PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Oh Jung-hee Chinatown
Translated
by
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2025 001
Copyright © Oh Jung-hee, 2025
Translation and Introduction copyright © Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 2025
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Introduction vii
Chinatown 1
Running Man 36 Mermaid 53
The Garden Party 68
Introduction
Oh Jung-hee (also known in English as O Chŏnghŭi) is the grande dame of modern Korean fiction, a writer whose works, spanning six decades, have drawn comparison with those of Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf and Joyce Carol Oates. In both technique and subject matter she remains one of the most accomplished of contemporary Korean writers. She uses flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness and a variety of narrative viewpoints to good effect. Her vocabulary is rich, her word choice deliberate and evocative. Her best stories are powerful, sensitive, carefully crafted portrayals of family relationships strained by unspoken emotions and unseen external forces. In these works, she probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by divorce, desertion, insanity and death. Darkness is a physical presence in many of her stories, representing among other things these rents in the fabric of the family.
Oh is noted for coming-of-age stories such as ‘Chinatown’ (‘Chunggugin kŏri’, 1979) and ‘The Garden of My Childhood’ (‘Yunyŏn ŭi ttŭl’, 1980) and for intertextual stories such as ‘Weaver Woman’ (‘Chingnyŏ’, 1970), which echoes the folktale of the herder boy and the weaver girl, ‘A Portrait of Magnolias’ (‘Mongnyŏnch’o’, 1975), which includes a retelling of the Ch’ŏyong legend, and ‘Fireworks’ (‘Pullori’, 1987), which recounts the Koguryŏ foundation myth. In these ways Oh, like several other contemporary Korean
fiction writers, connects strongly with Korean tradition while investing her stories with archetypes found in myth, legend and folktale.
Like Pak Wansŏ, Hwang Sunwŏn and Ch’oe Yun – three of modern Korea’s most accomplished authors and each, like Oh, represented in The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories – she emerged more or less fully formed as a writer. She began writing ‘The Toy Shop Woman’ (‘Wan’gujŏm yŏin’), which was honoured with the 1968 New Writers Award by a Seoul daily, while still in high school. She then published approximately a story a year until her first collection, River of Fire (Pul ŭi kang), appeared in 1977. If by that time there were any doubts about her commitment to her craft, she dispelled them by remarking in a brief afterword to that volume that while writing a story she is constantly plagued by doubts as to whether she has given her all to that particular work. River of Fire is remarkable for the tension created by the juxtaposition in each of the twelve stories of a first-person narrative and a nameless narrator, an unsettling combination of intimacy and distance. In these stories, Oh became arguably the first Korean writer to carry out Virginia Woolf’s dictum that killing off the gentle, egoless, self-sacrificing ‘angel in the house’ is part of a female writer’s job.
The decade that followed was Oh’s most productive period. Her second and third story collections, The Garden of My Childhood (Yunyŏn ŭi ttŭl) and Spirit on the Wind (Param ŭi nŏk), appeared in 1981 and 1986, respectively. The title story of Spirit on the Wind is a dual narrative that examines trauma from the point of view of the victim and her uncomprehending husband. The stories in both collections, like those in River of Fire, continue to portray
viii
By the mid-1980s Oh’s writing had become more discursive as she responded to critiques of her works as lacking in historical consciousness and awareness of contemporary realities – two catchphrases applied indiscriminately by the conservative and patriarchal literary establishment of South Korea to writers who do not focus overtly on social, political, or historical problems in their fiction. Always an intertextual writer, Oh began to incorporate more historical elements into her works. ‘The Monument Intersection’ (‘Pulmangbi’, 1983), for example, is inspired by her own family’s migration, after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, from Hwanghae Province in present-day North Korea to what would become South Korea.
A highlight of her literary fiction from the 1990s was the publication of her novella The Bird (Sae) in 1996.
Earlier in that decade, in an effort to broaden her readership, Oh published two volumes of conte, a genre that in Korea consists primarily of family-centred miniatures and occupies an ambiguous space somewhere between literary fiction and popular fiction. She has also published children’s and young adult fiction, and two volumes of essays.
The stories in this volume are centred in perhaps her most productive period – the late 1970s and early 1980s. ‘Chinatown’ is one of the most accomplished
ix families broken by desertion, infidelity, sterility, madness and death. These holes in the family fabric parallel the breakdown of a traditional agrarian society built around the extended family, a development accelerated by the industrialization of South Korea under a succession of military dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s.
coming-of-age stories in contemporary Korea. ‘Running Man’, an early story built on her debut story, ‘The Toyshop Woman’, focuses on the complications engendered by same-sex desire in a society still weighed down by strict neo-Confucian gender-role expectations. ‘Mermaid’ describes the psychological turmoil of a mother about to confide in her daughter that the girl was abandoned as a baby by her birth mother. ‘The Garden Party’ is a brilliant combination of manners, family dynamics and metafiction contextualized within a dinner party involving several prominent local families.
Oh Jung-hee will be remembered as the writer who pioneered gender parity in contemporary Korean fiction while raising the bar of accomplishment in fiction writing to a new level. She is one of the few writers of modern Korean fiction to acknowledge in her stories the individual’s capacity for evil, and virtually no one has written more insightfully about trauma. It is difficult to overemphasize Oh’s influence on contemporary Korean writers. Pyun Hye-Young (P’yŏn Hyeyŏng), one of the most prominent of the current generation, wrote her master’s thesis on Oh. According to the dust jacket of Oh’s 2006 essay collection, The Patterns of My Heart (Nae maŭm ŭi munŭi), among the authors most influenced by her is Kyung-sook Shin (Shin Kyŏngsuk), author of the best-selling Please Look After Mom (Ŏmma rŭl put’akhae, 2008). And the obligatory critical essay at the end of a 1994 volume of Oh’s self-selected stories was written by none other than Kim Hyesoon (Kim Hyesun), contemporary Korea’s most imaginative poet and a mentor to a generation of women fiction writers and poets. These accomplishments are all the more noteworthy when we
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