INTERVIEW

• Video highlights from Han Kang's artist talk event Vol.32 Summer 2016

  Video highlights from Han Kang's artist talk event

• Interview: 2016 Man Booker International Prize Winner Han Kang

  What is life? What is death? Who am I? Writing means embracing these ever resilient questions as you move forward.   Introduction Hello, I’m Han Kang and I write novels. It’s always a very special and amazing experience to meet my readers. Translation is such a singular process where a book is completely reborn, and I am so grateful to be able to meet you through this demanding and interesting process.   Q. How did you become a writer? I was always reading as a child. We moved a lot, so I changed schools a lot, and I remember reading by myself until I made new friends. So I was reading for pure pleasure as a child, and then I revisited those books when I was a teenager. I was asking all of those typically adolescent questions, what does it mean to be human, why do people die, what is life, who am I, and when I reread those books I was surprised to not find the answers—there were only questions, not answers. And I felt that the authors, the writers were as vulnerable and clueless as I was, asking and recording the same questions that I had. So I felt a sense of kinship with them, although of course I was only a very young and insignificant being, and I thought that if writing is about asking questions, and not necessarily finding answers, I could write that way too.   Q. Could you introduce yourself briefly? I studied Korean literature in university. After I graduated I worked for about three years in publishing and magazines. I made books, I interviewed people and wrote articles, I went on trips on assignment. After I started writing myself, there have been times when I’ve been writing full time and when I teach on the side; and so the time goes.   Q. When do you feel fulfilled as a writer? For me, to write is to endlessly question what is life, what is death, what am I. When I write, especially when I’m writing novels, I’m exchanging one, two, three, sometimes four years for that book. So when I feel that I’m going forward as a writer, when I see that I explored what it means to be human in a certain way in this book and I went another way in another book, that’s when I’m glad that I became a writer.   Q. Your novel The Vegetarian is about…? The protagonist is a woman named Young-hye, who sees vegetarianism as a way of not inflicting harm on anything. Eating meat symbolizes human violence, the violence of this world, and she chooses vigilant vegetarianism as a way of purging herself of that violence. But then she starts to identify as a plant rather than a human and stops eating entirely. She becomes completely exhausted, with the ironic result that what she did to redeem herself ends up killing her.   Q. How was The Vegetarian conceived? I have an old story called “The Fruit of My Woman,” from ten years or so ago, about a woman who actually, physically becomes a plant and her husband puts her in a flowerpot and waters her and takes care of her. I always wanted to write a follow-up to that story, so that was my first motivation, and secondly I have always been curious about human violence, I wanted to explore if human innocence was possible, what someone would have to overcome to lead a completely blameless life.   Q. What message did you want to convey through this novel? Can a person be completely innocent? What happens when we vow not to hurt anything? What is sin, and what is redemption? What is beauty? These are the questions that I hope to share with the readers of this book.   Q. Who is your favorite character in this book? This novel is made up of three parts, but ironically the protagonist, Young-hye, doesn’t have a voice. She’s a silent character that is observed, desired, misunderstood, and pitied, and for precisely those reasons I took great care when writing her. After her I feel for her sister In-hye the most. You could say the novel is about these two sisters. Young-hye is never truly understood by anyone, but In-hye is the character who comes closest to understanding her pain. I love her for trying to understand and for sharing her sister’s pain.   Q. If you could pick one sentence that best represents Young-hye? Young-he doesn’t have a voice as a narrator, but she expresses how she feels, what she’s thinking, through conversation. She says to her sister, “I’m standing upside down, and leaves are growing from my body and roots sprout from my hands and burrow into the ground.” She’s recounting how her body is transforming into a plant, so for her it’s such a critical thing to say.   Q. What are your personal thoughts on vegetarianism? I was a vegetarian for a few years in my late twenties. So I have felt the same kind of fear as Young-hye, as if everyone was trying to get me to eat meat. After that I started eating meat again for health reasons, in small amounts. But I still don’t like meat, and always feel a sense of guilt about eating it. I know people who are meat eaters but who think a lot about the fact that we take other lives to preserve our own. So for the vegetarianism question, I used to do it, and now feel a bit guilty about eating meat.   Q. Is there any background behind your vegetarianism and how it ended up in The Vegetarian? I recently published a novel called Here Comes the Boy, about a boy who dies during the Gwangju Massacre of May 1980. It’s a story that’s been 30 years in the making, during which the question of human violence has never left me. Are humans violent by nature? How do we suppress this violence, then? These are the kind of questions I’ve been living with for a long time. Looking back, I realize that The Vegetarian was about this question as well. The question of innocence. Can we become beings that reject violence? That was the question I was exploring. In retrospect, I wonder if my thoughts about vegetarianism, my guilt towards eating meat, might be connected to the Gwangju Massacre I experienced indirectly as a child. That was a defining experience for me, and in some ways Here Comes the Boy and The Vegetarian feel like a pair, although they are very different in other ways.   Q. What do you constantly think about as a writer? My fundamental question is, what does it mean to be human? Obviously it’s an ongoing question that changes with each novel. So in The Vegetarian I was asking, what is man? Can man be innocent? Can we reject violence completely? And in Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing, I ask, is it possible to reconcile the great contrast of beauty and violence in this world? Is life worth living? After that, in Greek Lessons the question is if we can bear this life, in what form is that possible? And in Here Comes the Boy the question is, what does it mean to be human? What should we do to not be a certain way? So it’s always changing. But the fundamental question underlying everything is, what does it mean to be human?    Copyright ⓒ Literature Translation Institute of Korea

• Meet the Author: Han Kang

  I've always been concerned with certain questions since I started writing.

