Review Early Spring, Mid-Summer

Early Spring, Midsummer, may be the best book out of the Si-sa-yongo-sa Modern Korean
Short Stories 10 book series. It contains couple of meditations on change, particularly Early Spring,
Mid-Summer by Yi Munyol, a couple of historical/metaphorical tales of the cost of war, including Kim
Won-ils The Spirit of Darkness, and a couple of stories that mix their historical stories with great and
sometimes shocking sadness, particularly, Pak Si-jongs Two Minutes to Seven.
The first of the historical/metaphorical stores is The Spirit of the Darkness by Kim Won-il is the story
of a young boy in the time just before the Korean war. The narrators father is a Red, and lives in
hiding. When the father is finally caught, it sends the boy on a journey about his village and in his
mind in which he remembers flashes of time with his father, lashes out at his father for leaving the
family, and oftentimes, is just plain hungry. The story has a sad ending, but is an excellent
introduction to the collection and theres some well placed explicitation in the story to help any
readers unfamiliar with Korea at the time.
Wings That Will Carry Us Both by Chon San-guk is the story of a lucky second birth in the
family with a seventh-generation-only-son. And, yet, this luck, as a Korean philosophical tradition
suggests, leads not only to happiness, but also to anxiety and dread. In fact, in describing this mixed
feeling, Son Sang-guk may have created the best and briefest literary introduction to the Korean
notion of han. Wings That Will Carry Us Both features one of the few happy endings (although
ambivalently so) in the collection, which can be read as a metaphor for the state of the brother
countries of South and North Korea, or as the story of brotherly bonding.
The Cave by Han Sung-won is perhaps the most difficult story in this collection to suss out,
and it ends fairly abruptly and randomly. A little research indicates that the story is actually an excerpt
from Father and Son: A Novel, which likely explains its appearing incomplete. In addition, the story
literally translates Korean terms for relatives (i.e. an older uncle on a fathers side is called Bigger
Father), which is pretty non-explanatory for readers not already well aware of Korean culture. The
story is of two children saved by their father, who dooms himself in the process, and the unhappy
lives they subsequently lead.
The cave, the house of drunken Chu-man and his supportive mother is clearly metaphorical,
perhaps standing directly for war-time massacre (There were several awful cave-based massacres
in modern Korean history, including the Goyang Geumjeong Cave Massacre or the Daranshi cave
massacre on Jeju, and the Gok-Gye Cave Massacre)

There is some fairly clever writing involved as when the narrators father is confronted by the
reds who claim him bourgeois. He responds with a logical argument and general claim that he hasnt
done anything wrong, to which the red semi-official responds, , and claims he hasnt done anything.
The red semi-official responds, Nobody surrenders because he has done anything (77)
Even with that, however, this story made me wish I had the more complete version.
Two stories in the collection are short tragedies.
D.M.Z. by Yu Hyon-jong is the story of a charming little boy with a desire to travel. He picks up
a stray cat and accidentally crosses under and over the DMZ by digging a hole, when he spots a
deer on the other side of a fence. D.M.Z. is a brilliant little story, because even though the boy seems
preternaturally lucky, the split in Korea as represented by the DMZ itself will not let him live. Readers
familiar with Korean literature might think of it as a juvenile version of Lucky Day by Hyon Jin Gon.
If D.M.Z. is a little bit of a downer, wait for Ten Minutes to Seven, the last story in the collection,
which ends it with all the delicacy of a guillotine slamming down on a neck. Just a brutal story about
two women, from very different generations, trying to get a last few minutes with their male relatives
who are on a train that will ship them off to Vietnam.
The remaining stories are, loosely, metaphors describing the price of non-war related change
in Korea. The Relationshipby Yu Chae-yon is an awesome and different story about a man, a sort of
idler, gets a job working as the arms and legs of a man paralyzed from the waist down. The idler
even marries a wife and has a child for the millionaire. At the end, however, even permanently living

