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Interview with Ha Seong-nan: Looking Behind the Closed Door
The K-pop girl group Le Sserafim recently released a song titled “Eve, Psyche & the Bluebeard’s Wife.” It takes women who have broken taboos as its main concept, women who have opened forbidden doors. A new edition of your collection Bluebeard’s First Wife was published in Korea in 2021 and has been receiving renewed attention. What did you find most challenging when you first wrote the story “Bluebeard’s First Wife”?
by Yoon Chi Kyu
Interview with Ra Heeduk: Poetry at the End of the World
Dear Ra Heeduk,
by Lee Da Hee
Interview with Kim Yeonsu: He Who Writes and Rewrites Every Day
Your latest short story collection titled A Future as Ordinary as This was noted “Novel of the Year” in survey of fifty Korean authors run by the largest bookstore chain in South Korea. In your opinion, what is it about the book that resonated so much with readers?
I’ve been doing a lot of walking around lately. I just walk wherever my feet take me. Although I look at the scenes unfolding on the streets and the people I walk past, I rarely think about anything. I just walk. I got into this new habit after the coronavirus pandemic broke out. I realized that my own thoughts didn’t hold any special power. In fact, many thoughts are crossing my mind this very instant, but I choose not to pay attention to them. That’s because there are other thoughts I’d rather focus on. This is the biggest change I’ve experienced lately, which is something my readers might’ve picked up on through my writing. But that, too, is just a thought I had right now. The truth is I don’t really know.
You made your literary debut as a poet and later became famous as a fiction writer. You’ve also published numerous essay collections. How does writing essays differ from writing fiction?
I used to write essays whenever I hit a wall with my fiction writing. This is a creative writing technique known among writers as “creative procrastination.” The logic behind it is that performing two difficult tasks at once makes the least difficult one feel like a breeze. A short story is easier to write than a novel, and an essay is easier to write than a short story. That’s why I would turn to essay writing whenever I would struggle with fiction writing. As a result, I’ve never really struggled when it comes to writing essays. However, essays are sensitive to lies. As I grew into more of a fiction writer over the course of my career and writing fiction became easier, the conventions of the essay genre began to feel increasingly stifling to me. That’s why most of what I write today is fiction, including things that I might’ve written in the form of essays back in the day.
One of your earliest works, the short story “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” features a character who writes as a means to come to terms with his girlfriend’s death. Your stories seem to be inspired by a will to overcome feelings of denial in the face of loss or frustration with reality through writing. What is it about writing that allows us to reconcile with reality?
I write something every day. Sometimes I’ll sit down at my desk to write, and other times I will pull out a notebook to hastily jot something down as I wait for the train at the station. I hardly ever write proper sentences. It’s as though I stick my arm into a manhole without knowing what lurks inside and pull out whatever I can get my hand on. It could be just a few words, or a handful of sentences. My mind is constantly attempting to fill the void left behind by each letter I pull out. Since I don’t know what lurks inside the manhole, I must rely on my imagination to string complete sentences together. Anything goes since it’s all a product of my imagination. I could end up with a trivial piece of writing or an idea that will flourish into a novel after decades of writing. Imagination knows no bounds. I also do a lot of rewriting, too, of course. A single idea could lead to multiple versions of the same story. Which one gets to see the light of day will depend on the story’s skeleton. What differentiates writing from speaking is that written words leave a visible skeleton behind. If the bones are too brittle, I go back and rewrite everything from the start. I then look at the story’s skeleton once more. If the bones still seem too frail, it’s back to square one again; but if they appear sturdy, I consider my job done. I often recommend writing as a tool to reflect on past events for this exact reason. It’s because writing holds the power to make a story’s skeleton stick out in plain sight.
Losing a loved one or failing to obtain the object of one’s desires are some of the painful things we all experience in life, but the sense of loss or frustration we feel comes as a result of attachment, or love. There would be no loss or frustration if we didn’t feel emotionally attached to begin with. Given this, couldn’t we say that people who write as a means to come to terms with loss or frustration are in fact doing so in an attempt to continue protecting the very object of their love? Could writing be considered an act of love in this sense?
Looking back on my youth, there were many instances where I confused violence with love, both in regards to myself and others. This led me to wonder—is that just the way love is? Perhaps so. I think the opposite of love is fear. We sometimes choose love because we loath fear, or vice-versa. My point is that we have a difficult time distinguishing between the two. This gives rise to misunderstandings which don’t reflect reality, the kind of situation which easily lends itself to being made into a story. Love and stories share different realities. The reality of a story lies in revealing our own misunderstandings. This is what I meant by the story’s “skeleton” in my previous answer. If you can convince yourself of your love through writing, then you are admitting this reality.
“Everyone gets one shot at love.” This sentence appears in your novel No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are. Everybody has their own experience with love, which may manifest itself in the form of mutual misunderstandings, or in some cases, violence. Among the various factors which may give rise to discord and conflicts between individuals, is there a reason why you chose to focus specifically on loneliness?
Everything in the world falls into one of two categories: things we can understand through the right amount of effort, and things we can’t understand despite all effort. When two or more individuals get together to agree on something, they’re likely to reach a common understanding if they try hard enough. On the other hand, no amount of effort may help one understand what someone else is going through. I believe this is where history and fiction differ. Each of our individual lives is closer to fiction than history. The reason we have a hard time making ourselves understood to others is because we each have different lives. If we look at loneliness simply for what it is, it doesn’t seem hard to understand. I recently read Oh William! (Random House, 2021) by author Elizabeth Strout, a novel which begins with a question and ends with an exclamation point. It’s similar to when we ask ourselves “What’s that?” only to reach the conclusion “That’s what it is!” When a question turns into an exclamation, loneliness simply becomes loneliness. I don’t think it strange at all that love may sometimes turn into violence, or that we treat loneliness as an old friend who is neither good nor bad.
You’ve written that loneliness doesn’t come from a state of neediness, and that a doughnut’s hole isn’t a void where something used to be, but that it was just a hole to begin with. I found such thoughts to be comforting. However, loneliness is bound to replace an empty hole left behind by something that goes missing. Are we being misled by a false perception that there must have been something when there really wasn’t? What can stories do about physical memories?
I feel like this question has more to do with mourning than loneliness. Someone going through a loss will naturally feel sad. There are many ways of grieving, among which my own preferred one is stories. I’ve used characters going through a separation with their lover as the protagonists for a long time because they have a greater craving for stories than anyone else. The story someone tells after breaking up with a loved one will go through a number of revisions. The first version on the day following the breakup won’t be the same as the version a week or a year after. Through the process of revising the same story multiple times, one reaches a point where they decide not to bring any more changes to it. This is when the period of mourning comes to a close and they are left with a story about their loss. In a sense, mourning allows us to get a story out of what we’ve lost. To me, all stories are like reminders of the voids left behind by loss.
In many of your works, events in modern Korean history are depicted as the driving factor behind violent acts of love, or as the direct source of loss and frustration. Whether it be the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, or the student protests of the 1980s, you seem to have a particular interest in modern historical events. Do you think this has something to do with the fact that you grew up as a teenager in the turbulent period between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in Korea? In other words, to what extent has history affected your own experiences with loss and frustration?
In my freshman year at university, I remember seeing the rallying cry “REVOLT” painted in big, red letters across the walls inside the bathrooms of the liberal arts building. The mood on the campus felt like we were on the eve of a revolution. Every day was extremely tense. I don’t remember any of the minor details—only how tense it was. The relentless tension came from our misled belief that we were perpetually in the midst of a decisive moment in history. Looking back on the events now, I realize that this couldn’t possibly have been the case. This means that we’d been wrong most of the time. Today, I feel like such misunderstandings were responsible for the loss of many lives. And this kind of tension wasn’t limited to my time in university—it resurfaced again when I worked an office job and when I had my first child. I think society is governed by big currents. It’s no easy task for a single individual to stand up to any of these currents. And there’s no way out for those who get caught in one. Those who are lucky might ride a current’s waves to success, but the majority of people will fail and fall into despair no matter what they do. Whether we’re looking back on history or what’s happening right now, people are and have always been pursuing some kind of current. When they actually get swept away, however, things hardly ever go as planned. One can always blame the current for the frustration and loss it leaves in its wake, but I think we ought not to let ourselves get swept away in the first place.
Even if a story was to be written and read outside of a major social current, it would still have to be circulated and consumed within society. How do you think stories are able to influence social currents? In other words, what role do stories play within society?
Although society presents us all with a formula for success, it’s really difficult for the majority of us to succeed using this exact formula. There must be a reason why we continue to believe in the formula even though it doesn’t work, but it’s really not something I’m interested in. I often find myself wondering whether or not I’m living in a dimension that falls outside of mainstream society. Since I’m not interested in the kind of life perceived as exemplary by societal standards, I just write stories dealing with other things. My stories may seem to challenge societal norms on the surface, but my intention isn’t to have them play any kind of role within society.
In your novel Wonder Boy, you use “wonder” as a new solution to the issues you raise in your writing (as can be surmised from the work’s title). I’d like you to tell us more about wonder as a means of coming to terms with frustration and loss, and as a way of overcoming loneliness.
If someone finds themselves submerged in water, it most likely won’t occur to them that they are wet. They will only come to such a realization once they come out of the water. I think “wonder” works in a similar way. You need to be out of the water to experience what it’s like not to be wet. Only then can you know that being in water makes you wet. I don’t think one can arrive at this wondrous conclusion through the experience and insight gained from being in water. One needs to come out of the water to realize they aren’t lonely. All the stories and clichés ensnaring us are just like water. I advise readers not to believe all the stories they are told.
Keeping on topic, here is a line taken from Wonder Boy: “Understanding is to tell someone else's story for them, and to fall in love again with them through their story.” When I read this passage, I got the impression that your view of loneliness extended beyond your own condition to include the loneliness of others as well. As a fiction author, what is the significance of conveying other people’s stories for them?
I’ve lived a very narrow existence until now, both in terms of life experience and the kind of knowledge I’ve acquired. For me to pass judgement on the world around me with such limited life baggage would be akin to walking on the edge of a precipice with my eyes closed. I need more life experience in order to open my eyes. I’m always surprised when I have a conversation with someone. More than anything else, it has to do with the fact that the material environment in which others live is so different from my own. The same applies to the kind of lives they’ve lived—we might as well be living in completely different worlds. But whenever I accept these other worlds, they allow me to stretch the boundaries of my own existence a little further. That’s why I need to expose myself to more numerous and diverse stories.
Following the publication of Wonder Boy and If the Waves Belong to the Sea, eight years would go by before the release of your next title, The Last of Seven Years. Interestingly enough, the novel tells the story of a poet who becomes unable to write poems. In your case, what kind of situation would make you unable to write fiction?
I asked myself the question: “If one day you were suddenly forced to write poems of worship [praising those in power], would you rather follow in Baek Seok’s1 footsteps and escape to the remote countryside instead?” I didn’t think so when I first began writing The Last of Seven Years. However, by the time I reached the last sentence of the novel, my answer had changed to a resounding “yes.” My perspective completely shifted through the process of writing the story. Many people think of Baek Seok as a poet who lost the freedom to write the kinds of poems he wanted, but I came to see him as a poet who made the deliberate choice not to write poems that he didn’t feel inclined to. I’m sure Baek Seok continued composing poems the way he liked but simply kept them for himself. I would do the same—I wouldn’t write any stories I didn’t want to write. I would only write the kinds of stories I felt inclined to, even though in the eyes of others it may appear like I’ve lost the freedom to write what I want.
What kind of novel do you want to write at this point in your career?
I’ve always been interested in people who managed to survive in situations where the odds were stacked against them. For example, the Manchurian communists appearing in “The Night Sings,” or the Joseon-era Korean and Japanese Catholics appearing in “Three Steps Toward the Sea.” These people went through the worst imaginable kind of suffering and would’ve been better off dying, and yet they didn’t. I only recently found out why I felt drawn to these kinds of characters. It’s because what I thought of as the end of life is in fact only the start of something else, and there are things which only reveal themselves to us in such moments. I think I finally have an idea of what these things are, and I want to write about them.
In your short story collection A Future as Ordinary as This published last year, the “ordinary” is presented in a positive light as something with the power to make loss and frustration bearable, an idea I found both refreshing and odd. Do you think the ordinary is really all it takes?
I think many of our problems in life stem from our level of satisfaction with things. There are times when frustration can feel satisfying, such as when we know we’ve done our best in a particular situation. We feel satisfied when we’re able to tell ourselves we did everything we could and have no regrets. Achievements can also be satisfying, of course, but it’s not always the case. The difference between feeling satisfied or not is semantic. It also depends on how we felt prior to reaching that state. In A Future as Ordinary as This, I opted for the word “ordinary” because the most amazing of futures will also be the most ordinary. We all wish to feel satisfied, and there’s nothing quite as amazing as being able to find satisfaction in the ordinary.
While some people will despair in the face of the ordinary, others will manage to find satisfaction in it. What is responsible for such a difference in mindset?
I’m someone who works with language. Although language reflects reality, language itself isn’t reality, which is why it’s bound to be misleading. This explains the constant need we have to correct our language. We can all think differently as long as language can be corrected. And if we’re able to change the way we think, we can all become different people. Despair can be turned into satisfaction through the act of rewriting. I think our mindset depends on the words we use. It’s a difference in language. This is why I recommend writing to everyone. Someone who can correct their own language will be able to tame their mind, and in turn, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Many people I know who have read A Future as Ordinary as This told me that the book brought them comfort. What is it about stories in general that give them the power to comfort us—both for the writer who writes them and the readers who reads them?
Back when I was in university, one way I would console friends going through a breakup was by drinking with them. I hardly did anything. I just listened to whatever they had to say. It was the same for me—I would also feel the urge to talk to someone whenever I went through a difficult time. Somebody once said that sorrow becomes bearable when it’s converted into a story. Stories undoubtedly hold this kind of power. But writing a story takes this one step further because it requires one to go back and revise what they wrote. The story might be the same, but the writer has to rework it. This could either make the story more elaborate or more abstract. Since it deals with language, the act of rewriting doesn’t make a story worse. Rewriting a story several times also allows the writer to make new discoveries. The message I was trying to convey in A Future as Ordinary as This is that we have the power to rewrite the story of our life multiple times. We can’t change things that have already happened, but we can rewrite our memories of those things. I think this is where the power of stories lies.
You wrote the following in the author’s note of A Future as Ordinary as This: “One day, these stories will become the reality of our lives.” This line made me realize that writing isn’t just a means of reconciling with the past, but also a way of propelling the present into the future. Thirty years have elapsed since your literary debut, and you are now in your fifties. How can a change or a shift in perspective allow us to look in on the present from the future without remaining stuck in the past?
I really enjoy getting older. When I was younger, I thought of every moment as a decisive one. In my mind, not getting what I wanted amounted to failure. But with age I’ve learned how silly that is. All of these moments I thought to be so important at the time were just part of a larger process. I also see this moment right now as part of a process. If we see every moment as part of something bigger, then it doesn’t matter what happens in this very moment because we know it will be followed by a next one which has yet to reveal itself to us. There’s no way of knowing what the next moment holds. The world abounds with stories I’ve yet to encounter, but each passing moment allows me to experience more of them. That’s why I’m constantly reading stories I’ve yet to understand. I might have an experience one day that makes all the pieces fit together. It’s also why I write stories I still don’t even understand myself. I think it’s all I can do given my own narrow life experience.
