Squeee with a Korean Accent

Squeee!  Another Korean author translated into English!  Assa!*

The US paperback version of the 2005 novel pictured above will be out in a couple of months (the UK version is already out).  The Kindle version was published last month, and I'm eager to start reading my copy sometime this week.  Although I've had mixed results with Korean literature, I want to love it, and I want its books and authors to make huge international splashes and kick literary ass.

 Gong Ji-Young seems like a strong contender.  She's extremely successful in South Korea, and some of her books have been made into movies.  I read a few pages of Our Happy Time on Amazon, and the translation by Sora Kim-Russell reads well.  My hopes are up.

A synopsis of Our Happy Time can be found here.   And here.  The descriptions appeal to the part of me that enjoys bleak reading.  I hope it rains while I'm reading it on the subway.

Here's the Korean cover:

* I'm not sure if there is a Korean equivalent for squeee!, so I went with assa, which means "awesome" or "nice!"

The DNF Files: Three Generations - Yom Sang-seop

From the book jacket:

Touted as one of Korea's most important works of fiction, Three Generations (published in 1931 as a serial in Chosun Ilbo) charts the tensions of the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul.  Delving deeply into each character's history and beliefs, Yom Sang-seop illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses that drive them.  This Korean classic, often compared to Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, reveals the country's situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, and the battle between the modern and the traditional.  The long-awaited publication of this tour de force is a vital addition to the Korean literary canon available in English.

I'm terribly disappointed with myself for not getting along better with this book.  After about 50 pages, I thought it was meandering, and I chafed against its rhythms.  Maybe it's the book.  Maybe it's me. I don't know.  When I first found it, I was excited to be reading a Korean novel that was both literature and a slice of history.  This is in my DNF files, but  it may be a short stay before it goes back on the TBR.

Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin

Does anyone else think that the cover of this book is a little creepy?  Doesn't the woman on the cover look sort of doll-like, waxen?  Even that shadow across the top part of her face doesn't quite save it from that posed look.  Maybe it's the hand, too.  Oooh, look!  I'm being distraught!  

Please Look After Mom is the story of a family whose elderly matriarch gets lost on a Saturday afternoon at Seoul Station when she and her husband come from the country to the big city to visit their grown children.  The family searches for Mom and in flashbacks, each feels guilt in whatever part they played in her disappearance, but the search efforts seem pretty lackluster.

I'm so grumpy.  I wanted to absolutely love this book and I don't.  I don't hate it -- I'm disappointed with some of the author's choices, but I love being able to recognize the history, culture, traditions and locations of the country I've lived in for the past seven years.  I also understand that the novel is going to play to Korean sensibilities much differently than it will play to someone with Western sensibilities.  I'm really pleased that it's an international bestseller.  Ever since I moved to South Korea in 2004, I've been waiting for that breakout hit.

'Hit' proves to be an apt word because author Shin unmercifully beats her characters as well as her readers over the head with the following message:  MOM GOOD.  FAMILY BAD.  In case the reader is in doubt, the parts of the book with the aloof, cranky older daughter (a novelist) and the horrible, self-centered philandering husband are written in second person, which gives the feeling of a tongue-lashing without end.

Seen through the family's eyes, Mom was perfect, but her gifts were taken for granted until she was gone.  She's a lot like O-Lan in The Good Earth, every breath a sacrifice for someone, mostly her children.  Seeing Mom in flashback, contriving for her family and trying to keep everyone from going hungry was admirable and made for good reading, but it just went on and on.  Mom becomes too good to be true;  she strains credulity.  Likewise, the family, particularly the husband, is a little too shitty.  Shin lays it on with a trowel and it starts to have the opposite effect that she intended.

But wait! Mom is not only the Korean version of O-Lan -- Mom is Korea itself.  Mom is kind and selfless Old Korea and the family represents thoughtless and soulless Modern Korea, which has run off and totally forgotten her.  She can wander through the darkest and dankest alleyways in Seoul, bruised and bleeding and time slips away while her family argues about what should go on a 'missing' poster that has a bad picture, erroneous information and a stingy reward.  