in the grand house of the millionaire, the narrator feels empty and alone. A well told story of
psychological dispossession that can clearly be read as a comment on the cost of merely economic
advancement.
The same kind of reading can be applied to The Sound Of The Gong, by Mun Sun-tae. Main
character Ho Chil-bok has had his home erased by a dam, so he moves to the city, where he doesnt
fit in and also loses his life. Driven slightly mad, he gets a gong and returns to his old home, now
surviving precariously as a fishing destination. Hos gonging scares the fish and he is chased off by
locals who see him as a threat to their livelihood. Strangely, even when he is chased off, he
continues to be heard.
Early Spring, Mid-Summer, by Yi Munyol is a collection of short snippets that are meant to be minimorality-plays, sometimes bordering on lectures, all featuring the character Paek-Po. Paek-po,
introduced as the idea of an everyman. The little snippets lay out his life and beliefs in a way that
would take much longer in straight narrative. The ending reminded me in some ways of An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, except no one dies.^^ It is clever how Yi uses
two of Koreas seasons, perhaps the best and the worst, as symbols.

Review: Wayfarer: New Fiction By Korean Women

Wayfarer: New Fiction by Korean Women is edited by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, which is
typically an indication that the contents will be of high value and quality.
The introduction, which is uncredited but sounds like the work of the Fultons, is a quick gloss of the
historical position that women writers inhabited; to put it in a short phrase, a very bad position. It also
discusses the introduction of hangul, and how that introduction created a small opening for female
authors and how, then, modernization and colonialization, that began to pry that small opening wide
open. This was by no means an easy process, as women were intentionally defined as yoryu
chakka, or women writers (there were even sub-categories to this taxonomy, and the early history of
even slightly successful female writers was not good (A good book that looks more closely at this
period is the collection Questioning Minds which traces the arc of female writers from 1917 to the
present). In the 1970s the damn finally collapsed, and it is from that era that this collection begins.
The theme in Wayfarer is alienation, and the theme is hammered on.
Almaden, by Kim Chiweon joins that short list of Korean fiction sited overseas, telling the story of an
unhappy married woman who clerks at her families liquor store. She engages in an imaginary affair
with a customer who is quite, quite distant from her husband. The routine of marriage has driven
love from the couples relationship, but an imaginary relationship brings no relief in the end.
Choe Yuns The Last of Hanako is a great story, which has been translated elsewhere in a
Jimoondang / LTI Korea (and is being translated yet again in the ASIA Modern Fiction Bilingual
Edition I often wonder why the compulsion to translate and retranslate the same works; to me it
makes the literature seem small?). A middle-aged man (known only as he), unhappy with his life, is
in Venice partly in search of Jang Jin-ja, who had once served as something like muse to him and
his group of male friends. Jang was nicknamed Hanako (one nose) only after she had been
expelled from the group of friends, and her real name was never spoken by them again. Hanako is
an outsider who works her way in, and while her differences are cherished for a while, eventually the
(male) society kicks back with cruel force. There are some extremely well written scenes including
the expulsion scene, which well portrays the some-times forced nature of the Korean drinking scene
(often inextricable from the larger Korean social scene). There is a big reveal about Hanakos life
(which I will not spoil), which the average western reader will probably figure out after 10 pages of
reading. But this is a really good story.
Human Decency by Gong Ji Young is one of the smaller works in the book as it is parochially
Korean, pitting a facilely international character against a true Korean hero who has stayed inside
the grinder of Korean politics. The narrator is self-tortured by her own history and has a quite obvious
loathing for all things foreign. All this adds up to a work highlighting han and Korean exceptionalism
of the simplest kind.
Human Decency is also relentlessly nostalgic. In the present all the true rebels are dead or
sold out a convenient Manicheism that is often used in literature; kill a few rebels so they can never
be seen turning into businessmen or spaghetti salespeople.