• Eyes that Pierce into the Hinterland of Life Novelist Han Kang Vol.15 Spring 2012

  On a bitterly cold day in Seoul, I met the novelist Han Kang, whose gaze made me forget about the cold outside. I had always wondered where within this calm and thoughtful person hid her grand and relentless narratives. Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970 and moved to Seoul when she was 11 years old. Right after graduating from university in 1993, she made her literary debut with a poem in the journal Literature and Society. She won a spring literary contest the following year for her short story, “Red Anchor,” marking her emergence as a fiction writer. Since the beginning of her literary career, Han has received extraordinary attention, later becoming known as one of Korea's controversial writers with the publication of Love in Yeosu in 1995 and The Fruit of My Woman in 2000. The considerable talent she exhibited in her short story collections sparkled with even more brilliance in her string of novels including Black Deer (1998), Your Cold Hands (2000), The Vegetarian (2007), Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing (2010), and her most recent work, Greek Lessons. Han Kang has continued to receive favorable reviews in addition to winning major Korean literary awards, including the Kim Dongri Literature Prize, Yi Sang Literary Award, Korean Fiction Prize, and Today's Young Artist Prize. Although Han is now known as a novelist with a unique and worldly aesthetic, she originally made her literary debut as a poet. Han Kang: In my freshman year I began to write both poetry and fiction at the same time. Whenever I sat down at my desk, I began by writing a poem or editing one I had written earlier. After spending an hour on poetry, I would then turn my attention to the novel I had been working on the previous night. After I made my debut, I found myself spending a disproportionately greater amount of time writing novels, but there are still those unexpected times when I'm able to write three or four poems a year. Rather than being known for a sharp wit reflecting contemporary trends, Han Kang, I believe, has a characteristic eye for reflecting on the tragedy and hurt that fundamentally lurk deep in the human psyche. Thus it makes sense that she began her literary career as a poet, because poems require attention to detail, focus, and penetrating insight more than quick wits. Her first story collection, Love in Yeosu, can be viewed as a personal record of discerning insights into a faithless world during the author's youth. It was her first book, created during a period of intensely focused writing just a year after her literary debut. The story collection was so polished and intense that it was hard to believe it had been written by an author in her mid-20s. Perhaps that is why literary critic Kim Byong-ik wrote the following comment in a review of her first book: “I just hope that the author's zeal and gregariousness help her regain her youth.” In comparison to her literary peers demonstrating humor and wit, why was Han Kang so sensitive to the themes of hurt and suffering so early in her career? I sought a belated reply from the author in response to the critic Kim Byong-ik's comment. Han: Well, at that time I didn't think physical age was so important. It's not as if I intentionally wrote somber stories. Recently I've had the chance to re-read my first story collection while preparing a revised edition for my publisher. Most of the characters appearing in this collection don’t believe in healing or reconciliation, and reject consolation to the very end. Although this causes them to waver, they try to live in the moment. I now realize that this was my honest impression of the world's essence during that period of my life. After the period of so-called realist fiction in the 1980s had passed, some Korean novelists used humor, while others used eloquent verbosity, lyrical aphorisms, and even trivialism to improve the critical response to their writing. In her first published work, however, Han used her penetrating gaze to peel off the veil of ideology and grand causes, revealing the hinterland of lives for all to see. This will and tenacity put Han Kang in rare company in the world of Korean literature. Perhaps that is why her emergence in the mid-1990s was so controversial. The expectations of readers after the publication of Han's first story collection, Love in Yeosu, were finally met in 1998 when the author published her first novel, Black Deer. The novel is a kind of travel epic that begins with a young woman who’s gone missing. This novel considers the issue of heartbreak superimposed upon the rift between individualism and modern zeitgeist. Literary critic Seo Young-chae highly praised the work, commenting, “This novel signals the arrival of a young master, no less.” The many novels following in the wake of Black Deer have proven Seo’s comment to be more prophetic than laudatory. Her second novel, Your Cold Hands, follows a sculptor, who makes plaster life casts, and his consecutive liaisons with two women. The story is about truth and perspective, illuminating people’s inner world hidden behind flimsy masks. After a hiatus of several years, Han Kang published The Vegetarian, Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing, and other works in succession, all featuring strong narratives through which the author tenaciously plumbed the depths of life's tragedies. While writing these two books, however, the author herself seems to have experienced pathos firsthand.   Critic Cho Kang-sok and novelist Han Kang   Han: The Vegetarian is divided into three chapters from the point of view of three different characters close to Young-hae, with whom they have made the resolution to go strictly vegetarian. As for the question of what vegetarianism symbolizes…this novel grew out of my curiosity over whether a completely innocent human being could exist. The protagonist, Young-hae, resolutely pursues vegetarianism to the end, to the point that she believes she is a plant and refuses to eat at all. In the process of writing this book, my questions concerning violence, beauty, desire, sin, and salvation became fused together. I remember that completing the last chapter, “Wooden Fireworks,” was particularly difficult for me, as I had to use the voice of In-hae, Young-hae's older sister, who was floundering while trying to understand Young-hae and Young-hae’s physical collapse." The Vegetarian was even adapted for the screen. The cinematic version became a sensation for being one of 10 competing Korean films invited to the 2010 The Sundance Film Festival. The same director also used Han Kang's novella, Baby Buddha, as the basis for the film, “Scar,” which was one of the works selected to compete in the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Han: Because of the sexual content in this novel, I was worried about careless adaptations to film.Fortunately, the director approached the task with sincerity and enthusiasm, so I decided to let the film adaptation go forward after many consultations.I believe the perspective of the film itself was faithful to the original work, but I was disappointed by the film distributor's provocative focus on the film’s sexual elements for the marketing campaign. The Vegetarian is about the painful relationship between two sisters. It looks at pain over the passage of time and considers the possibility