Does every book about Korea have to be an allegory?  For example, An Appointment with my Brother by Yi Yun-Mol was good, but of course the narrator is South Korea and the brother is North Korea.  Why does Mom have to be Korea?  Why can't she just be an old lady that got lost at Seoul Station?  It feels like Kyung-Sook Shin is straining too hard to force in all the elements of good literature.

Speaking of straining:  The novel is told from four points of view:  Oldest daughter, oldest son, husband, then Mom herself.  Four parts would have been an appropriately somber touch, since the number four in Korean sounds like the Chinese word for death.  However, Shin returns to the oldest daughter -- the novelist -- for a fifth section that feels awkward and amateurish and drags it all down.  If you just stopped after the fourth section, the novel would feel so much richer and you wouldn't miss a thing.  I promise.

Perhaps I would like the movie version of Please Take Care of Mom better.  I'm pretty sure there will be one.  I'm confident that this novel can be interpreted successfully.  Of all the art forms in Korea, cinema seems to be the one that is leaps and bounds ahead of the others.  A filmmaker would have a lighter and defter touch, using images to imply and inform.  Maybe a competent and wise scriptwriter adapting the novel  would pare down the dialogue and even give that clunky final section the heave-ho.  I hope so; I really want to love this story on some level.

Guest Reviewer: Paul at Korea Connection - Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin

I'm really excited about this book and annoyed with myself that I haven't read it yet.  Finally a breakout literary sensation from Korea!  Many thanks to Paul Buzan for letting me reprint his review of Please Look After Mom here.  I found it at his excellent website Korea Connection.


Please Look After Mom: A Review

It’s been one week since Mom went missing.

– “Please Look After Mom”

Five adult children and their elderly father are gathered together at a house in Seoul. They are drafting a missing person flyer for their mother. She has been gone for a week, lost in a moment of carelessness at busy Seoul Station.

As they work on and argue over making the most effective flyer, questions arise: Was Mom born in 1936 or 1938? Why don’t we have a recent picture of her? Why was it no one went to meet her and Father at the train station?



So begins Kyung-sook Shin’s English language debut, “Please Look After Mom”, a novel that is both a moving portrait of a family in crisis and an allegory of modern Korea’s relationship with its past.


A Man’s World

Kyung-sook Shin is one of Korea’s most popular contemporary writers. The author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, “Please Look After Mom” is her breakout title. The novel has sold more than a million copies here in Korea and has been translated into 19 different languages. I think it’s safe to say “Please Look After Mom” is set to become the most widely read Korean novel of all time.

Structurally the story owes an obvious debt to William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”.

Divided into four parts and an epilogue, each section is narrated by a different member of the family. Each of these voices offers a perspective on Mom — perspectives that are by turns conflicting, complicating, or compatible. It is a delicate story that relies on nuance and subtelty rather than red herrings and big reveals. Giving away too much here might diminish a prospective reading experience — and this is a book you should read.

The plot is simple: Where is Mom? But what matters isn’t simply that Mom is missing. What matters is that she was only marginally present before her disappearance because she was never truly known, never understood by her family. Identity – how we see ourselves, how others see us, where we fit in history – is a key theme running through the novel.

How well do we know the people with whom we are most intimate? This question is well-worn territory in the world of literature and has been treated by innumerable writers. Kyung-sook Shin does as good a job as many in exploring it. When examined through the lens of Realism, “Please Look After Mom” offers an authentic picture of the difficulties faced by many women in post-war Korea.

To paraphrase James Brown: Korea is a man’s man’s man’s world. In 1995 the United Nations Development Progamme began compiling data for a Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM indicates women’s participation in a given country’s politics and business, and the income differential between men and women.

When the initial set of GEM statistics were released in 1995, South Korea ranked 90th out of 116 countries. In the years since then Korea has worked to improve quality of life for its female citizens, steadily climbing to the low-mid tier of GEM rankings. That said, this is still a country that has a long way to go in realizing and respecting the rights of a full half of its citizenry.