Although you write in your native language of Korean, you’ve written stories taking place all around the world including countries such as China, Japan, and Germany. As an author with an interest in world history, and who has been influenced by the cultural traditions of both the East and the West, I’d like to ask you about your thoughts on translation. Given that your works are being translated into foreign languages as we speak, please tell us what you think about the role of translation.
I was born in a small town in the south of Korea. Growing up, I was encouraged to become either a lawyer or a doctor by the elders in our neighborhood. I had been convinced that wealth and power would be my only ticket out of a miserable life. That is, until I read a copy of Demian I found lying around at home when I was in high school. The novel left me shaken to the core. I felt like I was reading my own story—I was Emil Sinclair. Each word uttered by Demian came as a shock. How come no adult ever told me this kind of story? I thought to myself. I wanted to read more of these stories, not be told that becoming a lawyer or a doctor was the only way I could live a dignified existence. I started making frequent visits to the bookstore and the library where I had the chance to read more stories. I believe in a community of stories spanning the world and whose purpose is to offer alternatives to the stories of those in power who control the global narratives. A story offering an alternative in one country is just as relevant in any other country. That’s why I believe in the need to actively translate stories that can serve as alternatives to dominant narratives.
Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski
KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• A Future as Ordinary as This (Munhak Dongne, 2022)『이토록 평범한 미래』 (문학동네, 2022)• The Last of Seven Years (Munhak Dongne, 2020)『일곱해의 마지막』 (문학동네, 2020)• If the Waves Belong to the Sea (Munhak Dongne, 2015)『파도가 바다의 일이라면』 (문학동네, 2015)• No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are (Munhak Dongne, 2014)『네가 누구든 얼마나 외롭든』 (문학동네, 2014)• Wonder Boy (Munhak Dongne, 2012)『원더보이』 (문학동네, 2012)• “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” I am a Phantom Writer (Munhak Dongne, 2016)「다시 한 달을 가서 설산을 넘으면」, 『나는 유령작가입니다』 (문학동네, 2016)
[1] Translator’s Note: Baek Seok was a Korean poet born in 1912 during the Japanese colonial era. Although he spent part of his life in present-day South Korea, he returned to his hometown in the North following the division of the country in 1945. He opted to retire from his writing career as a poet in 1962 to become a shepherd after facing criticism from the literary establishment in North Korea.
by Kim Hyunwoo
Interview with Kim Kyung-uk: Fiction, It's Not Over Until It's Over
Congratulations on your latest short story collection, When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022). The title work features a protagonist who feels paralyzed and struggles to breathe whenever someone talks about him. Could you tell us the way you feel when you hear others talk about you? My mother called me to express her concern after she received a copy of my previous short story collection, My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019). She was worried critics had stopped reading my books. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, but it was due to the fact there was no critical commentary at the end of the book, as is customary in Korea. Just as the title of my latest collection suggests, I feel embarrassed when other people talk about me, so for that one time, I opted not to include a literary critic’s take on my stories. But I didn’t expect such a reaction from my mother. This is why I proactively told my editor that I wanted to include a review in my latest book. From some point on, my books didn’t seem to elicit any overt response from readers, so I thought it would be beneficial to receive at least one person’s feedback. It would also allow my mother to put her mind at ease. Your prolificacy as a writer has earned you the nickname “Story-Machine.” Could you tell us which authors or works have most influenced your writing throughout the years? When I was younger, I was particularly drawn to authors such as Albert Camus and Osamu Dazai whose lives came to an abrupt end right at the height of their prime. However, as I passed the peak of my youth, I became more interested in the works of authors such as Philip Roth, John le Carré, and Doris Lessing, who all continued writing well into their old age. When asked why he had quit writing, Philip Roth said, “I did what I did and it’s done.” Like him, I want to continue investing my heart and soul into writing and put my pen down once I’ve decided that I’ve written enough. Your debut story, “Outsider,” is about someone who tries to keep himself at a distance from the center. I think this provides us with an important insight into your work. Could you tell us how you define the center, and where do you find the strength or awareness to keep your distance from it? I wonder if my first story would’ve been more popular with the “in-crowd” had I gone with the title “Insider” instead. To tell you the truth, I chose “Insider” as the title for one of my other serial works that was published online last year, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference. I’d always been shy in the presence of others ever since I was a little boy, so I’d look in on the action from some distance away. I was a delicate child, and since I easily got carsick, I often stayed home by myself instead of taking part in family outings. Even today, I spend the majority of my time alone inside a small room. I think my own introversion has made me more curious about interactions between people. I still think of the “center” as something that exists between people. The middle of a wheel is bound to be empty. Otherwise, how else would you mount an axle? What you can’t see when you spin with the wheel becomes visible only when you stand firm in the center of the rotation. In a sense, we could say that the most central thing is also the outermost, and the outermost thing is also the most central. In a 2013 interview for World Literature Review, you said that you tend to choose the title of a work before you even begin writing the story. I thought that was really interesting. I was wondering: what is the process you go through to come up with a new title, and how do you go about writing the story from there? To tell you the truth, I got the idea for the title “Outsider” from a movie I’d seen at the time. From what I remember, it was a film depicting young people who’d lost their direction in life. As you can see with my early works like “There is No Coffee at the Bagdad Café,” I would often get inspiration for titles from movies. One thing that hasn’t changed over my career is the fact that I can’t begin writing a story until I’ve decided on a title. To me, a title is like the story’s seed in that it contains the work’s entire DNA, from the flowers to the fruit. If I can’t come up with a title for a new story, it’s a sign that it needs more time to mature inside my mind. The title is what gives birth to the first sentence of a story, and it’s that first sentence which gives rise to the second. A plant will only grow after its seed has sprouted. Your writing style has often been described as “hard-boiled,” something that is reflected in the characters and worlds you create. However, your most recent works seem to display a warmer, more compassionate view toward your characters. Why the change in attitude? It might be a sign that the “Story-Machine”is growing rusty and that the screws are starting to come loose. I’m now fonder of characters who struggle to find where they belong than I was back when my screws were still tight. If you feel my works exude more warmth and compassion toward my characters now, it’s probably because I’ve realized that there are a lot more layers to the truth than I thought. I’ve been having an increasingly difficult time getting closer to the truth that lies beyond the present condition before us. The larger truth often gets obscured by an excess of fragmentary truths. If an author wants to cut through the maze of fragmentary truths in order to reach the bigger truth, doesn’t he need to adopt a more hard-boiled gaze? I don’t think of hard-boiled as cold—rather, it’s just as an attitude that cuts straight through the extraneous. The clearer an author’s perspective, the more likely he is to show compassion for characters faced with a dilemma. I also remember you saying in another interview that you’ve started to reflect more on human dignity. I think what defines a breach of humanity depends a lot on the historical period. At this time in history, what types of dignity violations do you find yourself reflecting on the most? That’s right. Two words I try to always bear in mind are “survival” and “dignity.” How much longer can humans survive without changing their current way of living? That’s the question I ask myself whenever I hear that our days are numbered. If I were to meet my end in an unexpected way, how would I maintain my own dignity in the face of death? I imagine a situation in which ensuring my own survival would require me to forgo not only my dignity but also the survival of others. A situation in which the only way for me to maintain my dignity would be to give up on my own life. These are the kinds of things I’ve been constantly thinking about these days while writing. Your short story “Leslie Cheung is Dead?” does such a good job of vividly capturing the mood of the early 2000s. From some point on, however, you stopped making active use of popular culture references. Could you tell us why? I’m also curious if there are any aspects of pop culture today that stand out to you. I don’t watch movies or listen to music as much as I used to. Even back when I watched movies on a nearly daily basis and had music plugged into my ears wherever I went, I still thought of fiction as questions about the time in which we live. Pop culture references were just a means for me to explore some of those questions. That’s because pop culture is by far the best indicator of an era’s mood and aspirations. One of the things I find especially intriguing nowadays is this new form of reality TV we call “observational entertainment.”[1] It could be a show featuring a group of panelists who watch and comment on people being filmed doing something for the benefit of viewers who tune in to chat with other viewers in real time. I’ve also seen a show where a panel of guests was invited to watch other people who were themselves watching others doing something. These shows have completely blurred the distinction between the observer and the observed, and I find it strange that this doesn’t make us feel more uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking about why that could be. There has been a huge increase in observational reality shows in recent years. What do you find intriguing about them? I find it interesting to see we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer relevant to ask whether what we see on such shows is real or scripted. There’s a popular show in Korea called “Omniscient Interfering View” in which, as the name suggests, the focus isn’t so much on what’s happening on the screen, but on what people who are watching the footage have to say about it. It’s a bit like quantum physics, isn’t it? Whether a piece of matter appears as a particle or a wave depends on how one looks at it. The story “Here He Comes” from your latest work stands out from your previous works in that it’s a story about a fiction writer. Could you tell us why it took nearly thirty years to write a story inspired by your own occupation? Back in the day I felt ashamed to write“writer” in the box designated for “occupation” on customs declaration forms, but I don’t think much of it anymore. I’ve come to accept that writing is both my occupation and my own way of getting through life. That might explain why I was finally able to write a few stories featuring characters who are fiction writers. It might also have to do with the fact that I’ve grown a thicker skin with age. I really wrote “Here He Comes” hoping that “he” would come. I told myself—so what if a house has a dark past as long as it allows a writer to come up with a good story? You then wrote a sequel titled “I Didn’t Write This Story,” which is about a fiction writer who denies having written “Here He Comes,” making it your second work about a writer. Was “Here He Comes” meant to open a door to this new type of story, and was “I Didn’t Write This Story” meant to go back and shut it closed? Or are these two stories just a taste of what you have in store for us moving forward? I don’t think I could just decide one day to write a story about a writer and simply go ahead and write one. The occupation “writer” just occurred naturally to me in the process of thinking about a way to turn a novelistic question that had sprouted in my head into a story. My concern wasn’t whether or not to include a writer in the story, but what this character would say and do. Who else other than a fiction writer running low on inspiration would be willing to go and sit inside a house with a dark past? Who else other than a fiction writer with writer’s block would rejoice at the thought of moving into a house known to have witnessed a tragic incident, hoping it will help him rekindle his imagination? If I happen to come up with a good story that requires the main character to be a writer, I no longer try to find a way around it like I might have done in the past. I don’t think I have the luxury of being so picky about what I write given that good ideas don’t come easily and I’m constantly racking my brain for new ones. Could you briefly introduce us to your short story “A Sheepish History” that is featured in this issue of KLN? I think anyone who’s ever encountered a chatty taxi driver will have a lot of fun reading this work. “A Sheepish History” tells the story of a man who finds himself listening to a stranger revealing a secret he has kept buried deep in his heart for a very long time. I got the inspiration while I was on a trip to Japan. I got into a taxi and the driver began speaking to me in Japanese. Although he knew I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, he kept speaking to me in Japanese until we arrived at my destination. After I got out of the taxi, I kept wondering what he could possibly have been talking about. That’s when another question popped into my mind. Why did he keep talking even though he knew I couldn’t understand him? Was it because he was telling me a story that he was only willing to share with someone he didn’t have to ever see again and so wouldn’t understand him? Did he tell me something he couldn’t tell anyone around him, including the people he was closest to? These are the types of questions that eventually led me to write this short story. The story was included in a Spanish-language anthology [titled Por fin ha comenzadoel fin: cuentos y poemas coreanos—Ed.]. What made you choose this particular work to be included in KLN after it had already been introduced to Spanish readers? This short story is about a taxi driver who picks up a Korean client at the Incheon International Airport and mistakes him for a Japanese person. The client decides to play along by pretending he is indeed Japanese, and this results in this strange situation where two Koreans find themselves talking to each other in a foreign language. As the story progresses, the taxi driver unwittingly reveals a lifelong secret in Korean, wrongly thinking that his client won’t understand him. As a result, the client who had pretended to be Japanese finds himself having to bear the weight of being told the closely guarded secret of a stranger he will likely never cross paths with again. One day it struck me that no matter where we come from, everyone has a mother tongue, and that the kinds of things one can’t tell even to those closest to us are also the kinds of things which can only be told in one’s first language. I thought such stories can’t see the light of day until someonewilling to listen and interpret them appears. Some people say writers are people who tell the stories of those who can’t tell it themselves, but I have a slightly different take. I’d like to think fiction writers are people who interpret the stories of those who mumble them in their mother tongue. That’s the reason why I wanted to share this story with as many foreign readers as possible. You also participated in the Bogotá International Book Fair this year. What was it like meeting with Colombian readers? The Bogotá International Book Fair is one of the most long-standing book fairs in Latin America along with the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico. Since this year’s guest of honor was South Korea, I had the privilege of taking part in the festivities and meeting with Colombian readers. Although we needed interpreters to understand one another, I was able to feel their great enthusiasm for Korea and Korean literature. Perhaps due to the fact Colombia was Gabriel García Márquez’s home country, I was also able to get a real taste of magical realism. One of the stories I wrote features a character from Colombia, and I came across someone who shared the same name as the Korean protagonist in that story. I went to get tested for COVID-19 the day before my return flight to Korea and the test site worker suddenly said he was Korean and told me his name. We didn’t get to have a real conversation, though, because I was worried about my test result. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if it came back positive and I had to miss my flight and spend the next ten days quarantining in this country whose language I couldn’t speak. Thinking back on it now, I feel sorry and regret not having asked that person about his story. That’s how I was driven to write “I’m an Writer from the South,” which tells the story of a character inspired by my own situation had my fears come true and I was made to quarantine in Colombia all by myself. The protagonist in the story convinces himself that the greatest works come from complete isolation and total solitude, setting his creative spirit ablaze. I don’t want to spoil it for potential readers, so if anyone is curious to find out what happens, I invite them to look for the story in the 2022 October issue of Hyundae Munhak magazine. You’ve previously said that instead of basing your stories on real life experiences, you prefer using your own imagination to inspire you. You’ve also said that you get more inspiration from the blank spaces in books, from what isn’t written on the pages, than from what is. Could you tell us how imagination and real-life experiences differ when you write? I’m sure it’s different for every writer, but in my case, I feel like the more I rely on real experiences, the more I struggle to make full use of my imagination. Not to mention I don’t get any fun out of it. I don’t mind getting inspiration from real-life events, but I like to write stories that are grounded in my own imagination rather than actual memories. That’s because I don’t know where my own writing will take me. In the case of “A Sheepish History,” I wouldn’t have been able to write an entire story had I gotten stuck trying to recall what I had once been told by a Japanese taxi driver. The same applies to “I’m a Writer from the South,” which was inspired by a COVID-19 test site worker whom I took the liberty of changing into an imaginary immigration officer. It’s the same with reading. The blank spaces between the lines feed my imagination more than the sentences themselves. Once, I was reading Hamel’s Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea[2] and I came across a passage stating that a government official had been dispatched to Jeju Island to investigate Hendrick Hamel and his crew who were shipwrecked there. The official in question was a fellow Dutchman who’d gone adrift on his way to Japan and had washed up on the shores of the Korean peninsula and settled there much earlier. I was curious to learn more about the man, but he didn’t appear in any historical records. All I could find on him was a single line stating that he’d served as a military adviser for the King, married a local woman, and went on to live the rest of his life in Joseon Korea. I began imagining a character starting out on a completely new life in an unknown land, and that’s what allowed me to come up with the story for Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007). Since I didn’t have historical sources to fall back on, I had to create the character from the inside out. Perhaps it’s precisely this lack of source material that allowed me to write an entire novel based on him. I was also inspired to write about Hamel, but given the abundance of information we have about him, I wasn’t able to produce more than a single short story. Your stories have now been translated into many languages. You’ve said that fiction is like a question about the community in which it was written at that particular point in time. How does it feel to see your works being translated for communities other than the ones they were originally intended for? I see translation as a second act of creation. I think it is nearly impossible to translate an original text as it is, due to all the linguistic and cultural differences inherent within it. Trying to complete such an impossible mission must be painful work for a translator, but it’s been an eye-opening experience for me. For example, while one of my works was being translated into Chinese, I found myself having to think up Chinese characters for the names of characters that appeared in the story. In one instance, I came up with the term “Heavenly Gate” to refer to an acupuncture point which allows people to die a painless death only to be told by my translator that such an acupuncture point already existed in Chinese. I was completely taken aback. I also wrote a work featuring a character who gets married to the same person three times and was convinced such a story wouldn’t exist outside the pages of my novel Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010), but this all changed when the book was translated into Spanish. A journalist from South America who was interviewing me told me that he knew a couple in real life who had married three times just like the characters in the story. These incidents made me look at fiction in a new light. I stopped claiming that my job as a writer was to pull up stories that didn’t exist out in the real world from the depths of my mind, like someone who draws buckets of water from the depths of a well. I no longer try to come up with stories that don’t already exist. I tell myself that I write stories that might reflect something happening somewhere out in the vast world in which we live. I’m also curious to learn more about your life as a creative writing professor. The following is a quote from you in another interview: “I don’t really think of myself as a teacher. I just read with my students and share my love of reading with them. I think that helps with their writing.” Have your students taught you anything recently? My students are like colleagues with whom I’m able to share the pains and joys of reading and writing. Sometimes I think of them as teachers disguised as students. They’ll ask me questions that leave me speechless or give me perplexing answers that force me to introspect. As my brain gets slower and my heart begins to show signs of aging, they’re the ones who make it possible for me to keep up with the changing times. I don’t remember seeing your name appear among the list of judges for any literary award or prize. I also don’t recall ever seeing a blurb written by you in another author’s book. Is there a reason why you stay away from judging committees and testimonials? It’s because I want to still be able to enjoy the works of fellow authors purely through the eyes of a reader rather than as a judge or a commentator. I once asked you the following question in an interview we did at the launch of your novel What is Baseball? in 2013, which was also the twentieth anniversary of your debut: “In the end, baseball is about coming back home. The aim is to go through all the bases in order to make it back to home plate. Given this, how far along the diamond have you come at this stage in your life?” You replied that you probably still hadn’t left the batter’s box. This was almost ten years ago, so where are you now? I’m still in the batter’s box. I feel like I’m just barely holding on, hitting one foul ball after another to avoid striking out. Given that I’ve been writing for over thirty years now, you’d think I’d have at least made it to second base. That being said, I don’t mind the batter’s box because it allows me to face the pitcher head-on instead of looking at him from behind, even if I don’t make it to first base before being sent back to the dugout. Baseball does require players to make it back home without being tagged out, but it’s also a game that isn’t over until it’s really over. Not to mention it’s one of the only ball sports in which games are played for a number of consecutive days at a time. [1] Refers to documentary-style reality shows where the action is not scripted or planned in advance. Cameras are set up inside celebrities’ homes or follow them as they go about their daily routines to offer viewers a glimpse into their personal lives, including their parenting and romantic pursuits. Other cast members or guests sit down together and discuss the scenes unfolding before them on screen.—Ed. [2] The first Western account of Korea, written by Hendrik Hamel, a Dutch sailor who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653.—Ed. Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski KOREAN WORKS MENTIONE • When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022)『누군가 나에 대해 말할 때』 (문학과지성사, 2022)• My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019)『내 여자친구들의 아버지』 (문학동네, 2019)• Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007)『천년의 왕국』 (문학과지성사, 2007)• Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010)『동화처럼』 (민음사, 2010)• What is Baseball? (Munhak Dongne, 2013)『야구란 무엇인가』 (문학동네, 2013)
by Hwang Yein
Interview with Lee Sumyeong: Strange Tiling
Congratulations on the publication of your eighth book of poetry, City Gas (Moonji, 2022). Since your first collection, you’ve consistently published new books with no significant breaks. From a certain angle, it looks as if you’ve never abandoned poetry and poetry has never abandoned you. It even seems like your relationship with poetry has no ups and downs. Have you ever had a slump? It’s very fortunate if it seems that way. In reality, it’s a frequent experience for me to stop and get stuck because I’m not satisfied with a poem. There are a lot of stops and starts. The only reason it seems like I’m consistently moving forward is that I don’t ever stop for too long. The difficulty of writing poetry comes from the difficulty of innovation. I think poetry has to continuously reinvent itself in terms of content, form, perception, language. With every attempt to innovate, there’s a repeated process of interruptions and advances, and that repetition is how I’ve arrived at the present. Maybe my first question is related to your routines for writing poetry. Can I ask what your daily schedule is like? How do you balance writing poetry with your everyday life? I don’t have a fixed pattern. The time I give to poetry and cooking or chores around the house just depends on the day. If my family is out of the house and I don’t have any plans, sometimes I dedicate the whole day to writing. Writing isn’t so much a special type of work that requires specific conditions as it is something that I attempt whenever I can make time during the day, like any other daily task. If I can just close the door and sit at my desk, I try to let myself be absorbed right into it. But of course, just sitting at the desk doesn’t always produce results. To me, your poems are quiet and constantly changing—sometimes small changes and sometimes big ones. The poem “Herons Play the Heron Game” is the eponymous poem of your second collection. When I first read it, it felt like a declaration that you were throwing your hat into the ring of poetry. I wonder if, at the time, poetry felt like a kind of fun game for you, a game of striking at language. The heron in the poem is a jump-rope, a pit, a throat, and a kidnapping all at the same time—a multiple, simultaneous being. It feels to me like your project at the time was one of releasing words from their birdcages and letting them fly. When you first began writing poetry, for your first and second collections, what joy did you find in writing? I agree that my poems have constantly changed. And I’ve always written with the hope that change would be not so much a development in a certain direction, but aradiation outward toward reinvention. I’ve often been told that my second book of poetry unfolds like a kind of language game. But I do hope that the game is less “striking at language” and more an attempt to offer support to language’s own autonomy. When we open the “birdcage” of structure and meaning by which language is bound, words can encounter each other indiscriminately and meaninglessly. Deconstructing the mechanical combination of subject and predicate or switching common nouns with abstract nouns, for example, causes words and language to appear in unexpected formation. Words with different associations like jump-rope, pit, throat, and kidnapping all line up shoulder to shoulder. This autonomy of language seems to be joined to the sovereignty of things. “Things” are not objects that act on behalf of the poet’s emotions, but “multiple, simultaneous beings” that can become anything, like the heron. And when things act independently, and language is arbitrary in this way, unfamiliar images and new rhythms emerge as a result. I think “Teeth Dance” is an extension of that. I can’t move on without discussing your ability to weave crisp, vibrant imagery and fantasy. I especially like the poem “Dinner Table,” the first poem in your second collection. There is a tomato garden growing under the table and “you”—the poem is in the second person—stick your fork into the table and lift it up. It feels like, as the reader is lifting up the table and opening up the tomato garden, we are lifting and opening the first page of the book as well. Inside, it feels like we might find two children under a blanket telling stories late into the night. Your images are eerie and bewitching in that way. What does fantasy mean to you? Tell us about writing images and stories of fantasy that deviate from reality. “Dinner Table” is in my second collection, but looking back on it, I feel like fantastical scenes really started to take the lead in my third and fourth collections, The Curve of the Red Brick Wall (Minumsa, 2001) and A Cat Watching a Video of a Cat (Moonji, 2004). So “Dinner Table” feels to me like it predicts what will come later. The tomato vines are under the table, and “you” the reader are still sitting and using your fork above the table, which is why you stick your fork into the table and not the tomatoes. I’ll give you an example. In the poem “Cake,” from my third book, there’s a scene where someone puts a candle that is a bomb into a cake and lights it. The cake explodes. Then we sing a song like nothing is happening, slice up the explosion, and eat it. In my fourth book, there is a poem called “Dog Food.” It starts with a dog on a leash licking its bowl. Then the dog licks its own face with its long tongue, and it licks the face of the speaker who is holding the leash and moves on. To me, fantasy is not about creating something totally new that doesn’t exist in reality. Instead, it means capturing a scene that breaks out of the established relationships or positions of humans and things. Maybe this is meaningful because fantasy collapses our automatic perspectives and consciousness and makes us see unfamiliar aspects of the world and things. I think my poems achieve fantasy by changing our ways of seeing just slightly. If the poems we’ve talked about so far are intense and provocative, a poem like “The Left Rain Falls, the Right Rain Doesn’t” feels like it contains a puddle filling with rain and passing on. This poem is famous for being misread in a pleasant way. Many readers thought it was about getting wet in the rain while holding an umbrella for someone else. I’ve seen you mention that you enjoy that kind of misreading. But I wonder what kind of image and situation you were thinking of as you originally wrote the poem. I remember thinking of it as a poem expressing the divisions and imbalances in our lives. In the poem, we see two people walking along. People are easily split into two (or even more) persons, right? Isn’t that similar to the line “my hand was divided into two”? I’m not sure why, but to me that division feels less like comfort and more like imbalance. The appearance of two people, of them walking hand in hand, of their footsteps and bodies—to me it all looks like the emergence of imbalance itself. Where is there balance in our lives? Then when it rains, the rain joins this imbalance. The rain falling on the left goes hand in hand with the rain not falling on the right. I think that sense of tilting and imbalance is constructed through several imagesin the poem. I really care about the scissors, footsteps, buttons, and bodies as the objet presented in the poem. If you take a walk on a rainy day, you can usually see little items like that lying on the street and getting wet. Whenever I see that, I feel a powerful sadness from these objects that have been forced out of somewhere to wander in the rain, unable to find their proper place or appropriate balance. To add to that, would you mind commenting on the joyful misreading of the poem as well? I’ve heard this poem has also been read as depicting two lovers walking hand in hand under the same umbrella. Rain only falls on one side for each person because their shoulders won’t fit under the umbrella. It was interesting to hear that. I wrote the poem about division, but this interpretation adds an umbrella into the poem and reads harmony and consideration into it. It was totally unexpected to see my poem’s coldness return as this warm misreading, but I think that’s the nature of poetry. It reminds me that poems go beyond the poet’s intentions, and always contain more directions than expected. That’s why poetry belongs to the reader, and that’s what makes poetry amazing and powerful. The speaker of “Tree’s Rotation” says, “like a captive stone / I had no opinion.” It seems to me that this is the attitude of the speaker of your poems—to be without opinion, like a stone. The speaker is always one step removed from argument or explanation. In an interview with YES24, you’ve said, “Poetry has no perspective. Poetry is something like a ripple produced by contact with the world.” In your poems, it seems like there is almost no desire to speak about the self. So your poetry feels somehow detached at times. You’ve mentioned in your essay collection I Saw Chilsung Supermarket (Achimdal, 2022) that you have no interest in talking about yourself. I wonder if one reason you enjoy writing poetry is that it can make the self unimportant or create distance from the self. Have you ever wanted to reveal your self in your poems? How do you maintain distance between poetry and the self? Of course, it’s certainly possible for a poet to write poetry with a perspective or opinion. And poets can express their emotions as well. However, that seems to make the poet larger than the poems and make the poems relatively small and slanted to one side. And then, the world doesn’t have to conform to the emotions the poet expresses. In fact, doesn’t a poet have to avoid getting caught up in individual conditions, surroundings, emotions, and perspectives in order to freely say what they really want to say? I like to be liberated from thought. I feel much freer when I have no thoughts than when I express my thoughts. In my poems, rather than speak myself, I attempt to walk into the infinity of the object and the world. That’s the reason why I do that. When I cease judgment and don’t express myself, when I open myself to the outside, I feel like I am nowhere and everywhere at once. Next I want to ask about poet Lee Sumyeong as a person. You have many social roles, as a poet, researcher, critic, and so on. I admire your ability to perform all these roles faithfully. I wonder if this is possible because your poetry and life are not really separate, and because all of these things are somewhat connected. How does your poetry affect your life, and your life, poetry? They seem connected somewhere, but I’m not really sure how. Of course when I give a lecture or write criticism, I sometimes discover the identity of some complex thought I have about poetry, but those observations don’t seem to have a particular effect on me when I’m writing poetry. What kind of person I am, what kind of life I lead, and who I spend time with is important to my life, but when I write poetry, there is some other possibility or potential operating beyond that self, so it’s difficult to connect my life and poetry directly. I think it may be because, for me, poetry does not proceed so much from a connection to my own life as from contact with the material world at the present moment and location. I feel like one of the biggest changes in your poetry occurred in your collection Distribution Warehouse (Moonji, 2018). Here it feels as if you’re serving up reality on a dish like slices of hoe [raw fish]. If I were to venture a cautious guess, I would say it’s because the primary driver of your poems seems to have shifted from imagination to observation. The power of observation striking at objects can be felt in the transparent scenes of everyday life you observe. In the poem “Ediya Coffee” a man in a white shirt shouts, “Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m saying?” Bugs ruin the streetlights, and a drunk old woman tells someone to bring more alcohol. These are the kinds of common scenes that we can see around us all the time. These various patches of cloth come together to complete a single quilt. Following those scenes are the heavy lines, “Everyone bounced out of / Death /Once more / And started pummeling death with whatever they could find.” The poetic speaker who used to create worlds is now an observer quietly watching what’s happening around them. Is there some external or internal reason for this change? I’ve received a lot of opinions on the change that can be seen in Distribution Warehouse, which is my seventh book of poetry. I agree with your point about moving from imagination to observation. Attempting to bring individual scenes from this world onto the page in detail, just as they are, is certainly one aspect of it. But I actually don’t think that imagination and observation are that far removed from each other, because it’s not rare in poetry to observe through imagination or imagine through observation. Are ultra-fine descriptions observations, or are they imagined? For my part, even when I’m writing fantasy poems, I still try to describe things meticulously, as if I can see them right in front of me. The poems in Distribution Warehouse try to describe real items and people, like so many “slices of hoe,” existing only in the form of storage and accumulation within the symbolic space of the warehouse. Where the operation of time seems to have disappeared, there is the reality of inaction—the reality that literature doesn’t pay attention to because it’s too meaningless. The man yelling into his phone, and the drunk woman—their shouts and drunken language—are therefore a reality outside of literature, a reality difficult to capture in literature. This is because language in raw form, like “Do you hear me?” and “Bring more alcohol,” belongs so much to the everyday that it’s difficult for literature to approach. I think attempts to carry such things intact into the field of literature destroy literature’s established form and inertia, producing innovation. I hope that the change in Distribution Warehouse is less about a shift from imagination to observation, and closer to a new attempt at that kind of innovation. Innovation through a shift from supposedly “poetic” things to everyday life itself. For the past few years, it seems like you’ve been fixated on warehouses and city gas. I think these unremarkable words suit your poetry well. Your collections Distribution Warehouse and City Gas both contain multiple poems titled “Distribution Warehouse” and “City Gas.” The world of city gas and warehouses in these poems, all with the same title and without even identifying numbers, strikes me as a world of forgetting. The poems all have the same title, but they don’t coalesce or link to each other, like individual, falling raindrops. It’s similar to the poem “Unauthorized Absence,” where the speaker says, “I stick one tile on, and the other falls off, and I stick it back in place, / And the first one falls off / This strange tiling.” In your essay collection I SawC hilsung Supermarket, you write, “I’m not sure how I started writing poems with the same title. I’m not really attracted to serial poems. I’m actually exhausted by conventional serial poems that have the same title followed by a number. That’s why I didn’t put numbers on ‘Distribution Warehouse.’ I don’t even think of them as a series—maybe because they have no numbers. The repetition of ‘Distribution Warehouse’ is just an overlap that’s hard to explain, and the only thing clear to me is that I started writing these poems with the same title purely because of the power of the first ‘Distribution Warehouse.’” Could you tell us more about how you came to repeatedly write these poems with the same title? In Distribution Warehouse, there are ten poems titled “Distribution Warehouse,” and in City Gas, which was published this year, there are six poems titled “City Gas.” City Gas encompasses the world of Distribution Warehouse, while also diversifying and expanding it. As a result, poems titled “Distribution Warehouse” appear againin City Gas. So city gas and distribution warehouses keep disappearing and reappearing across the two collections. The reason I don’t number the poems is partially that I don’t like creating order. But more importantly, I like the feeling of writing a poem for the first time each time, and that’s the only way I can write. Writing multiple poems with the same title means staying with that title for a long time. In the sense that warehouses store different items and gas provides hot water and heating, they are a kind of basic, essential infrastructure for our lives—they’re similar. More than anything, they’re similar in that it’s awkward and uncomfortable to see them in literature because they overwhelmingly belong to the realm of life. But this insertion, this invasion of distribution warehouses and city gas into literature is interesting to me, and the power of these images that refuse to assimilate to literature allowed me to write multiple poems about them. Before I bring the interview to a close, I want to finish with my own intentional misreading. While I was reading “City Gas,” I accidentally started reading the word “gas” as “poetry”: There is poetry. Poetry is available to us. Poetry has no color, no smell, no weight. Poetry makes no sound, it’s invisible. But poetry is soft, and poetry is mild, and poetry flows to us subtly and gently, and poetry caresses us, and our thoughts are filled with poetry. The poetry supply expanded nationwide. So // There’s no need for walks. I want to give you this poem as a gift . . . I feel like, at some point, your poetry has become something like city gas to meand your many readers. On the one hand, gas structures our lives and is extremely familiar to us, but on the other hand, it has no sound, color, or shape. It is an element of our lives, and yet the shadow of death looms over it as well. It helps us, but it’s also dangerous. The line “Gas is available to us” suggests these two opposing images. Gas contains an element of danger, yet it paradoxically feels soft and mild. It seems natural to me to transpose this pharmakon of gas onto the pharmakon of poetry. Poetry is warm and mild, but it’s also cold and leaves us standing in the empty wilderness. Thank you for reading that element into my poetry. Okay, this is really my final question. What place do you love most in the world? Where are you most happy? When I sit down at the table to write poetry, wherever I am, I am happy. Translated by Seth Chandler KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• City Gas (Moonji, 2022) 『도시 가스』 (문학과지성사, 2022)• Herons Play the Heron Game (Segyesa, 1998) 『왜가리는 왜가리 놀이를 한다』 (세계사, 1998)• The Curve of the Red Brick Wall (Minumsa, 2001) 『붉은 담장의 커브』 (민음사, 2001)• A Cat Watching a Video of a Cat (Moonji, 2004)『고양이 비디오를 보는 고양이』 (문학과지성사, 2004)• I Saw Chilsung Supermarket (Achimdal, 2022)『나는 칠성슈퍼를 보았다』 (아침달, 2022)• Distribution Warehouse (Moonji, 2018) 『물류창고』 (문학과지성사, 2018)
by Moon Bo Young
Interview with Kim Seung-hee: Poetry Through the Power of Paradox
Your poetry collections Dalgyal sog-ui saeng (Life in an egg) and Huimangi woeropda (Hope is Lonely) were both translated into Arabic. And I know that you met with Egyptian readers in 2019 at the Cairo Literature Festival. I’m sure that this was a special experience for you. What do you remember about it? The Arabic translations of Dalgyal sog-ui saeng and Huimangiwoeropda by Professor Mohmoud Abdul Ghaffar of the Department of Comparative Literature at Cairo University were both published in Cairo. It was fascinating to see my works translated into Arabic, a language I have no knowledge of. That text of translated poetry, written in unfamiliar Arabic letters, looked to me like a book of spells. And when I listened to poetry readings of my works in Arabic, it felt like I was listening to music because I had no idea what it meant. The Cairo Literature Festival was an enjoyable experience because I met many famous poets from around the world, not just Egypt. It was fascinating to meet Egyptian poets like Ahmed Al-Shahawi, Ibrahim Bagalati, and Mohamad El Kelleni, as well as people like the Malaysian poet Bernice Chauly and the Filipino poet Alfred Yuson—these people really left an impression on me. In particular, the poetry reading of Catalonian poet Mireia Calafell was extreme, dynamic, and memorable. There were also poetry readings and lectures on literature at Ain Shams University, and a little more than a hundred students attended, most of whom were Korean language majors. They all spoke good Korean, and I got the feeling that they were familiar with, and envious of, Korean culture, perhaps thanks to Hallyu. They said they enjoyed my poems because they often contained objects from the dailylives of women, like eggs, frying pans, refrigerators, washers, clothes lines,brooms, and cutting boards. Actually, I was in a lot of pain back then because of my insomnia. I remember getting up early in the morning after sleepless nights to walk along the Nile, and drinking lots of hot hibiscus tea and pomegranate juice. I want to hear more about your time in Egypt. Their culture has much that is unfamiliar to Koreans, and I’m curious if there are any interesting stories you might have to tell us. Was there anything you saw while in Cairo that left a deep impression on you? Almost all of Egyptian culture is connected to the afterlife. The pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza were really powerful sights to behold. I was completely lost for words at their size and mystique. At the time, they were in the process of moving museum artifacts from the old building to the new one, so I got to see a moving line of mummies wrapped in yellowed cloth. They told me that in Egyptian burial culture, the heart of the deceased was removed and stored separately in a jar. They placed the jar with the heart inside next to the corpses of pharaohs in gold masks. The god Osiris, they told me, had scales of alternating hearts and feathers. The terrifying goddess Ammit who had the head of a crocodile would devour a deadperson’s heart if it was too heavy, and people who had their hearts devoured by Ammit would not be given an afterlife. Hearing this, I brought my hand to my chest and realized that mine was heavy. I shuddered with fear. How could a heart possibly be lighter than feathers? When I asked them this, they told me one had to live a life free of wrongdoing. We passed a commoners’ graveyard while driving in a car once, and the graves were so desolate. It was like a dismal quarry with rocks scattered all over the place. It was in such stark contrast to the tombs of kings. It was terrifying to see this disparity, even in death. I also heard the story of Osiris’s wife, Isis, who traveled far and wide to find the fourteen pieces of his corpse, how she used her wings to fan the fragments of his body and resurrect him. They also told me the story of how Isis conceived achild while weeping next to Osiris’s coffin. Of course, there are many versions of the story. I get to encounter a lot of unfamiliar culture and myths while abroad. Such foreign things often pique my imagination and allow me to write more original and rich poems. You once wrote that “poems are what people who are in pain but don’t really want to be healed write”—a line that has stuck with me for a long time. I think that poetry and literature is knowing you’re suffering but having no choice but to make that suffering even more painful. If there’s a driving force that has allowed you to continue to not let your pain heal and write poems, what would that be? I think a poet’s passion comes from life’s hardships. I realized while reading Pablo Neruda’s autobiography Memoirs that he often says things like “. . . if X did not exist, I wouldn’t be able to write poems.” For example, he wrote, “Without body-shuddering loneliness, I would be unable to write poetry” and “A mature writer can write nothing without a humanistic sense of comradery and society.” You can tell from such statements that even a great poet like Neruda was terrified of ruin, of being unable to write poetry. The driving force that has kept me writing poetry for fifty years is the power of the paradox described in the quote, “Poets are at once a patient and a doctor.” I have always believed that poetry has the power to heal. I want to talk about your recent poetry collection published last year, Danmujiwabeikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (The truthful human of pickled radish andbacon). In the title piece, the poetic narrator talks of “sincere mind” and“real mind” and says, “I just want to become pickled radish or bacon already.” The way I understood this was that the narrator wanted to become a sincere being with nothing to hide, even if that meant they weren’t complicated or multi-layered. And that was because, as you wrote, “At least pickled radish is yellow to its core and bacon is striped pink and white, front and back.” At the end of the poem, the narrator says, “It has been a long time since yesterday disappeared,” and then goes on to repeatedly ask, “What do I want[?]” I wonder if the narrator’s reason for repeatedly asking this is because they wish there was something to want, another step forward. But perhaps I’m just reading this the way I want to read it. What did you mean by sincere mind and true mind when you wrote this poem? Actually, it would be fair to say that this poem was written in an ironic tone of voice about one poet’s despair about the age of post-truth. In this age, emotion, faith, and partisan politics have more power than truth. No one cares what the truth is anymore. Seeing people who will risk any deception or hypocrisy just for the sake of furthering their own party’s interests, I posed the questions: What is truth? What is a truthful person? I thought of a real mind as desire filled with impulse and libido, and a sincere mind as the pure heart after those desires and impulses have been filtered out. Pickled radish and bacon are the same front and back, so perhaps they are the only honest things of our time. Pickled radish and bacon might look like pure sincerity, the kind of sincere mind you would have after cutting out all your organs of desire, like the womb and guts, but they are not actually symbolic of truth. Although they might seem to symbolize truth or honesty because they have no deception, in reality, they’re just a symbol of fixed death, because they have no secrets, no change, no dreams. So, I used pickled radish and bacon as a type of satirical allegory for the deceptive hypocrisy of our society. They’re symbols of a dystopia, and in that way, it’s a sad story. In this age of post-truth when people are tired of the politics of deception and hypocrisy, someone expressing their desire to become pickled radish and bacon was meant to be ironic. Irony is a form of talking that makes sincerity double-sided. To be honest, for me to talk about truth this, sincerity that, should clearly feel anachronistic, and so I’m quite lonely in that respect. [Laughs] One of the things that drew my attention in Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhansaram was when you had scenes of vestiges of pain being replaced with flowers. For example, in “Baekhapkkot-gwaposeuteu-it” (The lily and the Post-it), the narrator says while looking at an ultrasound image of a friend who has Stage IV stomach cancer, that it seems like white lilies are blooming from the mass. And in “Moran-uisigan” (Peony’s time), you write that “The time when alone at night /Spasms lap against my whole body” is the time when only “the peony, is left.” It’s not easy to picture flowers growing from pain. How should one read and understand this transition? Such a transition comes from the imagination of reversal, and with such reversal, poems can make miracles. So why the transformation into a flower? During crises of extinction, I think the type of images that we can lean on most desperately are the most universal, the most archetypal, the most absolute. In fact, our age is not an age of symbolism but an age of allegory, but I feel that I lean on symbols at critical moments. Lilies and peonies are regarded, perhaps subconsciously, as a symbol of absolute beauty and eternity. What those two poems show is precisely that kind of poetic miracle. The imagination to take the crisis of extinction and change it into a symbol of eternity, and to go from extreme pain to extreme beauty, can make poetic miracles. And when you reach that point, even pain, I think, can be extinguished. That’s the healing power of poetry. With each of your poetry collections, I always pay close attention to your serial poems. In Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram as well, there is a seven-part serial poem that ends with “Poseuteu-it”(Post-it). Support, immortality, hope, change—these are the keywords I wrote down on a Post-it as I read these poems. Recording something on a Post-it, because it’s just a temporary record, is somewhat momentary, but it’s also a memorable type of stamping, like a “momentary eternity” (“Ireum-uiposeuteu-it” Name Post-it). The same can be said for the words I wrote down while reading these seven poems. When you write down one word by itself, it looks so weak, but when you write down several together, it feels like they gain a lot of power. I’m also reminded of the wave of Post-its that passed through Korean society, as shown in the expression “yellow wave” from your poem“Jakbyeor-ui poseuteu-it” (Farewell Post-it). I wonder if this Post-it serial poem isn’t a single work that brings together those various waves onto one large Post-it. What’s the background of these poems? Although the time it takes to write a Post-it is short, there is a powerful energy that shoots out of one’s fingers toward the receiver, the second person. You could call it a “momentary eternity,” an “absent fullness.” I think there are two types of Post-its: the Post-its of closed rooms, and the Post-its of open plazas. And Post-its also have a “time lag of love.” That’s because you either leave Post-its for people you can’t meet, or express belated feelings for someone who’s already left. So, I think that Post-its of closed rooms are filled with confessions of sadness of grief-stricken