of healing. On the other hand, it examines the possibility of ruin or salvation for those who cling so tenaciously to a dream of transformation. As suggested by the title of a chapter in The Vegetarian, “Mongolian Mark,” the themes in the book seem to have made a personal impression on the author. Her most recent book, Greek Lessons, however, gives a quite different feeling from that of her previous works. Han Kang shared an interesting anecdote about the book. 1. Black Deer Han Kang, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2005, 440p, ISBN 8982811338   2. Love in Yeosu Han Kang, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2001, 322p, ISBN 8932007500   3. The Fruit of My Woman Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2000, 328p, ISBN 8936436570     Han: My fourth novel, Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing, took me about four and a half years to write. After three years of toiling away on the book, I stopped working on it for a year for various reasons. During my time away from it, I wrote about 150 pages in just one month, which constituted a short first draft for Greek Lessons. In fact, Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing had great meaning for me personally, but it also consumed much energy. After having written 150 pages of Greek Lessons and published Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing, I thought to myself, ‘How about rewriting Greek Lessons?’ When I had written around 300 pages, I thought, ‘I'd like the story to be just a bit longer,’ so I rewrote it once more, which is how the book reached its present length. While writing and editing Greek Lessons, I felt many moments of quiet abundance. I actually had a harder time once it was published, because I had to come to terms with the fact that I would no longer be writing it. Once a novel is done, the writer must leave that world. Greek Lessons is the story of an instructor of Greek, who is losing his sight, and his student, who is losing her voice. The plot unfolds like a spiral, with each person’s narrative, background, and personal wounds unfolding separately. Toward the end of the story, however, their stories intersect. Han: I think this novel is the sunniest of which I am capable. I didn't purposefully write it in a positive or heartwarming way. Instead, I found that the story headed toward the light on its own while I was writing it. I realized that I was approaching the light, too. I couldn't tell on my own whether human warmth was indeed warm; there were parts that were so tender and primeval that I couldn't gauge their tenderness on my own. That's how I knew I was getting close. Approaching these areas required me as a writer to remain invisible. As the characters continued to overcome suffering, the novel gradually became more transparent. This was a strange and unforgettable experience for me. Han says that she first got the idea for Greek Lessons from the concept of the middle voice in the Greek language, explained to her by a friend who had majored in Greek. Han: After receiving a cup from me, my friend Gang-seok explained that the past tense form of the verb “to receive” differs between the cases “I received it and possess it” and “I received it but it was broken or stolen so I no longer possess it.” I found his explanation quite fascinating. I wanted to write a book based on this concept, but I never would have imagined that it would become a novel. I didn't turn a blind eye to human suffering in Greek Lessons; rather, I found the bright spots while writing the story. Now that I think of it, the four characters in Black Deer wavered amidst the suffering they experienced, and it was commensurate to the danger they faced. Ultimately, however, none of them perish and they live to see a dazzlingly bright and calm afternoon. When I completed this novel at the age of 29, I felt as if I had broken through to the other side. Come to think of it, I had the same feeling when I wrote Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing. When the artist Seo In-joo dies under mysterious circumstances, an art critic assumes it was a suicide, and uses her death to mythicize her. However, the artist's friend Jung-hee, who loved her like her own flesh and blood, attempts to get at the truth. Thus the art critic and Jung-hee each try to tell a different story. During this process, questions related to life and death, remembrance and reality, as well as the sacred and the profane struggle violently with each other. In the final scene, Jung-hee, who had been constantly feeble and morbid throughout this struggle, uses her last ounce of strength to crawl out of her burning house, to break through the fire. In The Vegetarian, which is filled with even more suffering, the story ends with In-hae riding in an ambulance while looking out the window at trees, which look as if they are on fire. When I write novels, in some sense, each work ends up with its own balance of light and dark, but ultimately, I always try to leave the future open for protagonists. The author's reference to breaking through stood out immediately. Han Kang’s novels get their intensity from observing characters facing problems and pursuing them to the end, until they deeply penetrate the principles underlying their issues. On the other hand, her novels get their breeziness from the sentences themselves, although Han Kang says she feuded with language itself for quite some time. Han: In Greek Lessons, we are introduced to a man gradually losing his sight and a woman who suddenly loses her voice. In the man’s case, it feels as if he is a portrait of the universal everyman. Slowly losing the world of sight and enduring the human condition of the inevitable yet gradual approach of death are one and the same. During the process of mortality, we struggle against death even as our lives are being consumed. This is akin to speech and silence occurring simultaneously. Human consciousness always coexists with darkness, but our voices are heard most clearly in the blackest darkness. During this battle against mortality, our power of speech becomes ragged, and ultimately the female protagonist loses her voice entirely. I think that she could also be a portrait of us all. This opinion reflects my experience of working on Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing for over four years. At that time I became extremely sensitive to language. Rather than conceptual concerns about language, the sensual act of writing itself became unbearable to me. All the words I was using felt like they had become ragged, which pained me. I overcame most of that torment while writing Greek Lessons. Han Kang says that she is in the midst of planning two novels; one of them, set in the 1940s, will be her first attempt at historical fiction. She hinted that the book she completes first will likely lean toward the direction she took in Greek Lessons: linguistic intimacy and narrative transparency which, according to the author, “might be viewed as a very personal approach toward breaking through to the light.”   By Cho Kang-sok 4. Your cold hands Han Kang, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2002, 330p, ISBN 8932013047   5. The Vegetarian Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2007, 247p, ISBN 9788936433598   6. Leave Now, the Wind Is Blowing Han Kang, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2010, 390p, ISBN 9788932020006  

