues into the latter stages of her career, remaining productive well into her seventies.

The author’s potted biography informs us that she was born in 1931 near Kaesŏng, in what is now North Korea.

She entered Seoul National University, the nation’s top university, in June 1950, but the Korean War, which broke out almost immediately afterward, cut her studies short.

These two spare biographical details, which essentially bookend the memoir that follows, hint at the upheavals of Park’s early years but not the skill with which she re-creates this turbulent period of Korean history. Simply put, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary work about extraordinary times. Although deceptively little in the book, until its final page, suggests that the protagonist herself will eventually become the grande dame of Korean literature, her evocation of the dramatic vicissitudes experienced by her family is enthralling. The work became a best seller in its native South Korea and has remained a steady favorite since, having sold more than 1.3 million copies.

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Non-Korean readers will also find that the story has ready cross-cultural appeal and that the author’s insight into human nature resonates with those outside the conservative, patriarchal Confucian framework in which Park was raised. Of course, introductions to works of Korean literature in translation often do have to provide background that authors have taken for granted in their audience, and readers of Who Ate Up All the Shinga? should be aware of at least the broad outlines of the troubled middle decades of the twentieth century in Korea—all the more so, since South Korea’s current image as an economically dynamic, culturally stylish, and technologically savvy nation is effacing memories of darker days, when extreme poverty was rife and the Korean people experienced the successive hardships of occupation by Japan and a devastating internecine war. Nonetheless, even in 1992, when Park published Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, she was conscious of how remote the period had become for many of her readers, who were coming of age amid rising prosperity and the optimism of a freshly democratized polity, and she fills in necessary information while avoiding didacticism.

This feature, in conjunction with the author’s eye for colorful detail and her gifts of characterization, makes the text a rich and thoroughly accessible source of social history. For Park, spinning a good yarn has always been the primary concern, and the personalities who surrounded her in her early years stand out vividly, exemplifying the mores of the day without becoming reduced to types. Most particularly, the author paints a sympathetic but critical picture of her mother, highlighting her numerous contradictions. In Park’s eloquent rendering, we see a resourceful, determined woman who kicks forcefully against the strictures of the time while conforming to many of them.

She is desperate to shift her daughter from the countryside

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to Seoul so she can become a “New Woman” (shin yŏsŏng), equipped with a modern education, but has an incomplete understanding of what such a project entails.

Colonization by Japan, which began in earnest when Korea was annexed in 1910, brought a contradictory mix of enlightenment and oppression, which is still being disentangled in Korea’s fraught relations with its close but distant neighbor. Even now, Korean popular discourse speaks too often in simplistic terms of noble, downtrodden Korean victims resisting evil Japanese oppressors and their collaborators. Although Park does not shy away from pointed criticisms of the banal everyday violence of colonial existence, her reminiscences, in their nuanced sense of how people went about their lives amid a demeaning political structure, offer a useful corrective to such blackand-white portrayals. Most notably, Park portrays the experience of assimilation into the Japanese Empire from a child’s perspective. In doing so, she uncovers occasionally surprising combinations of acquiescence and resistance.

The author describes with good-natured humor, for example, her own tribulations of learning Japanese in school, seemingly interminable school ceremonies in honor of the emperor, and benighted attempts to make students devoted subjects of the empire. Descriptions of fears among the Korean populace about having daughters abducted to become “comfort women” in Japanese military brothels or seeing sons forcibly conscripted to work in labor camps appear in conjunction with approving comments on the fairness of Japanese financial institutions and their role in enabling Park’s family to obtain a loan toward purchasing a house in Seoul.

Of particular interest is the debate that arises within her family over whether to comply with the policy of assuming Japanese names, an issue that underpins Richard Kim’s

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fine fictionalized account of growing up under the Japanese occupation, Lost Names, and the two texts can profitably be read in tandem. Park’s tale, however, reveals that the policy was by no means as compulsory as often suggested and that self-interest rather than coercion often drove capitulation: while her brother insists on clinging to the family name, her uncle worries that doing so may hurt his business. The author herself longs for the family to take a Japanese name for a much more trivial reason: the resemblance between the Japanese pronunciation of her Korean name and the word for “air-raid drill” led to frequent teasing by her schoolmates that she longed to escape.

Park experienced adolescence during the heady era of post-Liberation Korea, when new political concepts excited the populace and a growing ideological divide penetrated even high schools. Park draws from personal example to show how initial euphoria over freedom from the Japanese yielded to serious concerns that society was teetering on the brink of chaos. Ominously, her laconic, thoughtful brother becomes involved with the underground leftist movement. The book’s last sections are also its most harrowing in their depiction of how one not atypical family becomes trapped in the crossfire of the Korean War’s destructive passions: when the Communists capture Seoul in their initial blitzkrieg attack, neighbors kowtow to her family, assuming that her brother has a high place in the leftist hierarchy. Soon after General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inch’ŏn, however, the United Nations forces and the army of the Republic of Korea (ROK) retake Seoul, and a period of excruciating hardship descends on the family as presumed Red sympathizers; the author is regularly summoned for interrogations and made to literally crawl before her tormentors. Her brother, forcibly conscripted by the Korean People’s Army (KPA), eventually straggles

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home from the front, suffering on his return from what we would now diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The final scenes are riveting: Park must take flight with her mother, her now lame brother (“accidentally” shot in the leg by an ROK soldier), her sister-in-law, and their two infant children, one of whom was born prematurely and remains desperately malnourished.