love constrained by time. And Post-its of open plazas make me think of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Post-its placed in a plaza of disasters and social injustice are a type of manifesto, a flag of appeal, of rage, of fierce love. And just as you pointed out—support, immortality, hope,change—these are all keywords. After the Sewol ferry disaster, waves of yellow Post-it notes started to circulate in every corner of our society. How do we express those feelings of unfinished lament, of sorrow, of heartbreak? And since the Sewol ferry disaster, we had the murder of a woman in the bathroom at Gangnam Station; the death of Kim Yong-gyun, a subcontract worker who fell into a furnace at a thermoelectric power plant; and the death of parliament member Roh Hoe-chan. Following each of these tragedies, a wave of Post-it notes formed a monument of unfinished lament, grief, and mourning. So, if we combine all the passion from those Post-its that were put on walls across our society—as you so keenly pointed out—we might have one large Post-it, like a large mural to represent an entire generation. It’s impossible not to talk about love when talking about your poetry. In “Sarang-ui jeondang”(Hall of love) you have lines like “Loving [. . .] / Is grand / Like the inside of a sweet potato [. . .].” There are countless metaphors for love, but I think comparing love to the inside of a sweet potato [“Yam” in the translation—Ed.] is something only someone who has written extensively and passionately about love could do—someone like yourself. I want to hear more about this love that’s like “the inside of a sweet potato.” I once saw a flower sprouting from a burlap bag of sweet potatoes I had placed in the dark basement of my home. In disbelief that a sweet potato flower could grow without dirt or water, I opened the burlap bag to find that the sweet potatoes had rotted in the darkness and given birth to a flower in their decaying flesh. Seeing this, I thought to myself that the condition for love is the devotion, pain, and self-deconstruction of decaying bodies. As the art of Frida Kahlo shows us, pain, self-deconstruction, and devotion foster love. I thought your attempt to sense the pain of the Other on the everyday level shines particularly bright in Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram. Although the poems are filled with everyday words like radish, green onions, garlic, onions, laundry, and hairrollers, the depth of the gaze that holds these things in its sights is never shallow. I’m sure you were inspired by everyday objects around you. Is there any everyday object that catches your eye these days? I’ve been keeping an eye on onions and on my TV these days. [Laughs] I think I’ll write a poem about those two things in the near future. After that, there’s my daughter’s piano which is taking up space in my living room, and a basket of small sun-like oranges. The voices of female agents in your poems have always been quite distinct. In fact, women are mentioned in four poems of Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram. Of these, the poems about mothers caught my eye. And in “Bunmanedaehayeo” (On childbirth), the poetic narrator is a mother reliving childbirth while at a photo exhibition on childbirth. I want to know the reason for your focusing on female narrators who are mothers, as well as on mothers who cannot help but become the eternal poetic subject of a female narrator. It’s not just me. Probably a lot of female poets have written about mothers. After all, that’s the one subject we know best. In my second poetry collection Woensoneul wihanhyeopjugok (Concerto for the left hand) (1983), I wrote a five-partserial poem “Baekkobeul wihan yeonga” (Love song for a belly button) around the motif of mothers. At the time, having just started raising my newborn baby, I had rediscovered the idea of “mother.” The discoveries I made about my body—my womb, my vagina, my breasts, my milk, my period blood—were all discoveries of a mother. The belly button is a symbol for separation and severance from the mother, a symbol of an orphan. The moment our belly button forms, we are separated from our mothers, thrown out into a wasteland and left to live a life. My mother was, all at once, a girl who liked literature, a “modern woman” who graduated with a degree in education, and a teacher (before she got married, that is). But when she got married, she had to raise five children. It was sad because it looked like she had thrown away her dreams and was living as a wife to a governor-general [laughs] of patriarchal Confucian culture. And like most Korean mothers, she was very son-centric in her thinking. [Laughs] My generation grew up holding onto modernist ideas about never being like our mothers, but after living a hard life, I came to understand my mother. Through that process, the concept of “mother” itself eventually solidified into my alter ego. The reason why mothers often appear in my poems is because mothers are my sad alter ego, the alter ego puddled in my mirror. My poems have a multitude of female narrators, and in some ways, all the many females of the world are the alter ego of my poems. Because poets and their poetic narrators are different, I think a female narrator can serve lots of functions if we don’t equate ‘I’ with the author. I think the proposition that poets and their poetic narrators are different gives poets so much freedom. It’s precisely because of this sense of liberation that I write poetry. Earlier, in response to a previous question, when you said, “The discoveries I made about my body . . . were all discoveries of a mother,” I was reminded of “Choeumpasimjangsori” (Ultrasound heartbeat). I think what you said allows a more meaningful reading of the poem. The narrator of the poem can speak to “you,” the person living in her body, through “me.” Because I’ve never experienced pregnancy or childbirth, I naturally read the poem while identifying with the stranger known as “you.” And then, naturally, I am reminded of my mother. I realized that my mother might have had these thoughts; she might have felt the same way while listening to my heartbeat. And because of this, I was able to rediscover my mother as someone connected to “me.” In this way, the poem can evoke not only a sense of identification with the first-person mother, but also an identification with the second-person fetus. In your answer to my last question, you said that you were able to rediscover your mother through yourself. Is it possible for a child to be discovered through the self as well? Our mothers leave with us a piece of their flesh in our belly button—the end of an umbilical cord. The belly button is both the end of our mother and the beginning of ourselves. Because of this, it’s difficult for a mother and child to otherize each other. They exist as vaguely intertangled beings. And the distinction is even harder when the child is a daughter. There’s a mirror-like axis of reflection that exists between a mother and her daughter. Because we project our problems onto our daughters,and because we see the hardship, gender pain, and social discrimination that she must live with, we feel simultaneous feelings of love and pain when we look at our daughter. In the poem titled “Jedo”(System), the line “Kill Mother, lala” also depicts the dream that a child can only be happy when they kill the mother inside them. Older generations often say things like, “Sons are lovers to a mother, and daughters are their mother’s other self.” While sons can become objects of love because they are somewhat apart from their mother’s body, because daughters are like a piece taken from their mother, mothers cannot easily otherize their daughters, and because of this, they feel a complex feeling toward them, the way narcissists might feel both love and hatred toward themselves. Your poem “Jabonjuireultalchulhan bom” (Spring, escaping capitalism) is about a horse that jumps off the racetrack and runs down Gangbyeonbuk-ro highway. In fact, this actually happened last March. I saw a news article about the event, and I just laughed and forgot about it. It just seemed like another crazy story. But when I encountered the horse again, in a poem of yours with the word “capitalism” in the title no less, I realized it wasn’t that funny. It’s almost pointless to distinguish between the seasons in a racetrack for horses because the only thing running the place is capitalism. So it was so sad that when the horse escaped and found an area to frolic and enjoy spring, it wasn’t a wide-open field but a place dominated by capitalism: a concrete road. The horse might have escaped capitalism, but it wasn’t a complete escape. And yet the line “Yes, you can do what you want” comforted me somewhat. I’m curious about what else you thought about that horse on the road, and anything else you couldn’t put into the poem. Oh, you saw that on the news, too? Wasn’t that amazing? When I saw that, it hit really close to home. Spring belongs to people who can enjoy it. And that beautiful spring day belonged completely to that one horse. Horseracing is one of the greatest examples of the logic and greed of capitalism. A racetrack isn’t a place where people make money through their own work; it’s a place with a nonsensical structure that enables you to make money through the exploitation of others, breeding them and forcing them to compete. But on that beautiful spring day, one horse quietly made its escape. “Argh, I’m tired of capitalism . . .” the horse probably said as it fled. So this isn’t just a story about a horse. What’s funny is that the horse stayed in its lane while running down the highway. As you pointed out, the horse escaped from capitalism, but it wasn’t a complete escape. So, it was a contradictory horse of joy and sorrow, and I also felt conflicting feelings of both liberation and sadness. It was from those emotions that I impulsively began writing, composing the poem in one sitting. One of the main words that runs through all your works is the word “sun.” That goes as far back as your first poetry collection Taeyang misa (Massfor the sun). This might be too broad of a question, but what meaning does the word “sun” have for you? I think the sun will be the beginning and end of my literature. Actually, the meaning of the word “sun” is multifaceted,changing depending on the context. I like the line “Love in the light while you have the light.” I live rotating and orbiting around a sun field. The collection of prose Eomeoni-ui eumseonggachi yet aein-uieumseong gachi (Like a mother’s voice, like an old lover’s voice)released last year was a reprint of the work Segye munhakgihaeng (Exploring world literature) published in 1992. That book, I think, is a collection of all your deep knowledge about classical literature across the world. Although they were all works of literature that I was very familiar with, I discovered new things about them through your point of view.Like you said in the author’s note for the revised edition, I discovered the “newness of reading boo ks.” For readers who want to experience that newness, do you have any works of classical literature that you wish to recommend, and could you share your reason for recommending that specific work? To me, a classic is a book that allows for new discoveries every time you read it. Because of this, I think classics reflect our love and hatred. After all, with each generation, good and bad are always changing, and some meanings are lost while other meanings are discovered. Recently, I’ve been reading Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk and Memento mori by Lee O-young. Living with COVID-19 for two years, stuck in tight spaces and never being able to escape from daily life, my soul has become two-dimensional and I feel a sense of metaphysical want. As Orhan Pamuk puts it, death makes us think about the metaphysical. For half a century, you have been for readers and writers of poetry, as well as women, a role model for dynamic writing. In the future, is there anything you want to write or feel you must write? I’m not sure. I just write. I’ll go as far as I can manage to hobble. After all, poets don’t have a GPS. [Laughs] I think the one desire of a poet—the hope that today’s poem will be better than yesterday’s—is what sustains the poet each day. Whatever I write, I want to write poems that have beautiful reversal, like that of a caterpillar metamorphosizing into a butterfly. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert
by So Yu Jeong
Interview with Kim Soom: From Girlhood to Old Age, From Seoul to Manchuria to Ussuriysk
The name Kim Soom brings to mind many keywords—grotesque, family, shipyard workers, history, comfort women, and diligence. I’d like to begin with the last keyword. The year 2022 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of your literary debut. You’ve lived more than half of your life as a writer, having published a total of twenty-three works, including seven short story collections and sixteen novels (ranging from novels in epistle form, literary retelling to Young Adult, and two written in the form of testimonies that seem to stand somewhere between the boundaries of poems, novels, and interviews). Your first collection of short stories, Fighting Dog, was published in 2005, eight years after you won your very first literary award for your debut short story. We can roughly calculate that you’ve published at least one book every year since 2005. Last year alone, you’ve published three works: Listening Time, Drifting Land, and A Swallow’s Heart. As a fellow writer living in the same age, your diligence is something I aspire to learn. Twenty-five years is a long time and not all writers are capable of persistently turning out books as you have. I’m curious, what is the source of your strength that has led you to write so tirelessly? I don’t know where that strength comes from, either. And I believe “impulse” would be a better word for it. I’ll see, hear, read or think something and then, like a bolt of lightning flashing across the silent sky, the impulse to write will shoot up from within me. It’s this out-of-the-blue impulse that has led me to write these last twenty-five years. I assume such an impulse will take different forms according to when it visits you. Your early works mainly deal with the absence of communication and the sheer solitude originating from severed relationships and the mood is quite grotesque. We can still find this worldview in your stories today. Can you explain how the words solitude and grotesque have come to define your works? I’ve spent my childhood growing up in the countryside. When I look back on the landscape that used to surround me like a folding screen, such as anything from nature—a reservoir, mountain, rock, or tree—or animals, such as chicken, pigs or goats, or even humans, I think there has always been this strange, eerie aura about them. Nature in its pure form (and even the people who live within it), practically unaffected by civilization, will seem primitive and strange. Everything in it will be in perfect harmony and yet exposed to competition and the struggle to survive at each and every moment. And they’ll exist completely alone, in solitude. Nature’s solitude is so great that the solitude of human beings simply pales in comparison. I believe my emotional development took place in that world, and because of that, the foundation of the world I create cannot help but be grotesque and filled with solitude. You’ve revised your first two short stories, “On Slowness” and “Time in the Middle Ages,” which launched your literary career, and used them to create “The Story of Roots” that went on to win the Yi Sang Literary Award in 2016 (included in the 2019 story collection Will I Be Able to Touch the tree?—Ed.). What thoughts passed your mind as you reworked your two early works for the first time in twenty years? I tried to determine what belonged to me and what didn’t. It wasn’t easy removing or deleting the things that weren’t mine. Going back to my early works that I worked on during the eight years until the publication of my first short story collection was like pushing myself into the hardened ground that has become rock solid and forcing myself to come face-to-face with the roots, that is, the roots of my stories, hidden underneath. It was a gruesome and painful task but I was able to learn that the roots of the stories I write today come from those two early works. I think one of those roots may refer to labor. Your novel Cheol (Iron) minutely details the horrific reality of laborers who are treated as consumables at a huge shipyard. The story deals with realistic issues and at the same time illustrates an absurd situation created by the characters’ blind faith in “iron.” Thirteen years later, in 2021, you published A Swallow’s Heart. I noticed there were fewer descriptions of the absurd but a noticeable increase in poetic language. What sort of change did you feel writing another story based in a shipyard thirteen years later? As I continue to write, I feel my sympathy for my characters deepen. I especially felt that way as I wrote A Swallow’s Heart. It’s a novel I wrote with great satisfaction. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing process, although I had to deal with the painful personal history and sadness of each of the laborers who worked for the shipbuilder’s supply team (that is the so-called ghost workers of a secondary subcontractor, who not only work in the gray areas of safety but who are also stripped of their most basic rights). ©Ozak Another area we cannot overlook when it comes to your novels is history. Your focus used to be on relationships, especially on the pain caused by families and disillusionment about family relationships. However, the focus shifted to history. Is there a special reason behind such change? I don’t consider myself having more interest in history than other writers. And I don’t think of myself as someone who writes historical novels. When I wrote One Left, Drifting Land, and A Swallow’s Heart (they’re all full-length novels and each deals with a specific group of people), I rather felt I was focusing on the individual rather than the whole. What I mean is, I felt as though I was focusing on each and every person. I was treating “everyone” as the main character. Even if a person is completely alone in the world, that person still exists within history—the history of that person’s family and the history of the ethnic group or country that family belongs to. Many would agree One Left (2016) is a milestone work in your literary career. The novel is considered monumental in the area of testimonial literature. And I personally believe publication of this work has provided the best possible consolation to those who have been victimized by history. What were your biggest concerns when writing One Left? I wanted to depict the “typical day” of the main character. I wanted to show how this woman, who survived wartime sexual servitude, endured so many days thereafter and grew old, living her everyday life. I wanted to show how challenging, lonely and great her struggles were to live one day at a time. And I kept reminding myself, during and after the writing of the story and even today, that my novel should never harm or heroize any of the victims, and that I should never exaggerate the truth. One Left has been translated into several languages and received rave reviews, and even won a translation award for fiction in Taiwan last year. What may be the reason behind the work receiving so much interest from foreign readers even though the story deals with history that is distinctive to Korea? The Japanese military’s “comfort women” are victims of wartime sexual violence and I think there is a consensus among people that such wartime atrocities are issues that have to do with all of us, regardless of our age or nationality. One Left is a novel that is like a documentary, based on the recollections of the story’s narrator, an unknown survivor of Japan’s wartime sexual crimes, from the day she learns that only one former comfort woman remains alive, whereas Flowing Letter (2018) depicts the appalling reality of a fifteen-year-old girl who lives and works at a comfort station. What led you to write Flowing Letter after writing One Left? After the publication of One Left, I always felt it was an unfinished work. I could picture the girls and the comfort station before my eyes, unlike when I wrote One Left, and that led me to write Flowing Letter. Although I wrote and published One Left first, Flowing Letter is a work that comes before it. I still think One Left is incomplete, and I believe that thought would have become even greater, like an outstanding debt, had I not written Flowing Letter. The stories of the surviving comfort women continue on in your works in present tense. The voices of Kim Bok-dong, who passed away in 2019, and Gil Won-ok, who is currently in ill health, are rendered poetically in Nobleness Lies in Self-Examination (2018), Have You Ever Wished for a Soldier to Be an Angel? (2018), and a supposed prequel to these two works, Listening Time (2021). I caught a glimpse of your struggle to honor the people who testified their experience in Listening Time. I had the impression you were trying to listen to the “unspoken silence” of the surviving victims. I can imagine how close you must have become with them after writing a series of these works. Is there any special story you would like to share on how you came to build a close relationship with the surviving comfort women? My relationship with them first began after I wrote One Left. I think they appreciated the fact that I had written a story about comfort women, and Kim Bok-dong and Gil Won-ok halmeonis (grandmothers) invited me to dinner. It was my first time actually meeting with former comfort women. I sat facing them before a table laid out with food they usually ate, finished my dinner and returned home. There wasn’t much talk. I normally enjoy speaking with the elderly, but I struggled talking with them that day. Even then, I had no idea I’d someday write about them. Several months later, I was given the opportunity to join the halmeonis at their own place and time and listen to their stories in their own voice. While working with them, I found myself thinking about relationships in general and came to the conclusion that relationships occur naturally, that they cannot be forced according to a certain plan. So you were given the chance to share your life with them. I can imagine what a wonderful writing partner you must have been to them. Now, let’s turn to Drifting Land (2020), a novel which won the Dong-in Literary Award. This work introduces to the readers another story from our history, the forced migration of ethnic Koreans in Russia. I was surprised at the minute details you deployed in the train scenes. I’d like to know what caused you to develop an interest in this topic and how you conducted your research. Forced migration of ethnic Koreans was always on my mind and I wanted to write a novel about the migration process even years before I’d written the first draft. I searched for whatever materials I could find and read them until the scenes inside the train and the ethnic Koreans therein came alive. Your most recent work of publication is “The Man Who Touches Waves” [the January 2022 issue of Hyundae Munhak—Ed.]. It’s a story of a totally blind man who works as a special education teacher. The book reads like a monologue or even a long narrative poem. It also borrows some literary forms from plays. What led you to write it and will you continue to write about people with disabilities? I’ve been meeting with four people (individually) who have visual impairments. Since last summer, I’ve been writing stories inspired by the conversations I had with them. The recently published work is the first among such stories. A thought came to me one day that I wanted to write about “someone who cannot see” given the chance “to see.” I was able to write “The Man Who Touches Waves” as I was introduced to someone who is totally blind and works as a special education teacher. I value each and every moment I meet with them. Conversations with them always bring me joy and fulfillment, and I hope it is the same for them as well when they talk with me. I don’t know where my work is currently headed, just as I had no clue before last summer that I’d be given the chance to work with visually impaired people. “The Man Who Touches Waves” seems to mark the beginning of a long project. I look forward to the works that follow. Let me now turn to a personal question. I’ve been told you love animals. In your short stories “The Hole” and “My First Goat,” you illustrate horrifying scenes of pigs being buried alive after the outbreak of foot and mouth disease and other forms of animal cruelty. I’m curious about your thoughts on animals. I pray for my dogs that have passed away after being at my side for more than ten years. I pray almost every day, asking for forgiveness for failing to do my best in looking after them while they were with me. It is now 2022. What are your writing plans for this year and what kind of stories would you like to write from now on? The revised edition of Noodles will come out soon. It’s a collection of short stories, including “The Hole,” published eight years ago. I began the first day of the New Year revising the stories in the collection and found myself really looking into the lives of my characters (even more so than when I first wrote them). It was a meaningful experience as I gained deeper understanding of their pain and sadness. Translated by Juyeon Lee
by Cho Hae-jin
Interview with Bak Solmay: A Moment Allowing Other Moments to Pass By
You’ve been writing fiction for a long time, and recently, Minumsa publishers re-issued your first collection of stories, Then What Shall We Sing? How do you feel you’ve changed since publishing your first collection, and what have you been focusing on in your recent works compared to the past?I’ve only been writing for a little over ten years now, so I wouldn’t necessarily call that “a long time.” Early this year, I became conscious of how I’ve been feeling a little lighter, of how I’ve been moving in a way that was different from how I moved in the past. It was a very liberating feeling. I felt I could accomplish many different things. I came to the realization that it’s meaningless to distinguish between what I’m supposed to be doing versus what I shouldn’t do because it would be unlike me to do so. I’m not quite sure what kind of bearing this realization will have on my fiction, but earlier this year, I definitely felt caught in a particularly strong moment. The feelings from that moment have mostly faded away, but I would still like to hold on to that moment somehow. I find it difficult to focus when I’m asked questions about my earlier works or when I’m put in a situation where I have to think about my past works. The old me and my old works are still contained within me, and I can summon them if I have to; but I simply don’t feel compelled to do so when asked (as I’m being asked now). Besides, my earlier works and my current works are ultimately similar to one another; I feel any distinctions between them are largely meaningless.Since early on in your career, you have consistently confronted macro and historical issues, such as the May 18 Gwangju Uprising, nuclear power plants, and most recently in Future Walking Rehearsals, the arson attack on the American Cultural Service building in Busan, while at the same time managing to maintain your own perspectives and pace instead of becoming overwhelmed by the weight of such issues. What are some of the things you consider when approaching historic events in your fiction?One of the things that came to my mind while writing some of my novels is that there is no one who isn’t related to particular historic events. But if I were to assume that there are some people with little to no connection to an event in history, how would that person be swayed by that history? I don’t know if “swayed” would be the right expression here. Perhaps “influenced” would be the better word.This might sound like a strange assumption, but the deeper belief that underlies this assumption is that there isn’t anyone who isn’t affected by historic events. With that in mind, I start focusing on how someone, who may not be directly connected to a historic event, is nevertheless brought into its sphere of influence and made to interact with the repercussions of the event. But again, this is different from stating that everyone somehow has a relationship to history and that we all impact history as it impacts us. The title, Future Walking Rehearsals, seems to represent the key themes that you explore in your fiction—the future, the act of walking, and rehearsing. What comes to your mind when you hear these three words?Walking makes the future and rehearsal possible. Simply by sitting in your seat and thinking about going for a walk can carry you to new inspirations.When we think of your fiction, one of the first things that comes to mind is food and the activity of eating. Many of your characters seem to approach their contexts and even the strangers in their lives through the medium of food. For instance, in “On My Way to Eat Meat,” you list various chicken recipes, the names of which sound endearing, but there was also a slight tension in those descriptions. Can you tell us more about this tension that seems to come with the act of eating?It’s interesting to hear that you felt a sense of tension. I happen to love to eat, so I try to create food-related moments that are sweet and as you say, endearing. I find joy in sharing a meal with others. But the act of eating can also be ruthless; for instance, when I’m starving for something to eat, I reach out and grab anything that I can shove down my throat. It’s perhaps that merciless aspect of eating that gives rise to the tension that you’ve felt.©OzakSince we’re on the topic, I have to ask, do you watch any of the mukbang [eating show] content that’s on YouTube?I did in the past, but I have trouble concentrating on long YouTube videos. These days I typically watch shorter videos of cats eating random stuff.Along with eating, another charming aspect in your novels is the attention given to sleep and the act of sleeping. Recently, you began releasing a series of works under the theme “hibernation series.” Traditionally, literature has paid much attention to dreams. But in your fiction, you seem to be less interested in dreams than you are in the physical act of sleeping. For some reason, when you write about sleep in your fiction, it seems irrelevant to dreams, whereas when your characters are wide awake and moving about in their realities, it seems as if they are living in a dreamworld. Is there a difference in your approach to dreams and sleep, as represented in your fiction? I’m not sure. I love to eat and I love to sleep, which is why I visit them often in my writing. This might sound repetitive, but I feel that when a character in a story falls asleep, then another, similar character is somewhere doing something else, in a slightly different yet very similar context. So if a person A is sleeping in a place B, then A’ would be working at a place called B’. Sleep is our way of getting rest, but it also represents a small gap in our lives and a moment that allows other moments to pass by.©OzakReading your recent “The Extremely High-Spec Machine That Only Works in This Room,” I got the impression it contains moments of very direct, very immediate connections although the characters couldn’t physically meet or see each other in person. What are your thoughts on the concept of “directness”?I find this to be an interesting question, since I’ve never given it any thought. At the same time, I feel that your description accurately captures the essence of the story. Whenever I’m writing fiction, even if it’s not this particular story that you mentioned, I have the sense that I’m chasing something that exists far away and only vaguely. At the same time, though, the existences feel very clear and real to me. Ideally, I would like to capture both sensations and write about them persuasively enough in my works. I’m struggling to provide a clear definition of “directness” but it might have something to do with my attempt not to lose any tension when I’m writing fiction.Your works have a characteristic aura of fantasy surrounding them. But this aura is peculiar in that the fantasy is not presented as something that is completely separate from reality, but rather as an element that is situated inside (or perhaps placed on top of) a very real and ordinary—and simultaneously historic—space. For instance, in “With the Twelve, Already-Dead Women,” you incorporate ghost stories, yet they don’t necessarily seem to have a worldview that is different from our own realities. What are your thoughts on the relationship between reality and fantasy?That’s is a difficult question. I’m afraid I don’t know. When I’m writing, I try to concentrate on where I’ve been, where I want to be, the places I’ve seen, and the places I want to see. Sometimes, the world I write about can be similar to our world now, but strictly speaking, it can also be a place we’ve never seen before.You mentioned in another interview that you’d like to try your hand at writing detective fiction or mystery novels. You also told the story of the detective cat Chami in Silence Animal. Do you still want to write mystery fiction, and if so, what is it about mysteries that appeal to you most? I do like mystery fiction, but I’m drawn to a particular type of detective stories. I wrote a review of Ryo Hara’s Sore made no ashita in the magazine Littor (Issue 30), and I’d like to quote from the text: “I remember reading somewhere, although I forget where, that people find themselves fascinated by the profession of detectives because they feel that detectives exist somewhere in a halfway zone, in a no man’s land. Detectives prowl darkly lit, dangerous alleyways, yet they aren’t criminals. They solve problems and help their clients, but they aren’t members of law enforcement. Each time, they do things that neither the police nor criminals can do.” One other thing that appeals to me about detective fiction is that the stories are almost always set in the context of big cities. These stories inevitably offer up a close reveal of the cities.If we move past the genre of fiction and look at writing as a whole, what are some of the strengths and appealing elements of writing that you can’t find elsewhere in other media, say in videos or music?Well, I may not write or think about fiction every single day, but to me, writing is so much a part of my life now that it’s difficult to provide a straight answer regarding its strengths and power, especially when compared against something else. Rather than comparing writing to other media, I would say that anything—whether it be music or videos or writing—that can help me enter a whole new world is what brings me joy.Are there any books you would like to read or any interests you would like to research for your next book or maybe even a personal project? I would like to devote more time to studying modern and contemporary Korean history. I would also like to learn more about some of the detailed footnotes in our history, for instance, how religion was first accepted in Korea and how movie theaters and hospitals were built and then demolished. I would also like to find out more about the film industry. I’m curious to know more about the people who worked in the theaters, who perhaps had as much of a contribution to filmmaking as the film directors and actors, and I would also like to know more about the theater industry.I’d also like to ask you about translation. You like to play around with the register in your narrative structures and make liberal use of suffixes and other word endings in a rather unique way. Have you given any thought as to the implications your narrative structure might have on the translations of your works? I often hear that my works would not be easy to translate, for the same reasons you gave. When I think about translation though, I still hold out vague hope that somehow the translations will magically fall into place and work themselves out. But of course, I say that from the perspective of the author of the original work. From the reader’s perspective, it’s a great thing to be able to have access to many more translated versions than before. For translators, however, I feel that their working environment and their treatment are still far below what they are entitled to.I would like to end the interview on a light note. The illustration on the front cover of The Dog I Love is that of a dog, while the cover of Silence Animal features an illustration of a cat. Are you a dog person or a cat person?I recently saw the film The Tsugua Diaries at the Busan International Film Festival. There are about four dogs that appear in the movie, and when I saw them on the screen, I felt my heart leap with joy. But then I thought that if the movie had featured cats instead of dogs, then maybe the theater would have erupted in cheers. (In reality, the audience was very quiet.) I can’t choose which I like better, and so I want them both, but I don’t have either a cat or a dog, yet I still want them both, but then . . . I guess . . . a cat?Interviewed by Bo-Won KangTranslated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim Bo-Won Kang writes poetry and literary criticism. His poetry collections include The Perfect Set of Poems to Congratulate a New Business and the co-authored work, Gathering of over Three Persons.