Scarlett Fingernails by Kim Min-suk, is a touching and interesting story of a wife who wants to
temporarily leave her family to go see her father on the occasion of his 61 st birthday, which will also
be the date of his release from prison. This is complicated by the fact that her husband is unhappy
that she will go, and her mother is quite upset and has basically given up on her husband. When the
mother tells the story of the father she basically says he wasnt a spy he returned to see his family,
but when captured wouldnt confess and recant his redness the mother also says she wont
divorce him so he can keep his family up North safe, in essence, he cant recant his Redness for fear
of repercussions to them. The mother sends down some food and clothing for the dad. The family
guilt by association may seem strange to a western reader, but of course it is a Korean tradition of
long provenance (as the life of Kim Satkat, the Rainhat Poet demonstrates). The story has dual
surprise endings, and although it deals with alienation, it also demonstrates a remarkably resilient
family.
Dear Distant Love by Seo Yeong-eun begins with Mun-ja, an old maid in a publishing firm
where younger employees come and go and despise/pity her. For no immediately apparent reason,
she seems content, above it, even thinking she has fooled her co-workers. She is confident she can
live through anything, but on this day she must raise money from her aunt. She has a rather feckless
lover with whom she share a long and tangled history, and she seems willing to put up with almost
any slight or difficulty with an air of brave optimism, in a way reminiscent of Na Hyeseoks Kyeonghui. This is an interesting take on one approach to life and love.
Identical Apartments, by Pak Wan-so tells the tale, through the eyes of a married daughter, of an
extremely extended family living in one large apartment. Somehow the wife has focused on the
indignity of having to listen for her husband ringing the doorbell. Finally, they move into their own
apateu. The wife befriends the woman across the way and apes her style and learns to cook from
her. Soon, the narrator is unhappy again, for a long list of things, and to my eye this story is more
about someone who is perpetually unhappy (the hatred of doorbell, for instance, conveniently
morphs into a hatred of the peephole at the new apartment). Paks point appears to be
commodification and progress create clones; however, really, in the villages, who was the
iconoclast? As the narrator comes to hate everything for which there is a duplicate her attitude
seems to be a form of clinical depression or klonosphobia (a word I just created from Greek roots!),
and that substantially dulls Paks point. There is some clever writing, and a rather nifty plot turn at the
end, but this was still a bit draggy for me.
The Flowering of Our Lives by Kong Seon-ok is written in interior monologue and the narrator
comes off as super-hyper or slightly schizophrenic. This is not doubt intentional, but it makes
reading the text something like sitting next to the crazy dude on the bus who rambles on about
various conspiracies. The story is also stuffed with rhetorical questions, a familiar rhetorical approach
in Korea speech, but difficult to navigate on the page. The story wanders between the narrators
relationship with her mother, and the narrators relationship with her own daughter, as well as two
female friends, one of the past and one of the present. The narrator describes herself as a rebel
(although her rebellions seem quite quotidian) due to her distress. The whole point of it is the
narrators essential question about herself, What is it that distresses me? But answers are never
forthcoming, and the story ends on a random note.
This may be a failing of my gender, as the introduction notes, the story is:
Striking. The narrator of that story is perhaps the most complex character in this anthology. In
turns indignant, despairing, sad, brazen and sympathetic, she has begun to come to terms with her
contradictory impulses. Here is a vivid example of the sensibility of Korean women writers of the
1990s. More than any of the other stories in this volume, this one is for and about women.
For me, there was never any indication of coming to terms with anything, and the moodshifts seemed random.
Wayfarer by O Chong-hui is the wonderful/horrific story of Hye-ja, a recently divorced woman
left alone in a house. Told semi-surrealistically (compare to the previous story this works really well) it
begins in a way that reminds me a bit of The Wings, with a confused narrator living in a semi-dream
state. The reasons for this state are unpeeled like an onion. The storytelling is delicate and Hye-jas
psychology is well explored and although her mental states change, the changes seem organic
throughout. With several brutal twists, the story winds to an end with the essential unfairness of Hyejas plight revealed and Hye-ja returned, with quite different meaning, to the image that opened the
story. This is a brilliant story of the burdens place on women by Korean society, and worth the price
of the book alone.