Journeys in Korean Literature
Critique
Perturbing Insight about Human Nature Uh Soo-woong Arts & Culture Reporter, The Chosun Ilbo
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anuary 22, 2013 was the second anniversary of the death of the writer Park Wan-suh (1931-2011). Around that date I phoned her elder daughter, Ho Won-suk, after several months’ silence. Nowadays, she looks after the author’s neat little house in Achiul, Guri City, to the east of Seoul. It is the house mentioned at the start of “That Boy’s House” (which was published in 2007 as part of the collection “Kind Bok-hui”): “I too, several years ago, had brought to an end a lengthy period of life in an apartment and moved into a house.” Korean readers tend to refer to Park Wan-suh as a popular writer but that is too general a designation that makes me want to add something more. To borrow an expression from the poet Jang Seok-ju, she is a “fountainhead of Korea’s maternalist literature.” In the Korean literary scene, novels that perpetuate patriarchy have long formed the mainstream. Park’s works deal with the stories of women who are bound to suffer alienation in our patriarchal society. She unfolds bundles of tales about daughters rather than sons, mothers rather than fathers, wives rather than husbands. There are large numbers of women writers in Korea who produce this kind of writing, but the stories from Park Wan-suh’s oeuvre are especially sensitive and abundant. Her insight into human nature is actually frightening. Works that see through the falsity of petit-bourgeois happiness while penetrating human hypocrisy and duplicity have become Park Wan-suh’s patented trademark. “That Boy’s House” is a fine example in which the author shows her willingness to face that piercing gaze, even in regard to herself. The story was originally published in the summer 2002 issue of the review publication Munhak-gwa Sahoe (Literature and Society), when the author was 70. I recall vividly how delighted I felt, how refreshing it was to see a septuagenarian writer standing side-byside with younger colleagues and boldly presenting such a story, at a time when the Korean literary scene was crowded with so many prematurely aged writers. The theme of this issue of Koreana is “aspects of Seoul that even Koreans do not know about.” This story by Park Wan-suh can be
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seen as a study of modern social phenomena, an account about the everyday customs of a Donam-dong neighborhood that even Koreans are in large part unaware of. Beneath the surface, it seethes with physical desire and bitterness. It is a sharp denunciation of a woman’s desires and sense of guilt, and of false human consciousness, the author’s own included. The story’s setting is the war-devastated city of Seoul in the early and late 1950s. Its starting point is a visit, by the now elderly main figure, to the neighborhood along the Angam Stream in Donamdong where “that boy,” who was her first love, used to live. She too spent part of her youth there, such that she is able to assert, “I was very familiar with that area.” In those days, when she was still a high school student, a distant relative of her mother moved into the neighborhood. That refined household included a boy of her age. In those days, boys and girls were strictly segregated, so they acted as though they did not know each other until a year or two later when they met again by chance. The narrator, now a university student, is working at a U.S. army base when she meets that boy by chance on a tram on her way home from work, and they begin to talk. Amorous feelings start to develop. They become sweethearts and spend a happy winter wandering around together in Seoul. But the boy is unemployed, while she is effectively the head of a family of five for whom she is the main income earner. As a result of the ongoing Korean War, all the menfolk had left for the front lines and the world beyond, while only the women and children remained at home. Still, the desires and passions of love are ineluctable. With the menfolk of her family having fallen victim to the war, this young girl is in charge of her household. She thus feels a sense of guilt when amorous desires arouse her body. The narrator recalls: Once May came, the garden erupted in blooming profusion. I had not realized there were so many kinds of flowering trees and plants. In addition to the intensely fragrant white lilac and the purple iris, flame-like azaleas, sensuously scented oleanders, pomegranates with flowers like the lamps in the red-light quarter, and breathless gardenias, all flung their blossoms wildly and passionKo re a n Cu l tu re & A rts