FICTION

• Human Acts Vol.39 Spring 2018

  It wasn’t as though we didn’t know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn’t matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as any army. Conscience. Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world. The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean . . . the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it. At one o’clock in the afternoon, while the speaker in front of the Provincial Office was playing the national anthem, the soldiers opened fire. I’d been standing in the middle of the column of the demonstrators, but when the bullets came flying, I turned and ran. That sublime feeling that I’d been tapping into, that enormous heart I’d felt briefly a part of, was smashed to pieces, strewn over the ground as so much rubbish. And the gunfire wasn’t only in the square; snipers were also positioned on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Beside me and in front of me people crumpled to the ground, but I kept on running. Only when I was sure I’d left the square far behind did I let myself stagger to a stop. I was so out of breath I genuinely thought my lungs would burst. My face a mask of sweat and tears, I sank to my knees on the steps leading up to a shop door. Its shutters were down. A small group had gathered in the street, and I heard them talking about raiding the police stations and reserves barracks to get guns. They were clearly made of much sterner stuff than I was. We’re sitting ducks like this. They’ll gun us down, the lot of us. Paratroopers even broke into the houses in my area. I was so scared I slept with a kitchen knife by my pillow. Shooting hundreds of rounds like that in broad daylight – I’m telling you, the world’s gone mad! One of them jogged off to fetch his truck, and I stayed there slumped on the steps until he drove back. I thought about whether I really had it in me to carry a gun, to point it at a living person and pull the trigger. It was already late at night by the time the truck I was riding in returned to the centre. We’d twice taken a wrong turn, and when we’d got to the barracks we’d found that the guns had already been looted, so it turned out to be a wasted trip. In the meantime, I had no way of knowing how many had fallen in the street fighting. All I remember is the entrance to the hospital the following morning, the seemingly never-ending line of people queuing up to give blood; the doctors and nurses striding through the blasted streets, white gowns bloodstained, hands gripping stretchers; the women who handed up stale rice balls, water and strawberries to the truck I was riding in; the strains of the national anthem, and ‘Arirang,’ which everyone was singing at the top of their voice. Those snapshot moments, when it seemed we’d all performed the miracle of stepping outside the shell of our own selves, one person’s tender skin coming into grazed contact with another, felt as though they were rethreading the sinews of that world heart, patching up the fissures from which blood had flowed, making it beat again. That was what captured me, what has stayed with me ever since. Have you even known it, professor – that terrifying intensity, that feeling as if you yourself have undergone some kind of alchemy, been purified, made wholly virtuous? The brilliance of that moment, the dazzling purity of conscience. It’s possible that the kids who stayed behind at the Provincial Office that day experienced something similar. Perhaps they would have considered even death a fair exchange for that jewel of conscience. But no such certainty is possible now. Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was okay for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they’d left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice? When the announcement came over the wireless that the army would reach the Provincial Office within the next ten minutes, Jin-su propped his gun against the wall, stood up and said, ‘It’s possible that we could hold out until the morning and run the risk of dying in the process, but that’s not an option for the youngsters here.’ For all the world as though he himself were a seasoned adult of thirty or forty, rather than a boy barely out of school. ‘We have no choice but to surrender. If death seems the only other outcome, put down your guns and surrender right away. Look for a way to live.’   I don’t want to talk about what happened next. There is no one now who has the right to ask me to remember any more, and that includes you, professor. No, none of us fired our guns. None of us killed anybody. Even when the soldiers stormed up the stairs and emerged towards us out of the darkness, none of our group fired their guns. It was impossible for them to pull the trigger knowing that a person would die if they did so. They were children. We had handed out guns to children. Guns they were not capable of firing.   I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand. In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over. I genuinely believe that, if something had come up, the commanding officers would have issued the order for the troops on the ground to do just that. If we’d all done as the student representatives said, piled our guns in the lobby of the Provincial Office and attempted a clean surrender, we would have run the risk of the soldiers turning those same weapons on unarmed civilians. Every time I recall the blood that flowed in the small hours of that night – literally flowed, gushing over the stairs in the pitch dark – it strikes me that those deaths did not belong solely to those who died. Rather, they were a substitute for the deaths of others. Many thousands of deaths, many thousands of hearts’ worth of blood. Out of the corner of my eye I could see blood silently seeping from people I’d been speaking with mere moments before. Unable to tell who had died and who survived, I lay prone in the corridor, my face pressed into the floor. I felt someone write on my back with a magic marker. Violent element. Possession of firearms. That was what someone else informed me was written there, afterwards when they threw us into the cells at the military academy. * Those who hadn’t been carrying a gun at the time of their arrest were classified as mere accomplices, and were released in batches up until June, leaving only the so-called ‘violent elements’, those who had been caught in possession of firearms, still in the military academy. That was when the programme of torture entered a different phase. Rather than brutal beatings, our captors now chose more elaborate methods of inflicting pain, methods that would not be too physically taxing for them. ‘Hairpin torture’, where both arms were tied behind the back and a large piece of wood inserted between the bound wrists and the small of the back; waterboarding; electric torture; the method known as the ‘roast chicken’, which involved trussing the victim with ropes and suspending them from the ceiling, where they were then beaten while being spun around. Before, they’d tortured us in order to extract the particulars of actual crimes. Now, all they wanted was a false confession, so that our names could be slotted neatly into the script they had already devised. Kim Jin-su and I continued to receive a single tray and share its scant meal between us. It took an enormous feat of will to put what we’d experienced a few hours ago in the interrogation room behind us and wield our spoons in stony silence, fighting the temptation to scrap like animals over a grain of rice, a shred of kimchi. There was one man who knocked his meal tray over and screamed, I can’t take any more of this! What’s going to happen to me if you shovel the whole lot down yourself? As he grappled with his partner, a boy pushed between them and stuttered, D-don’t do that. I was taken aback; this was the first time I’d ever seen that quiet, shy-seeming kid open his mouth. W-we were r-ready to die, you know. It was then that Kim Jin-su’s empty gaze rose to meet mine. At that moment, I realised what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals. The boy with the stutter was called Yeong-chae. It was a name Kim Jin-su pronounced frequently in the afternoons following that initial altercation. In the ten or so minutes after the meal, which was when the guard tended to relax his vigilance, he would address the boy in a soft, friendly tone. You must be hungry, Yeong-chae, no? Kim Yeong-chae, where’s your family from? I’m a Gimhae Kim too. Which branch? You’re fifteen, right, well then, no need for honorifics with me. I’m only four years older than you at the most. I don’t look my age, do I? Oh, well, all right. Call me uncle, then. We’re distant relatives, after all. From listening in to their conversation, I learned that the boy hadn’t continued his education beyond middle school, and was learning carpentry at his uncle’s woodworking shop. He’d joined the civilian militia to follow in the footsteps of this uncle’s son, who was two years older; this cousin, to whom he’d always looked up, had been killed that final night at the YMCA. I-I l-like to eat sp-sponge cake the best. W-with S-sprite. Yeong-chae’s eyes stayed dry while he told the story of his dead cousin, but when Jin-su asked him what his favourite food was he had to scrub at them with his fists. With his right fist, that is. His left remained in his lap. I stared at it, at the cotton wool poking out from between those clenched fingers.   I was constantly racking my brains. Because I wanted to understand. Somehow or other, I needed to make sense of what I’d experienced. Watery discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only ‘me’ there was. Even now I find summer difficult to endure. When runnels of sweat trickle down over my chest and back, itching like the bite of insect mouths, that time when I was nothing but a lump of meat is suddenly back with me, the feeling unchanged, and I have to take a deep, steady breath. Grind my teeth together, and take another deep, steady breath.   When a square wooden cudgel is squeezed in between my shoulder blades, manipulated so that my screaming joints are forced as far apart as the physical composition of my body will possibly allow, when this body writhes and contorts and the words spew from its lips, for God’s sake, stop, I did wrong, seconds strung together with jerked, juddering gasps, when they insert a drill bit beneath my fingernails and toenails, shuddered-in breath spat out in a rush, for God’s sake stop, I did wrong, seconds patched with broken groans, rising into a wail, make this body disappear, please, for God’s sake, just wipe it off the face of the earth.  pp. 120–128   Copyright © 2014 by Han Kang.Translation copyright © 2016 by Deborah Smith.Reprinted with permission from Portobello Books.