by Bo-Won Kang
Interview with Kim Bo-Young: Why the Stars Shine in Earth’s Sky
Your short story “How Alike Are We” (2017) can’t be excluded from any discussion regarding Korean literature’s achievements in the 2010s whether one is a fan of science fiction or not. The story keenly observes the changes Korean society is yearning for in the wake of tumultuous events, from the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014 through the so-called “AlphaGo shock” in 2016 to the feminism reboot ongoing from 2015. I imagine the story must have undergone countless revisions and rewrites. I’m very curious what that process was like.The message of a completed story can turn out quite differently from what you intended to write. My original plan had been to invert the “human in a mechanical body” trope in science fiction and write about an “AI in a human body.” But as I wrote, I struggled with the question “Why did this AI want to become human?” Maybe because humans can easily do what machines can’t, I supposed, but failing to pinpoint an answer, I stopped writing and put the story aside for a long time. [For anyone who hasn’t read the story, please skip the bracketed paragraphs below as they contain spoilers. The English translation is available online in full at the Clarkesworld magazine website.—Ed.] [The answer came to me while I was watching The Masked Singer with my older brother. My brother, who has a mild developmental disability, wanted to know whether the masked singer was female or male, while the rest of us watching tried to guess their name or age or profession. It occurred to me then that our ability to instantly tell someone’s gender relies on the countless stereotypes and biases we hold about it. Short means female, deep-voiced means male, and so on. My brother was having trouble perceiving gender because he doesn’t stereotype. I reasoned that an AI would have precisely the same difficulty.This is a logical conclusion. AIs don’t reproduce sexually, so they have no gender, so they have no reason to distinguish between genders. Whereas humans immediately assign a binary gender to even an AI who explicitly says they don’t have one, that they are, so to speak, agender.]Once I found the answer, the story developed quickly. Then a publisher approached me for a solar system-themed anthology, where I decided to include this story that had been brewing for a long time.But right around the story’s due date, Korean Gamergate occurred. [In 2016 a video game voice actress tweeted an image of a T-shirt reading “Girls Do Not Need A Prince.” The tweet prompted a backlash among male gamers and resulted in the voice actress losing her job.—Ed.] There was an outpouring of complaints by gamers insisting “I don’t want to see work by a feminist in my games” and demanding such work be removed. Their definition of a feminist was loose at best. Anyone who said, “That’s no reason to remove someone’s work” was branded a feminist and attacked. The worst hit were game illustrators, many of whom were women and part-time subcontractors unprotected by labor laws, so a number of companies took down their illustrations in an attempt to defuse the uproar. But a series of all-too-successful complaints only fueled the frenzy, which spread to other creative industries and to Korean society at large with repercussions felt to this day. Game narrative design being my main source of income at the time rather than fiction writing, I suddenly had to stop everything I was working on.Amidst that madness, the story I’d been writing felt too superficial. I told my publisher that I just couldn’t publish the story as it was, and pinched for time, I sent the revised story to my editor chapter by chapter, daily serial style. That’s how my bafflement at the hate and madness that can suddenly spread in a restricted environment ended up in the story.On the flip side, Gamergate prompted the Korean publishing industry to take a deep interest in feminism. And it didn’t take long for the industry to realize that most feminist utopian and dystopian fiction was in fact science fiction. Existing Korean SF writers were reexamined, a slew of general fiction readers—the majority of whom were women—consequently crossed over to the genre, and new SF writers also shot up in number. Paradoxically, 2016 was a breakout year for the Korean SF market. ©Ozak “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way to You” are two linked epistolary stories about a man and woman whose unsynchronized timelines bar them from reuniting for their interstellar wedding. Compared to “On My Way to You,” which is told from the woman’s point of view, the man’s telling of “I’m Waiting for You” feels a lot more condensed. Why did you choose the letter format?From the outset, “I’m Waiting for You” was written not to be read, but to be heard when the person who had commissioned the story proposed to his girlfriend. The story’s first version was a cassette tape recorded by the groom. My first draft had music cues. Since the story would be narrated to a romantic partner, I chose the letter form for its conversational tone, and since it wouldn’t do for the girlfriend to get bored and leave mid-reading, I omitted and condensed a lot. The man would narrate the whole work himself, so the woman wasn’t featured in the story. Everything in this story was written with a single goal: that she might, as she listened, be moved to accept his proposal.Except—I feel a little apologetic toward the couple for saying this—when I was writing “I’m Waiting for You,” my thoughts kept turning to the parents waiting for their children aboard the Sewol. There was no special reason for the association. It’s just that there was little else I could think about that year.I’m also sorry to say that the person I had in my thoughts while writing “On My Way to You” was my mother, who had passed the previous year. There was little else I could think about that year, too. Sewol parents would miss their children even if the world should end. As I would miss my mother even at the world’s end. Love isn’t so complicated. ©Ozak In both “How Alike Are We” and “On My Way to You,” an AI, a technological being, acts as the arbitrator and problem solver of a catastrophe that has befallen human society. The AIs in both works follow a strictly mathematical and logical algorithm. Yet the conclusion they draw is to stand on the side of good, not evil. I found this interesting. What is artificial intelligence to you?My answer may not be what you expect. Artificial intelligence is the way I understand my family, and how I understand my life with my family.My brother has a mild developmental disability that can be categorized as Asperger’s. When I was young, there was poor awareness of disabilities and it wasn’t easy to find professionals and professional services. My parents had me believe that my brother was normal and I grew up believing so. As with many children with older siblings, my brother was my first friend, my first window into society. But as I grew older, the problem that the world neither understood my closest and most familiar friend nor noticed his existence—yet had so many people like him—became one of my life’s major preoccupations.The logical reasoning of artificial intelligence is not unlike the way someone with Asperger’s thinks. My brother does not judge, whereas a neurotypical person will judge even when they say they do not and thus has no idea what it feels like to never judge. I project such qualities onto my AI characters. So for me, imagining the personality of an AI is easy, comfortable, and fun. The gaze of my machines reflects my brother’s lifelong struggles, as well as my own feelings of disconnect with this world that come from having been socialized through my brother growing up.I don’t think the AIs I portray are ethical. They are simply logical in a way that humans aren’t. This just appears ethical to the human eye at times. Important themes in your work like “the evolution of ethics” must have required careful consideration in storytelling. Does your concern with ethics ever restrain your imagination? Or have your efforts to stay true to principles helped renew your imagination in unexpected ways?Imagination can’t be restrained. It’s boundless. Every night I watch the images cooked up by my imagination until I fall asleep. It just takes time for me to convert those imaginings into a form people can understand, and to research what I need to realize them. That’s why storytelling can realize only tiny snippets of my imagination.Realism still dominates Korean publishing and many readers find even the most common SF tropes strange or difficult. Writing stories that don’t bore me or my SF readers but are still legible to the uninitiated has thus been a key concern throughout my writing career. It’s like having to satisfy two requirements that are impossible to satisfy at once, every time. This restraint is great enough that I haven’t had the chance to worry about any others. A Plagued Sea (2020), a story about the outbreak of “East Sea Disease,” was published in the midst of COVID-19. I wonder how the pandemic has affected your brainstorming and writing process.A Plagued Sea was written as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The disease in my story, I decided, should cause changes to one’s physical appearance, so the references I had in mind while brainstorming were the plague and leprosy. But then COVID-19 broke out while I was writing. Obviously, I couldn’t ignore what was happening and it made its way into the story. My stories always contain my present. Even if it weren’t for the coronavirus, the world’s changes would be mirrored in my work.That said, I live in a remote South Korean countryside, in the mountains with hardly any houses around. Most of my work is done online, there hasn’t been a lockdown yet in South Korea, and my region hasn’t imposed very strict pandemic controls, so for the most part, my everyday life remains unchanged. What I feel more acutely from here is climate change. The vegetation is shifting rapidly as is the crop cycle. Both have been triggered by similar causes, and soon we will face many problems that none of our existing methods can solve.The thought that everything can end in an instant does weigh heavier on me now. All the more reason to live this day and moment preciously. “Scripter” is about distinguishing an AI from a human in the game world—a kind of Turing test. Though published back in 2008, the story is still interesting in today’s world where the metaverse is the next big thing. What would you say are the similarities and differences between imagining games and imagining science fiction?I was a game developer before becoming a writer, and until as recently as 2016, I supplemented my income with narrative design consulting gigs. “Scripter” reflects a lot of my experience as a developer.“Science fiction” is a subject-matter-based classification so you cannot really compare it to games. If I were to instead compare “fiction” with games, I would say they are completely different fields requiring completely different talents and skill sets. A game script acts as a docent who guides user behavior. You calculate distances that users will travel and the time and effort it will take them to navigate the story, planting signs at the right places so they don’t get lost. Since the rewards in a game are simpler and more straightforward than those in reality, where you position the rewards determines whether users fight or cooperate. In fact, a game offers the developer a chance to build a utopia according to their philosophy, but the CEO’s or investors’ desire to make money ends up interfering. Finally, a short question on translation. Is there anything you’re concerned about or particularly wish for when your work gets translated into English?My translators are the ones who have their work cut out for them, so who am I to worry! All I can say is that, as more Korean literature crosses borders, the absence of masculine and feminine nouns in Korean will probably be something translators will have to tackle with increasingly. As Korean isn’t inflected for gender, you can delay revealing a character’s gender or not reveal it at all and leave it open. Many internet-based writers also choose not to disclose their gender. Interviewed by Lim TaehunTranslated by Sung Ryu Lim Taehun is a literary critic and assistant professor at Chosun University. His research interests include literature and technology, and SF culture and soundscape art.
by Lim Taehun
Interview with Yoon Sung-hee: Like Rolling Snowballs to Make a Snowman
Congratulations on the release of your latest anthology, Every Day is April Fool’s. What is a day in the life like for you? It’s always the same: working when I can on a novel I’m supposed to be writing and otherwise lazing about at home. I let my mind wander as I lie on the sofa, watch TV, or have a read through one of the three or four books I have on hand. Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work? And what is your personal and professional perspective on the pandemic? The pandemic has had little effect on my work, probably because writing is such a solitary job. Once the pandemic hit Korea, I started trying harder to stick to my routine so that I could endure through my daily life. I made it a personal rule to write three hours a day, walk one hour a day, and cook for myself rather than order out for delivery. I haven’t been perfect, of course. I tend to be lenient with myself so I’m not so great with rules. But staying put at home did help me to write quite a few short stories last year. Counting from your debut in 1999, this is the twenty-second year that you’ve been a writer. Who were some writers who influenced your decision to take this career path? I must have been twenty-four or twenty-five when I fell head over heels for Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Of course, I’d been inspired by other works to try and reach their heights, but never so much as with Vonnegut’s work. Slaughterhouse-Five taught me to practice writing with the speed and rhythm of the prose in mind. So that’s where your concise yet packed writing style comes from. Now let’s talk about your debut work, “A House Made of LEGOs” (1999). The motif of LEGOs is key to the story—what is your take on games and play? Your characters, whether children or elders, seem to discover something in the process of playing. Many of my stories feature seniors, and when they play, it’s with a sense of understanding that they can never go back to the past. But I try not to use games and play as a device for evoking nostalgia, because then my stories would veer into excessive sentimentality. My intention is that the idea of play acts as a sort of cord fastening optimism, acceptance, and sadness together. Take one character from my recent short story “Every Day is April Fool’s.” The narrator’s younger brother gets into a traffic accident and is taken unconscious to the emergency room. He briefly becomes a disembodied spirit, looking down at his own body in the hospital bed. Later, he discusses the experience with his family, saying, “When I woke up, it occurred to me that no matter what happens, I should try to live a fun life. And that’s why I didn’t study.” That’s the kind of attitude my characters tend to have about life. What a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of your career as a storyteller. Your early works tended to be rather dark, until at some point humor became a defining trait in your writing. Where do you get the strength to endure and rise above grief? It all started from a simple change. When I was writing the short stories that would be published in my first anthology after my debut, I felt a sense of frustration toward my characters. So I gave myself a challenge: to make sure that in every short story I wrote, there was at least one scene where the main character laughed. That changed the way I conceptualized my stories. I ask myself, When was the last time this protagonist laughed? It’s a probing question that helps me to untangle difficult sections of my stories. The challenge led to a gradual but real change. And on a personal level, I always loved absurd stories, even as a child. I really wanted to write stories where freak coincidences popped up in the narrative. I’ve gotten less self-conscious about it, too, as I set about making my characters laugh. All this has put me closer to the path of coincidences, miracles, and humor in the world of fiction. ©Ozak The themes of humor and consolation are also major keywords in Every Day is April Fool’s. The entire collection has a notable emphasis on and love for the stories of older women. What drew you to the lives of elderly women? I took some time to think about elderly people. They walk slowly, eat slowly, and often fall into their thoughts. I thought that was a great fit for my fiction. From the moment I decided I wanted my characters to laugh, I wanted to write about many wise but adorable old people. In “Every Day is April Fool’s,” the aunt tells her nephew and niece, “Loneliness makes a person crabby. And if I ever become a crabby old woman, don’t even bother visiting me, all right?” This is actually something I’d wanted to tell the old ladies in my story, not necessarily the readers. Loneliness tends to stem from events that happened in a character’s past. When your stories look into the past, they seem to address the issue of forgiveness, whether of others or of oneself. What does going back to the past mean to you? One of my short stories is actually titled “Boomerang,” and it means that your actions in the past will come hurtling back towards you. It’s a recurring theme of sorts in my stories. I think about what moments in the present will trigger the return of a past misdeed, and let myself think deeply about the possibilities. The opposite is true, too. When in the present might a person be visited by a painful event they’d wanted to forget? For me, the past and present don’t exist in vacuums of their own; they must overlap. And in that overlap, I look for and unearth forgiveness. ©Ozak That’s a great segue into your Kim Seungok Literary Prize-winning short story “One Night,” which happens to be in this very issue of KLN and features the relationships between an elderly woman and her parents, her husband, and her daughter. In a game of freeze tag, a frozen person can only be unfrozen by another person. In your story, the person unfreezing the elderly woman is a young man. What was the inspiration or the reason you created this dynamic? Actually, I had a bit of writer’s block while working on that story. I stopped at the part where the old woman falls, and I couldn’t write anything after that for days. That was when I saw neighborhood children playing freeze tag. Suddenly it came to me—that my character also needed someone to come and unfreeze her. I made this character a young man because I wanted to emphasize to people of his generation that it’s okay not to be working, that just doing nothing can be difficult enough. The reason he’s a man is because the old lady is a woman. She resents her husband, but still thinks back often to the good old days when he was still young. That’s why I wanted her to meet this kind, sweet young man. On that note, concerning the elderly woman’s past with her husband, what is family to you? You’ve dealt with more than just spousal or mother-daughter relationships. Your stories feature relationships with one’s grandfather, grandmother, aunt, or uncle. When I craft a protagonist, I think of everything the protagonist is not. This is why I focus so much on the people around my main character. And when I try to build my character in that space I’ve created with the other characters, I oftentimes end up with a family. That’s why I tend to go into the life stories of my characters. I love thinking about complicated family relationships involving multiple generations. I still feel like being talkative about this framework, as if I still haven’t said everything I need to say. And although I don’t necessarily want to leave this frame, I do want to expand out into other areas of life—but right now, I’m not completely convinced I should. I don’t think I can write my next full-length novel until I’ve come to grips with this. Your answer makes me wonder how your stories are created. There’s no big secret. For me, writing is like making a snowman. I start with a little snowball, roll it around in my head, and once I think it’s big enough, I write it down. Once I’ve done that, I roll it around again to form sentences. Eventually these little snowballs grow into the snowman’s body and head. That’s how it works for me. That’s a very apt image, I think, because your stories, in which the nameless people of this world are beautifully connected, are also like a snowman made by rolling together individual snowballs. Growing up, I always imagined that there were people similar to me living somewhere I didn’t know. I didn’t read much as a child because I didn’t have access to many books. I loved reading, though, whether it was fiction or otherwise. I also loved listening in on adults’ conversations. I even read through the little instructions written on medication packages. We had a lot of live-in tenants when I was younger. When someone new moved in, I would ask them where they lived before and try to find the place on a map. I’ve lived almost fifty years in my hometown, and the radius of my life is rather limited. But I often dream about living in another city. I think these life experiences are what shape the stories I write today. That reminds me of your first full-length novel, Spectators. It even features characters who travel around the world, and I was fascinated by the way the roots of the story are connected to the sheer distance spanned by their travels. How does traveling inspire you? Or what is traveling to you as a writer? I’m very much a homebody, but I also enjoy getting out of the house. The one thing I love more than traveling, I would say, is making the itinerary before I leave and picturing my upcoming journey. Sometimes I wonder if I really do enjoy traveling, or if I’m simply in love with the planning process. Anyway, traveling for me is to see beautiful things and eat delicious food with the people I love. Spectators features children who travel around the world and parents who have never gone traveling. The parents spent their entire lives running a restaurant, where they get to listen in on diners’ conversations and hear even more about the world than their children—who are physically moving between countries—get to see. For me, both of these things constitute travel, whether you spend your whole life manning a restaurant counter or wandering the globe in search of answers. How do you feel about the international publication of Spectators? I had the chance to attend the Guadalajara International Book Fair when Spectators was published in Spanish [as Espectadores (Bonobos, 2016)—Ed.]. It was my first time participating at a book fair, and I wondered what sort of people would come to listen to me. I still remember the sparkling eyes of the students at the event. As I walked out of the venue at the end, I felt like the “me on the other side of the world” I dreamed about as a child was standing there. They were the people who attended the event. The moment is still a cherished memory that gives me great courage as I continue to write. I’m sure the students who attended the session felt the same. Now, one final question for courage as we cross borders in the name of literature: your literary universe is sometimes called the “Yoon Sung-hee World” for the unique characteristics of your works. Out of your works, which seven short stories would you choose to define this label? I would pick “The Responsibility of Loneliness,” “Take Care, See You Again,” “The Hole,” “The Slow Ball, the Slower Ball, the Very Slow Ball,” “Resting on a Pillow,” “Daytime Drinking,” and “Remaining Memories.” This is actually really hard. Those particular stories were a joy to write, but didn’t get much public attention when I published them. I do have a special attachment to my first anthology, but I didn’t count any stories from it because it was published before I established the Yoon Sung-hee World. I made sure to pick one or two stories from each of my other five books. Interviewed by Cha Mi-Ryeong Translated by Slin Jung Cha Mi-Ryeong is a literary critic. She has authored a collection of reviews titled A World of Abandoned Possibilities (2016). She has served on the editorial boards of Munhak Dongne and KLN. She currently teaches modern Korean fiction at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology.