What “Please Look After Mom” highlights is the tendency, in no way unique to Korea, to treat women as little more than a commodity. Kyung-sook Shin’s characters are dumbfounded by the notion that Mom would have dreams and aspirations other than serving her family. When Chi-hon, the oldest daughter, asks her younger sister, now a mother herself, if she thought their Mom enjoyed cooking for the family, the younger sibling is at first unable to even register the question. After all, you wouldn’t ask of oxygen if it enjoys being breathed, of food if it enjoys being eaten.

I would be doing a great disservice to this book if I were to suggest it is some kind of feminist rant. It isn’t. It is a far more complicated, nuanced work than mere polemic. But in a country where it is routinely expected of a woman to hang upon a cross for her family, “Please Look After Mom” presents a host of challenging questions.



The Yoknapatawpha Connection

When Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County — the fictional Mississippi county in which the vast majority of his novels are set — he was trying, in part, to make sense of the influence of the past.

The Antebellum South had been gone for sixty years when Faulkner began writing, yet it cast a shadow on every aspect of Faulkner’s life. How was America to understand and navigate its legacy of slavery? At his best, Faulkner alegorized our need to forge new traditions in the absence of old ways. His stories are intensely regional but manage to speak to universal human concerns.

Similarly, I think “Please Look After Mom” can be read as an allegory of Korea’s breakneck pursuit of modernization — with plenty of universal implications.

Sixty years ago Korea was engaged in a fierce, bloody, devastating civil war. Over 1.3 million Koreans died in combat, with millions more dying afterwards from starvation and sickness. The country was divided, a tentative cease fire was reached, and both sides have lived with the threat of war since.

Every day I see people who lived through the war. I work with people who remember fleeing their homes as the front rolled towards them. I know people who have living family members who were tortured by South Korea’s secret police in the 1960′s and 70′s. I have spoken with people who risked their lives in pro-democracy demonstrations. I once lived thirty minutes from Gwangju, Jeollanam-do, a city where, in 1980, as many as 2,000 civilians were gunned down by the government during a pro-democracy event.

Korea in the 20th-century was as volatile and dramatic as any nation in history.

And yet you would hardly know this from visiting Korea today. In the few decades since the Korean War, Korea has transformed from a war-ravaged, poverty ridden, police state, to a high-tech, fully modern, democratic country with one of the biggest economies in the world. It has been a truly remarkable transformation.

But what if you lived through that transformation?

In “Please Look After Mom” Mom is clearly suffering from dementia. The family is in denial and Mom for her part strives to deny or hide her worsening condition. Routine tasks that she has performed throughout her life — making kimchi, tending the garden, going into town for cooking supplies — are suddenly a cause for debilitating confusion. As her mind weakens Mom begins losing memories of a way of life that her children and grandchildren will never experience.

Mom, like many older Koreans, represents a generation that laid the foundation for modern Korea — and who find themselves now living in a foreign country.

Near the end of the book Mom asks a rhetorical question: “Do you think that things happening now are linked to things from the past and things in the future, it’s just that we can’t feel them? I don’t know, could that be true? Sometimes when I look at my grandchildren I think that they were dropped down from somewhere out of the blue, and that they have nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me at all.”

Today, Korea is a far more comfortable place to live than it was a couple of generations ago — food, night life, nice cars, smartphones, videogames, all the bells and whistles of an industrialized nation. But how high is the cost of comfort if it comes at the expense of relationships and a remembrance of things past?

When Mom disappeared her family lost forever something of immeasurable value that they never fully understood or appreciated. No amount of material comfort can compensate for that kind of loss.


“Please Look After Mom”

Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom” is a worthy read. It grabbed me from the first sentence and wouldn’t let go — I read all 235 pages in a single sitting.

I should note that Chi-Young Kim’s translation renders the story in elegant, unpretentious English. An excellent effort.