• The White Book Vol.32 Summer 2016

  I   In the spring, when I decided to write about white things, the first thing I did was to make a list. Swaddling bandsNewborn gownSaltSnowIceMoonRiceWavesYulanWhite bird'Laughing whitely'Blank paperWhite dogWhite hairShroud   With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt that yes, I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform. Into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed. But then, a few days later, running my gaze down over that list again, I wondered what meaning might lie in this task, in peering into the heart of these words. If I rake those words across the heart of me, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string. Could I let myself hide between these sentences, veiled with white gauze? This was difficult to answer, so I left the list as it was and put off anything more. I came abroad in August, to this country I’d never visited before, got a short-term lease on an apartment in its capital, and learned to draw out my days in these strange environs. One night almost two months later, when the season’s chill was just beginning to bite, a migraine set in, viciously familiar, and I washed down some pills with warm water. And realised (quite calmly) that hiding would be impossible. Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness. The migraines that began when I was twelve or thirteen swoop down without warning, bringing agonising stomach cramps that stop daily life in its tracks. Even the smallest task is left suspended as I concentrate on simply enduring the pain, sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones, grazing my fingertips. One deep breath drawn in, and this new moment of life’s on-going takes shape distinct as a bead of a blood. Even once I have stepped back into the flow, one day melding seamlessly into another, that sensation remains ever there in that spot, waiting, breath held. Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. With no time for our will to arrest or impel, we lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way. Now, in this moment, I feel that vertiginous thrill course through me. As I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written.   Door This was something that happened a long time ago. Before signing the contract for the lease, I went to look at the flat again. Its metal door had once been white, but that brightness had faded over time. It was a mess when I saw it, paint flaking off in patches to reveal the rust beneath. And if that had been all, I would have remembered it as nothing more than a scruffy old door. But there was also the way its number, 301, had been inscribed. Someone – perhaps another in a long line of temporary occupants – had used some sharp implement, maybe a drill bit, to scratch the number into the door’s surface. I could make out each individual stroke. 3, itself three hand spans high. 0, smaller, yet gone over several times, a fierce scrawl that tugged at your gaze. Finally, 1, a long deep-gouged line, taut with the effort of its making. Along this collection of straight and curved wounds rust had spread like a vestige of violence, like long-dried blood stains, hardened, reddish-black. I hold nothing dear. Not the place I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life. Those numbers were glaring fiercely at me, clenching their teeth tight shut. That was the flat I wanted that winter, the flat where I’d chosen to spin out my days. As soon as I’d unpacked, I bought a tin of white paint and a good-sized paintbrush. Neither the kitchen nor the bedroom had been re-papered, and their walls were spotted with stains large and small. These dark splotches were especially conspicuous around any electrical switches. Wearing pale grey tracksuit bottoms and an old white sweater, so the splatters wouldn’t show up too badly. Even before I’d started to paint, I had no ambition of achieving a neat, even finish. It would be enough, I reasoned, just to paint over the stains – surely white splotches are better than dirty ones? I swept my brush over the ceiling’s large patches, where the rain must have seeped through at one time, watching grey disappear beneath white. I gave the sink’s grubby interior a wipe with a flannel before painting it that same bright white, never mind that its pedestal was brown. Finally I stepped out into the corridor to paint the front door. With each swish of the brush over the scar-laced surface, its impurities were erased. Those deep-gouged numbers disappeared, those rusted bloodstains vanished. I went back inside the apartment to take a break and get warm, and when I came back out an hour later I saw the paint had run down. It looked untidy, probably because I was using a brush rather than a roller. After painting an extra layer over the top so the streaks were less visible, I went back inside to wait. Another hour went by before I shuffled out in my slippers to find that snow had begun to scatter down. Outside, the alley had darkened; the street lights were not yet on. Paint tin in one hand, brush in the other, I stood unmoving, a dumb witness to the snowflakes’ slow descent, like hundreds of feathers feathering down.    Translated by Deborah SmithPrinted with permission of Portobello Books, London, UK.  