Park readily acknowledges the extent to which Who Ate Up All the Shinga? draws on the often unreliable medium of memory. As she writes in a piece that became the foreword to later editions of the text, she frequently found herself forced to fill in the interstices of erased recollections with the mortar of imagination. And while she concedes that such a technique is perhaps only to be expected, a more serious problem for her involved confronting discrepancies in the memory of events between herself and other members of her family. Such comparisons, reminiscent of Rashomon (or, perhaps more appropriately here, the work of the acclaimed director Hong Sang-soo), instilled in her a realization that memory may ultimately be no different from imagination. In the hands of a less skillful writer, that declaration might prove alarming for those who want a reliable picture of the author’s experiences, but Park has a deserved reputation for unflinching honesty. She notes the difficulty of resisting the temptation to embellish herself, but the portraits she draws of herself and her family are astonishingly frank, verging on the confessional and even self-flagellating. Throughout her career, Park has written herself into her protagonists, but clearly fictionalized elements have rendered problematic easy identification of the author with her protagonists. Those elements are entirely absent here, and to pursue the question of whether Who Ate Up All the Shinga? should be regarded as fiction or nonfiction is unlikely to prove profitable. Indeed, Park has been

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described as acting like a surgeon wielding a scalpel in the way her writing exposes hypocrisy with almost clinical precision. The metaphor is no less applicable when she turns her attention to her own life story. ************ A few additional remarks before we begin. Those about to embark on the work may rightly wonder just what a shinga is. Although the nature of this edible plant, which grew in abundance around Park’s native Kaesŏng, will become clearer as the text proceeds, curious readers should rest assured that they are not alone in their perplexity. The author deliberately opted for a title that would leave the majority of Koreans scratching their heads, and the Korean name of the plant has no precise English equivalent (the Latin name seems to be Aconogonon alpinum, for the insatiably curious), hence our decision to romanize the term in our title.

And since the issue of romanization has come up, it is perhaps germane to note that we have, after considerable reflection, settled on the McCune-Reischauer system of transliterating Korean words for our translation, except for names that have become well known in English by more idiosyncratic spellings (for example, Syngman Rhee).

Such exceptions are most obvious in the case of the author herself, whose clearly stated preference for the romanized spelling of her own name as Park Wan-suh has been honored, even though the alternative McCune-Reischauer rendering, as Pak Wan-sŏ, can also occasionally be found.

When we refer to her clan name as a whole, however, we do adhere to its standard romanization as Pak. My co-translator, Yu Young-nan, and I wish to acknow­ ledge the generous support of the Daesan Foundation, which provided us with a grant toward the translation of the text. We also extend a note of deep thanks to Park Wan-suh, who was unstintingly generous in fielding queries about

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difficult points in her text. We have long been cognizant of her prodigious talent, and over the years we have experienced firsthand her graciousness and kindness as well. It is a privilege to translate one of her most important works.

Finally, those who follow the translation of Korean literature will be aware of the increasing trend toward teams that bring together native speakers of the source and target languages. Although both of us often had worked on our own in translation, collaboration proved highly productive. As we sent versions electronically back and forth a dozen times or more with extensive annotation and commentary, teasing out the finest nuances of the original text and possible renderings, we found ourselves engaged in a rejuvenating project of discovery. Both of us agree that we have put more energy into this translation than into any other text that either of us has worked on, not least as a measure of our respect for Who Ate Up All the Shinga? and its author. We hope that the end result justifies the effort.

Stephen J. Epstein

author photo/detail : © koo bohn chang

praise for Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

“Park Wan-suh is a household name in Korea and draws standing-room-only crowds in North American cities with substantial Korean populations.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is a major work, being both a rare account of a woman coming of age in colonial Korea and the first book-length memoir in English by a Korean writer resident in and writing about Korea.”

Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia, and cotranslator of There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun “Park Wan-suh is important for the ways in which her writing is at once popular (nearly all her works are best sellers) and canonical. She is widely discussed in Korean academia, and she has become the subject of a number of dissertations.

While this is also the case for many male writers, Park Wan-suh may have combined the two levels more successfully than any other novelist. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is the embodiment of one of these works.”

Theodore Hughes, Columbia University

book/jacket design: chang jae lee

{

columbia university press new york

}

cup.columbia.edu ISBN 978-0-231-14898-6

9 780231 148986

columbia

jacket image: © bettmann/corbis

Stephen J. Epstein is the director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His research focuses on contemporary Korean literature and society, and he is currently working on a book exploring Korean national identity in relation to globalization. He has also published several translations of Korean and Indonesian fiction.

printed in the u.s.a.

Yu Young-nan is a freelance translator living in Seoul. She has translated five Korean novels into English, including Park Wan-suh’s The Naked Tree and Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations. Yu was awarded the Daesan Literature Prize for her translation of Yi In-hwa’s Everlasting Empire.

an autobiographical novel

Who Ate U p

All łhe Shinga •?

P a r k W a n - s u h is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability.

Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small vil˘ lage near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that “no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean.” But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park’s idyll, complicating her day-to-day life.

•?

U p All łhe Shinga

Park Wan-suh broke into Korea’s literary scene in the 1970s and in 1981 received the prestigious Yi Sang award for her novel Mother’s Stake. Her prolific career includes more than 150 short stories and novellas and close to twenty novels, many of which have topped best-seller lists and have been adapted for the screen. Her works in translation include My Very Last Possession and The Naked Tree.

P a r k W a n - s u h Who Ate

Weatherhead Books on Asia

{Park Wan-suh} Translated by

Yu Young-nan

and

Stephen j. Epstein

With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park’s portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.