by Cha Mi-ryeong
Interview with Kim Hye-jin: A New Kind of “Togetherness”
Your novel Concerning My Daughter begins with a house and ends with a home, one could say. In that sense, I think the story is about forming a family as an economic unit and expanding it into an emotional support unit. The story considers new possibilities and forms of family by bringing together families that don’t meet society’s approval, families that have been torn apart, and families that have been lost. I wonder whether you had set out to write a family narrative different from pre-existing ones when you wrote it. I didn’t start out wanting to write a family narrative. All I knew was that I wanted to write about a mother and daughter. In any case, the daughter moves in with the mother in the beginning of the story and brings her same-sex partner with her, and in the end the mother brings home an old patient named Jen she had been looking after in the convalescent home. It wasn’t until the characters were living under one roof that I realized that this novel could be read as a narrative about a new family. In the initial draft, Jen does not move in with the mother character. I had only written up to the scene where the mother goes looking for Jen when Jen is forced out of the convalescent home. It didn’t occur to me that the mother could bring Jen home with her. ©Ozak The novel is also a portrayal of women of different generations. Many people read the story as a portrait of women’s solidarity, and I wonder what the solidarity could mean for them, what possibilities it opens up going forward in their lives. Any feelings or thoughts on this? The most powerful unit of solidarity in Korean society is the family. When I was writing this novel, I thought it didn’t necessarily require blood relations to form a family. Then, as now, this is not a very radical idea in Korea. It has gained substantial social approval. But I do think that compared to people’s perceptions, the laws and institutions are more conservative. I think that once the laws and institutions become more flexible, family and solidarity will perhaps take much more diverse forms. It was interesting to see that the climax of Concerning My Daughter was different for different readers. For me, it was the scene where the mother couldn’t say her daughter’s cell phone number at the protest scene. Some say it’s when they eat together at Jen’s funeral, while others say it’s where everyone gathers in one house. I wonder what the climax of this work is for you. Or maybe there was an image that inspired this novel? In the second half of the novel, there’s a scene where the mother goes to the hospital to see her daughter who was injured at a protest. There, the mother meets up with her and her daughter’s partner and takes them to the cafeteria. Watching the two of them eat, the mother finally sees that these two are out there in a ruthless world. She realizes that they’re struggling to live their reality, not pursuing an illusion or a daydream. I thought this scene was the climax of this novel. This is also the scene where the change in the mother is most palpable. I think the notion of change is at the core of the novel. The change that happens to the characters is especially important. I imagine you must have given a great deal of thought to how much change the mother can afford. For me, I liked the fact that the change in the mother’s attitude toward the daughter was not shown directly through her own relationship with her daughter, but through her relationship with Jen and through the daughter’s relationship with her partner. The difficulty of understanding a person is revealed very slowly through the changes in her own relationships. I thought the mother was looking at her daughter’s future through Jen. There is also a part of her that understands her daughter a little better through her partner. How should I put it? I think in order to understand a person, you must understand the person’s relationships and circumstances, and your own relationships and circumstances in turn work closely to give you insight. I also think that understanding a person starts with facing and getting to know the external things that surround a person. ©Ozak The novel is being translated into several foreign languages. Some have already been published, and some are forthcoming. Do you have any translation releases you are especially looking forward to? I’m looking forward to the English translation. I think it’s because English is the only foreign language I can read a little at a time. Concerning My Daughter has already been published in Japan. Have you been following the response since then? What was it like to see the Japanese translation? You also spoke at a book event hosted by the publisher of Eobi, your first short story collection. It is always fascinating to see books in Japanese because the text runs top to bottom and right to left. All translations, not just the Japanese ones, feel like strangers to me because they come in different languages and different covers, too. It’s as if they aren’t mine. I haven’t been following the response of Japanese readers, but I’m curious. What was the reaction or review from a reader or critic on Concerning My Daughter that you most appreciated as the author? I remember when a critic said, “This novel is a novel about words.” I had never thought of it that way, because the mother isn’t able to fully articulate herself in the novel. But at some point, she verbalizes her thoughts. And she is astonished to find these words within herself. So the view that this is about a person finding her words stuck with me. How would you say Concerning My Daughter impacted your later works? Several more books have come out since Concerning My Daughter. I can’t say I felt a distinct sense of change each time. However, there is one thing: when I was writing Concerning My Daughter I thought I had to pour more into in the novel. That I had to put more into it and create something richer. But now I think it’s okay to have only one very small but very pure emotion in the novel, and that it’s enough to contain just one very clear thing in the story. You started your career in 2012 with the short story “Chicken Run.” You have had a prolific career for the past nine years, receiving both critical and popular acclaim. What were some changes that occurred in terms of your views for value regarding fiction over the course of your career, if any? I used to think that the narrative was the most important thing in a novel. Now, I think a scene, an interaction, or a sentence can carry greater meaning than a narrative. I guess you could say that my idea of what a novel is has become more flexible. ©Ozak The homeless characters in your first novel, Central Station, and the characters at the protests in some of your short stories are examples of people in the streets who often appear in your works. They come off as having no choice but to go out into the streets, rather than being those who are unable to find a place for themselves. What would you say this instability in your characters represents in your works? I think that a novel is the story of an individual and embodies the process of an individual living life. In that light, I think I consider life itself to be a great instability. I don’t know if instability is representative of something in my works, but I would say that the individuals I am examining live unstable lives. Maybe I want to keep asking through my stories how people are living their lives, and with what thoughts in their minds? You chose the excerpt from Concerning My Daughter that appears alongside this interview. Can you tell us about why you chose this particular scene? I think the scene best reveals the heart of this novel. It is the clearest portrayal of the conflict between the mother and daughter, and an honest depiction of the mother’s character. The theater adaptation of Concerning My Daughter was staged last year. What was that like for you, seeing the sentences you wrote performed through actors’ bodies and watching it in person? People experience the same novel in different ways perhaps because we each have such different lives and experiences. Maybe that’s why we sometimes get the feeling that we are seeing ourselves in the novels we read. Watching Concerning My Daughter on the stage felt like that for me. It was exciting to see scenes from the novel I wrote performed live, but the emotions and scene progressions that the director and actors discovered in my story were astonishing. It was a meaningful experience to reflect on why the stage adaptation took notice of those aspects and scenes. Preparations for the screen adaptation of Concerning My Daughter are underway. I am curious if you ever imagined what the book would look like on the screen. Are there any scenes that you are especially looking forward to watching? Any casting hopes for the mother, daughter, and daughter’s partner roles you have in mind? I get asked about the film adaptation a lot, but I honestly have a hard time picturing what it will look like. Or which actors would be good for the parts. There aren’t many incidents in the story, so I do hope that the everyday scenes of daily routines are portrayed well, but I truly think it’s all up to the director and the actors. One thing I’m curious about is what soundtrack will be used for which scenes. This year marks the tenth year since you debuted as a novelist. How has your perception or attitude toward fiction changed in the last decade? My perception of fiction has changed significantly since long ago when I first made up my mind to become a novelist. Back then, fiction was a story that was separate and distant from me, and that was enough. I must have believed that it was possible to maintain that distance between my life and the novels I write. But I think my stories are bound to come into contact and overlap with my life at a certain point. This is unavoidable. Another change is that I find myself often wondering what it means to be a novelist in this age where personal narratives are increasing exponentially. Why should we read novels today when the stories of individuals are special and important? The standard of art in general, including fiction, is changing, and I wonder if we are living in an age where the value of a work of art is actively and quickly re-established by the audience and readers. I don’t have any good answers to these questions, but I certainly do wonder about more questions and take more things into consideration when I write than I ever did before. Translated by Jamie Chang
by Park Hye-jin
Interview with Gu Byeong-mo: The Rejection of Stereotypes
Your work moves fluidly among many topics and genres, from fantasy to realism. Where do you get inspiration for your stories? Because my characters and fictional worlds involve an elderly woman assassin, a wizard’s bakery, a fish-human, bird-humans, and AI robots, many people think I come up with topics in a variety of ways. To be honest, that’s sort of an illusion, owing to the fact that I wrote a number of books over a short period of twelve years. My interests generally span many areas and topics and I don’t do anything special to find something to write about. I might be inspired by something small I come across in my day-to-day life, or I might be reading a poem and get sucked in by a single word that then expands into an imaginary world that has nothing to do with the poem itself. It could be that my ability to find things to write about in ordinary day-to-day life is a little more honed, but it’s not something that comes with practice; I had an active imagination as a child and it just became a part of me. I don’t think that subject matter is the most important element in fiction. Students who begin to write often worry about “what” to write, but in my view the “how” is more critical than the “what.” ©Ozak Your works have unique titles, with Pagwa deriving from Chinese characters, Bird Strike from English, and other novels from Korean. In the US, Pagwa is being published as The Old Woman with the Knife. How do you come up with your titles? I mull them over until the perfect title, the most symbolic and meaningful, the most beautiful, comes to me. There’s no one way I come up with a title. I decide on the title once I have a rough outline of a novel, before I begin writing. Some writers start with a working title and change it later, but for me it’s hard to write if I don’t definitively decide on one from the beginning, so I tend to think about it for a long time. So it’s exceedingly rare for a title to change during the editing process for publication. The title for the American edition of Pagwa was changed into something more intuitive and intriguing, but the original title has an ambiguity to it—it’s a Chinese homonym that means “bruised fruit” and “peak of youth” or “the flower of life.” Your characters’ names are also unique. How do you come up with names in your fiction? My characters have names that aren’t too hard to say in Korean, and which also reflect their personalities and temperaments. Depending on the atmosphere of the novel, sometimes they don’t have names at all and are only referred to by pronouns, or in my more realistic novels, they have names you could easily find in contemporary Korean society, while in worlds that contain imaginary elements, as in Pagwa, I try to find names that are comparatively rare. In an entirely fantastical world like in Bird Strike, I try to come up with ambiguous names that aren’t familiar in Korean but aren’t English either, names that don’t point to any specific country. For all novels I use a Hanja [Sino-Korean] dictionary, which I find very useful when naming characters, since a single pronunciation can contain multiple meanings. In Pagwa (The Old Woman with the Knife), the main character, Jogak (Hornclaw in the English version), is a woman in her sixties, and weaponizes the invisibility of her age and gender to carry out her work as an assassin. How did you land on that premise? Around 2010, I was planning out several stories, and I vaguely thought that I wanted to write about a killer for one of them. But there are so many movies and novels and comics about killers so I kept it in the back of my mind, knowing that a misstep could make the book feel tired and clichéd. One day, I found rotten peaches in the crisper when I was cleaning out my fridge; I’d received them as a gift and forgotten about them. I wiped up the mess and thought, That’s going to be me soon. That was when the story came to me—of someone who’s become like those peaches, of an over-the-hill senior citizen assassin. Around that time an excellent novel had been published in Korea: Kim Un-su’s The Plotters. The main character in that work is a young man who’s smart, cynical, and strong, and I thought I would take an entirely different path. Seniors are considered weak and burdensome in our society, people who should be quickly pushed aside, and older women are particularly mistreated. And so I thought a mature woman, someone who nobody considers important or even notices, should pick up a weapon. ©Ozak For the English edition, you requested that Haeu (Worryfixer in the English version) use non-binary pronouns. Of course, in Korean, gender is often less obvious due to the language structure. Why was that important to you? In 2013, when the book was first published in Korea, Haeu was written as a woman. This character has a small but clear role in the novel, and she’s a bit of a trickster. With the revised edition coming out in 2018, I thought, Isn’t it a stereotype that someone who wears large earrings and likes jewelry has to be a woman? So I didn’t refer to Haeu as “her.” I asked you to use non-binary pronouns for the English translation, but I’m not sure that this was reflected in all foreign-language editions. Some might think that depicting a man who wears earrings and is fond of jewelry could be prejudicial toward certain groups, but I wanted to acknowledge to myself that someone’s preferences have nothing to do with their gender. Your work has been translated into many languages. Do you have a favorite and least favorite part about the process of translation? With English-language readers being exposed to fewer works in translation than the rest of the world, have there been different challenges with the translation process into English? It’s hard to offer examples, but I’m sure there are Korea-specific emotions, habits, relationships, family lines, objects, and more that I write without thinking twice about and that other Koreans intuitively understand. There might be some parts that are harder for English readers to comprehend, but I think most of these issues would have been solved by your work and mediation during the translation process. And I think this is something that often happens when literature crosses borders, regardless of countries; there are many cases where a book translated into Korean includes a translator’s note since there are, for example, medieval customs or jokes or characteristics specific to that culture that Korean readers may not fully get. I’m especially excited about introducing a prickly, multilayered woman to an English-language readership. In many cultures, elderly women are rarely depicted as having three dimensionality, much less as people with ambition and dedication to craft. In the US, Asian women in particular are even more rarely seen that way. Can you talk about what you had in mind as you were developing the character of Hornclaw? It never occurred to me when I was writing this novel that it would go to the US, and I’m not that familiar with how Americans perceive older Asian women. But regardless of country or culture, assuming that older women are looked down upon and discriminated against in general, I think the only difference would be their relative social standing and economic power. As you mention, it does seem that older Asian women are seen that way by non-Asian people. It could be that those views unconsciously impacted me, as the older woman assassin I created is a small, shabby, easily forgettable person. There is only a brief mention of a baby that Hornclaw sends away for adoption. Hornclaw is matter of fact about maternal roles and that experience doesn’t define her. Our culture defines women so much by motherhood that this felt fresh and groundbreaking. When you were writing about Hornclaw, were you including criticism of the roles or expectations of women? It wasn’t my intention to critique when I was writing the book; rather, I intuitively thought that these attitudes and feelings would make sense for this character. I wrote certain parts without precisely mapping out each and every intention and behavior, instead writing in ways that felt right, and this is an example of that. But afterward, I did think that I wrote it with the intention you mention. There’s a time gap between the act of writing a sentence and the act of interpreting its meaning. In other words, what I wrote reflects my own thoughts about maternal love. Maternal love isn’t essential or innate to women, but our society stipulates that it is and pressures women, and that would be especially so for a woman old enough to be considered a grandmother. I think I was revealing my rejection of that stereotype, my rejection of those types of demands on women, without necessarily being cognizant of it. ©Ozak There is warmth and kindness in your work, in that each character, no matter how flawed or unlikeable, is seen in their full humanity. Can you talk about your affinity for outsiders who populate works like Wizard Bakery, Pagwa, Agami (Gills), and Bird Strike? I don’t believe that literature needs to shine a spotlight on people who are appreciated in society and live nice lives, though of course they have their own challenges. There are also writers who truly dedicate themselves to illuminating the shadows, examining poor and disadvantaged communities, and depicting abjection, the rejected, and the precariat, so I don’t think it’s quite right to say that I write specifically about outsiders that frequently. While Hornclaw sees her declining physical ability and growing empathy to be weaknesses, it could be said that she’s growing as a person. Many people believe that there is tension between objective excellence and developing and maturing as a well-rounded person. What kind of commentary did you want to make about aging? I was thirty-six when I completed this novel. I wasn’t acutely feeling what it was like to age, and you could say I was at the peak of my youth, especially by today’s standards. I understood old age only intellectually, so I do think that the details of aging as I wrote them are not as accurate. While it can be desirable as a human being to sympathize with others, to be compassionate, and to actively intervene and help others, those qualities remind me of the virtues of care work that are often only demanded of women. That’s why for Hornclaw they are signs of weakness and why she feels disinclined toward them. This novel doesn’t promote an idea of what people become as they age or what people should be like as they grow older. It merely shows what it’s like to be old. It shows that when a thousand young people get old, each of those thousand people grows old differently. If someone reads this novel and thinks, This doesn’t make any sense, there’s nobody like this in the world, I would say that I’m not telling a story about all “typical” old people in the world (or what people want to believe is typical), but about this specific old person, this one woman. Translated and Interviewed by Chi-Young Kim
by Chi-Young Kim
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