• The Vegetarian Vol.27 Spring 2015

  He opened the sketchbook. The drawings filled scores of pages and, despite being based on fundamentally the same idea, were completely different from the performance poster in terms of atmosphere and artistic feel. The naked bodies of the men and women were brilliantly decorated, covered all over in painted flowers, and there was something simple and straightforward about the ways in which they were having sex. Without the taut buttocks, tensed inner thighs, and the skinny upper bodies that gave them a dancer’s physique, there would have been no more suggestiveness about them than there was with spring flowers. Their bodies—he hadn’t drawn in faces—had a stillness and solidity which counterbalanced the arousing nature of the situation. The image had come to him in a flash of inspiration. It had happened last winter, when he’d started to believe that he might somehow be able to bring his year-long fallow period to an end, when he’d felt energy start to wriggle up from the pit of his stomach, bit by bit. But how could he have known this energy would coalesce into such a preposterous image? For one thing, up until then his work had always tended towards realism. And so, for someone who had previously worked on 3D graphics of people worn down by the vicissitudes of late capitalist society, to be screened as factual documentaries, the carnality, the pure sensuality of this image, was nothing short of monstrous. And the image might never have come to him, if it hadn’t been for a chance conversation. Had his wife not asked him to give their son a bath that Sunday afternoon. Had he not watched her helping their son to pull on his underpants after towelling him dry and been moved to exclaim, ‘That Mongolian mark is still so big! When on earth do they fade away?’ Had she not replied thoughtlessly, ‘Well... I can’t remember exactly when mine went. And Yeong-hye still had hers when she was twenty.’ If she hadn’t then followed up his astonished ‘Twenty?’ with ‘Mmm... just a thumb-sized thing, blue. And if she had it that long, who knows, maybe she’s still got it now.’ In precisely that moment he was struck by the image of a blue flower on a woman’s buttocks, its petals opening outwards. In his mind, the fact that his sister-in-law still had a Mongolian mark on her buttocks became inexplicably bound up with the image of men and women having sex, their naked bodies completely covered with painted flowers. The causality linking these two things was so clear, so obvious, as to be somehow beyond comprehension, and thus it became etched into his mind. Though her face was missing, the woman in his sketch was undoubtedly his sister-in-law. No, it had to be her. He’d imagined what her naked body must look like and began to draw, finishing it off with a dot like a small blue petal in the middle of her buttocks, and he’d got an erection. It was almost the first time since his marriage, and definitely the first time since he’d said goodbye to his mid-thirties, that he’d felt such intense sexual desire, a desire which, moreover, was focused on a clear object. And so who was the faceless man with his arms around her neck, looking as if he was attempting to throttle her, who was thrusting himself into her? He knew that it was himself; that, in fact, it could be none other. Arriving at this conclusion, he grimaced. He spent a long time searching for a solution, for a way to free himself from the hold this image had on him, but nothing else would do as a substitute. Another image as intense and enticing as this one simply didn’t exist. There was no other work he wanted to do. Every exhibition, film, performance, came to feel dull and flat, for no other reason than that it wasn’t this. He spent hours seemingly lost in a daydream, mulling over how to make the image become a reality. He would rent a studio from his painter friend and install lighting, get some body paints and a white sheet to cover the floor . . . he let his thoughts run on like this even though the most important thing, persuading his sister-in-law, still remained to be done. He agonized for a long time over whether he might be able to replace her with another woman, when the suspicion occurred to him, somewhat belatedly, that the film he was planning could all too easily be categorized as pornography. Never mind his sister-in-law, no woman would agree to such a thing. In that case, should he shell out a large sum of money to hire a professional actress? Even if, after making a hundred concessions, he eventually managed to get the thing filmed, would he really be able to exhibit it? He’d often anticipated that his work, which dealt with social issues, might put him in the firing line with some people, but never before had he imagined himself being branded as some peddler of cheap titillation. He’d always been completely unrestricted when it came to making his art, and so it hadn’t ever really occurred to him that this freedom might become a luxury. If it hadn’t been for the image he would never have had to go through all this anxiety, this discomfort and unease, this agonizing doubt and self-examination. He wouldn’t have had to suffer the fear of losing everything he’d achieved—not that that really amounted to all that much—even his family, in one fell swoop, and due to a choice that he himself had made. He was becoming divided against himself. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he’d been so sure before.    pp. 58 - 61