Hopefully, the novel’s success in America (it was a New York Times bestseller in April 2011) will usher in a wider range of Korean literature in English translation. The book is available in hardcover and in Kindle format.

Do you know someone who might like to read Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom”? If so, would you share this post? It would really mean a lot. Thanks!  And if you've read "Please Look After Mom", what did you think?

Readathon: Hour 1

Pages read: 50
Blogs visited: 3

I'm trying to read 101 books this year. When My Name Was Keoko, which I started last hour, is my 86th book. If I can read everything in my Readathon pile during the next 24 hours, I'll make my goal and the rest of the year will be a cakewalk. Umm, cake...why didn't I put that in my snack pile?

Linda Sue Park is such a good writer. I'm so lucky to be reading her books while I'm living in Korea. I credit her with getting me interested in children's literature again. Maybe someday, she'll visit Korea and I'll get to meet her and tell her how much I enjoy her work.

Wishlist Wednesday: Toji (The Land) - Park Kyung-Ni

I've been curious about Korean literature since I moved here, but until now, I haven't met anyone that I could get into an in-depth discussion with about it. Exploring at the bookstores, I've discovered a few short novels and books of short stories that have been both enjoyable and moving, but nothing that seemed to have great scope.

For a while, this made sense. South Korea seems like the least likely place to breed novelists, because the pace of life is frenetic. Bali-bali (hurry! hurry!) seems to be their theme song, and not only are Koreans going as fast as they can, they pride themselves on how many activities they can cram into a single 24-hour period. Anyway, not a reflective sort of environment. I reasoned that any literary attempts would have to be short.

Still, I thought there had to be some literature, because their recent history has been so dramatic and often sad. Where was Korea's War and Peace? For the billionth time, I cursed at my lack of proximity to a decent university library here in Korea...or at least one where the damn Dewey Decimal System didn't stop at 799! Those books were somewhere, hiding! Enough with the trips to temples, mask festivals and kimchi museums...show me the literature!

Finally, I found my answer in The Korea Herald, when I read about a novelist that died just this past May. Park Kyung-Ni (pictured above) wrote the classic Korean novel, the one that kids have to read at least excerpts of in school: Toji. Did I want reflective? Did I want epic? Toji (which is Korean for "The Land") took 25 years for Park to write, and no wonder -- it's thousands of pages long, spanning 16 volumes. The time and setting is late 19th century Korea and early 20th century, covering the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and the division of the Korean peninsula in the early 1950s. It's been made into a movie, a miniseries and an opera.

As luck would have it, I've been doing teacher training for Korean English teachers these past 2 weeks. Many of them have literature backgrounds, and their level of fluency is quite high, so I was able to ask them about Toji. They gave me a brief synopsis of one of the plot lines, and one teacher said that she thought that Park had been on the Nobel Prize for Literature shortlist one year. I expressed interest in reading it, and asked if it had been translated into English. They knew that it had been translated into German, but weren't sure about English. They warned me more than once about the length.

The teachers also knew quite a bit about Park Kyung-Ni's life, (1926-2008) which was an unhappy one. She was the oldest daughter in a middle-class family, and her father ran out on her mother when she was a baby. During the Korean war, she lost her husband and three-year old son. She was left with her mother and daughter (I think the daughter was handicapped, but this might be my misinterpretation, because somehow Pearl Buck got into the conversation) to take care of. Park once remarked in an interview that if she'd had a happy life, she would never have thought of becoming a novelist.

When the session let out for the day, I hopped on the computer and headed for Amazon. Yes! Toji has been published in English! No! There was only one copy of volume 1 (a hefty 500+ pages), priced at $110.00! Further research revealed that only volumes 1 and 2 are available in English. A website in the UK set the price at 65 pounds. Each. Aigo-oo!

It's a good thing that I enjoy a challenge, especially one that involves hunting down objects of my bookwormy desire. My next step will be to contact the Korea Herald reporter who wrote about Park Kyung-Ni; she published her email address at the end of the piece. She is Korean, but maybe she can point me in the right direction for affordable English copies.