• Greek Lessons Vol.15 Spring 2012

  2. Silence   The woman brings her hands together in front of her chest. She wrinkles her forehead and looks up at the blackboard. “Now, read it aloud.” A man, with a smile playing on his lips, says to the woman. He is wearing a thick pair of silver-rimmed glasses. The woman’s lips quiver. She licks her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue. Her hands fidget nervously but quietly in front of her. She parts her mouth momentarily, then closes it. She holds her breath, then inhales deeply. As if to say that he will wait patiently for her, the man takes a step away from her and towards the blackboard. “Please read.” The woman’s eyelids shudder. Like layers of insect wings rubbing furiously against one another. She shuts her eyes tightly, expecting to be transported to a new place when she opens them again. With fingers deeply imprinted with chalk, the man repositions his glasses. “Go ahead. Read.”   The woman wears a black turtleneck sweater with black pants. Her coat draped across the chair is also black, as is the knitted scarf that rests in her large black canvas bag. Looking as if she had just walked out of a funeral, her gaunt face hovers above her black outfit. Her skin is coarse. She looks like a human clay sculpture that had been stretched out to look more emaciated. The woman is neither young nor beautiful. There is a twinkle in her eyes, but because her eyelids never cease to twitch, their glimmer is barely noticeable. Her shoulders and her back are hunched over, as if she is escaping from the world into the darkness of her clothing, and her nails are cut painfully short. On her left wrist is a velvet maroon hair elastic – the only thing on the woman’s body with any color. “Now everyone, together.” The man can no longer wait for the woman to respond. He throws equally long, deliberate glances at the young college student sitting in the same row as the woman, the middle-aged man hiding halfway behind the column, and the heavy-set youth sitting askew by the window. “Emos, emeteros. My, our.” Three students read along quietly. “Sos, humeteros. Your, your.” The man standing at the podium looks to be in his mid to late thirties. His build is on the smaller side, but the line of his eyebrows and the depression between his nose and upper lip are prominent. A thin smile playing on his lips masks his thoughts. His dark brown corduroy jacket has a small patch of lighter brown leather at the elbows, and his wrists peek out of sleeves that are just a bit too short. He has a thin white scar curving from the edge of his left eye to the corner of his mouth. The woman looks up at it silently. When she had first noticed his scar, she imagined it as a trail of tears marked on an ancient map. Behind his thick lenses tinted with the slightest touch of green, the man’s eyes focus on the woman’s tightly shut lips. His smile fades. He turns away to hide his stern expression and hurriedly writes a short Greek sentence on the blackboard. Before even getting to place the accents, the chalk falls to the ground, breaking in two.   Late last spring, with hands dusty with chalk, the woman stood leaning against the blackboard. A minute passed since the woman had not been able to find the right words to continue, and the students began to stir. She was staring blankly, not at her students, the ceiling, or even the windows, but into the void in front of her. “Are you okay?” A curly-haired female student with charming eyes asked her from the front row. The woman tried to smile in response, but all she could muster was a brief twitch of her eyelid. Her shaking lips were forcefully shut, and originating somewhere even deeper than her tongue or throat, she murmured to herself. It has come back. The forty something students sitting in front of her nervously met each other’s eyes, and muted whispers of “What’s going on?” spread from desk to desk. The only thing she could do was to step calmly out of the classroom. She kept her composure to the best of her ability. The second she was completely out in the hallway, the hushed murmurings in the classroom escalated quickly as if someone had turned up the speakers. The noise swallowed up the echoes of her clicking heels on the marble floor. Beginning the year she had graduated from college, the woman worked for six or so years at a publishing company and at an editing agency. After she quit, she was been a lecturer of literature for seven years at two universities and one high school of the arts in the metropolitan area. Every three years or so, she published a collection of serious poetry, and she had been a columnist in a bi-weekly book review magazine for several years. Recently, she was busy with meetings every Wednesday as a founding member for a yet unnamed cultural magazine. But now that it was back, she had to put a hold to all her work. There was no reason, no warning for it. Of course, it had been six months since her mother passed away, several years since her divorce, three lawsuits since she had lost the custody of her nine-year-old son, and five months since her child had returned to her ex-husband’s house. The gray-haired psychiatrist, whom she had been seeing weekly due to her insomnia that came about after losing custody of her son, could not understand why the woman kept denying the blatantly self-evident reasons for her sleeping disorder. No. She had written on the white paper on the table. Things aren’t that simple. That was their last meeting. Their sessions, which had to be conducted through writing, were too time consuming and had led to too many misunderstandings. He suggested that she see a different doctor specializing in speech therapy, but she respectfully declined. More than anything else, she no longer had the financial means to afford such expensive therapy.   *   It is said that the woman had been a precocious child. Her mother, as she underwent chemotherapy in the last year of her life, constantly reminded the woman of this fact. As if it was the most important thing to do before her impending death. This may have been true about the woman’s skills in language. At the age of four, she had taught herself the Korean alphabet. Not yet aware of the concepts of consonants and vowels, she simply memorized words in their entirety. It was not until she was six that her brother, mimicking his homeroom teacher, had taught her proper linguistic structures. At first, when she learned these concepts, they were meaningless, vague ideas, but every afternoon that early spring, she squat on her porch with the sun shining down on her, unable to shake off thoughts of those vowels and consonants. And after a while, she discovered the subtle difference between the n sound in pronouncing na and ni, and soon afterwards the difference in the s sound in sa and si. Having made all the possible vowel combinations in her head, she realized that the i and ŭ sounds, were the only two vowels sounds that could not be combined respectively, and because of this, there was also no way for her to write the sound in Korean. These humble linguistic discoveries had given her such vivid memories of sheer excitement that, twenty years later, when the psychiatrist asked about her earliest, most intense memory, she recalled the rays of sun that she had felt on the porch that spring. Her neck and back, tingling from the warmth of the sunlight. Words, thoughtfully etched into the dirt with a stick. Pieces of the alphabet, precariously clinging to one another, holding a mysterious but miraculous potential.   Afterwards, as she entered elementary school, she began to record words in the back pages of her journal. Without reason, without context, they were simply words that she found particularly interesting. Her favorite was the word sup (숲), for forest. It was an architecturally formed word, with its structure reminiscent of ancient pagodas. The ㅍ was the stylobat, the ㅜ was the body, and the ㅅ was the very top. In the pronunciation in the order of s-u-p, she enjoyed the slow exhalation of air through her contracted O-shaped lips. Then the lips would close completely. A word that ends in silence. There was a stillness that surrounded its pronunciation, meaning, and shape. Mesmerized by the word, she repeatedly wrote: 숲. 숲. Contrary to her mother’s recollection of the woman being “exceptionally bright” as a child, she had not been one to stand out from her peers. All through middle school, she was not a troublemaker, but nor did she have particularly good grades. She had a handful of friends, but none close enough for her to hang out with after school. Except for when she was washing her face, she was a curiously uninterested young girl who never spent time in front of the mirror, and not once did she feel the slightest longing for romance. After school, she would head to the nearest public library to read books, but not her school textbooks, and at night, she would read herself to sleep under a pile of even more library books. The only person who knew that her life was being violently torn in two was the young girl herself. The words that she wrote in the back of her diary were beginning to writhe anxiously, joining to form alien sentences. Occasionally, the pointed words would pierce through into her dreams, viciously rousing her from her sleep. The less she slept, the more her nerves stood dangerously on edge, and sometimes, unexplainable bouts of pain would strike the pit of her stomach. The most agonizing part was that every individual word she let slip from her mouth, she heard with terrifying clarity. No matter how trifling the word or sentence, its completeness and imperfections, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, were evident to her with icy transparency. She felt shame from the tangled white webs of sentences streaming from her tongue and her fingers. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream.   It was winter of when she turned seventeen that it finally came. Language, which had been pricking her relentlessly like a robe of needles, suddenly vanished from her body. She could hear the sounds of words in her ears, but the thick, dense atmospheric layer of silence was blocking the passages between her ears and her brain. The movement of her tongue and lips which she had used for making sounds, and the firm grip of her pencil which she had used to write words – these memories were muffled by the same silence. She could no longer access them. The girl did not think in terms of language anymore. She moved without language and she understood without language. She was enclosed by the silence that absorbed the passage of time like cotton batting. She returned to a time before she knew how to speak, no, to a time even before she had been granted life in this world. The girl’s very shaken mother took her to the psychiatrist to get medication, but the girl spent the following two seasons hiding the pills under her tongue, then burying them in the flowerbed. In the same yard where she had first learned of vowels and consonants, she spent her days squatting, feeling the sun on her back and her neck, just as she had done before. Even before the first heat wave of summer, the nape of her neck was darkly tanned, and the bridge of her nose, which was always damp with sweat, was red from heat rash. The scarlet sage flower that had bloomed absorbing the woman’s drugs started to wither. It was then that the girl’s mother and doctor decided it was time for her to return to school. It was becoming glaringly clear that staying at home was not doing her any good, and it was agreed that the she had to finish her schooling. She had received an assignment notification to a high school in February earlier that year, but had never been on the school grounds. It was an uninviting place. The academic materials were far ahead of where she had left off, and the teachers, regardless of their age, were overbearing and authoritative. No one paid any attention to the new girl who refused to speak a single word all day. When she was called on in class to read out loud or when she had to respond to commands during gym class, she simply stared silently at the teachers. Without fail, she was always dismissed to the back of the classroom or slapped in the face as punishment. Contrary to the expectations of her mother and psychiatrist, the new stimuli from her social life were not enough to crack her silence. An even thicker, glowing stillness filled the dark hollows of the empty vessel that the girl became. Along the crowded streets on her way home, she walked deliberately and weightlessly as if she was inside a gigantic soap bubble. She looked out into the world from underwater, insulated by the glimmering waves of silence. Cars roared by and vanished into the night, and the sharp elbows of passing pedestrians stung her side then faded away.   After much time had passed, she wondered: If that single French word had not nudged her on that winter day at school. If she hadn’t suddenly been able to recall language, as one remembers the trace of an atrophied organ. Of the foreign languages that she knew, including English and classical Chinese, it was French that had jogged her memory probably because it was the most unfamiliar to her. She only started to learn it as she entered high school. She was staring vacantly at the blackboard as usual, when her line of vision cut short at a single word. The stumpy, balding French teacher pointed to it and said it out loud. Her lips, caught off guard, trembled excitedly like a young child’s. Bibliothèque, she heard herself murmur somewhere far below her tongue or her throat. She did not realize the sheer importance of that moment. Back then her fear was yet faint. The pain was still hesitating, wavering in the depths of silence, waiting for the right moment to expose its heated coils. At the vacillating meeting point of letters and sounds, ecstasy and sin intertwined and burned together, like the slow burning fuse of an explosive.    * Translated by Mickey Yoon-Jung Hyun.

REVIEWS

• [FRENCH] Impossibles Adieux: A Tragic Yet Tender Journey Into the Depths of Winter Vol. 63 Spring 2024

• Words and Gestures: Greek Lessons by Hang Kang Vol.38 Winter 2017

• Poetic Brutality: Human Acts by Han Kang Vol.36 Summer 2017

• Troubled Lives Find Respite in Art: Pars, le vent se lève by Han Kang Vol.28 Summer 2015

• The Fruit of My Woman by Han Kang Vol.27 Spring 2015

• Passive Resistance: La Vegetariana by Han Kang Vol.24 Summer 2014

• Pain’s Relativity: Fire Salamander by Han Kang Vol.19 Spring 2013

• In the Beginning of Beginnings: Greek Lessons by Han Kang Vol.15 Spring 2012

• A Passionate Struggle for Life: Leave Now, the Wind Is Blowing by Han Kang Vol.8 Summer 2010

BOOKS