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KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
A Distant and Beautiful Place , by Yang Kwi-Ja (trans. Kim So-young and Julie Pickering). Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2003. 242 pages (ISBN 0-8248- 2639-6, paper).
reviewed by Stephen Epstein
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 6.2 (July 2003): 153-158. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
As Kim So-young and Julie Pickering note in their helpful introduction to A Distant And Beautiful Place , Yang Kwi-ja has numbered among South Korea’s most successful authors since her debut in the late 1970s. Despite several literary prizes and best-sellers to her credit, however, little of her work has thus far been rendered into English. The appearance of the volume under review, a translation of Yang’s 1987 short story collection Wŏnmidong saramdŭl (The people of Wŏnmi-dong), aids in filling this lacuna, and Yang now joins Hwang Sun-wŏn, Yun Hŭng-gil, Pak Wan-sŏ and Yi Ch’ŏng-jun in a select group of Korean writers who have anthologies exclusively dedicated to their short fiction available in English.
Like Cho Se-hŭi’s groundbreaking Nanjangiga ssoa ollin chagŭn gong (A small ball launched by a dwarf), Wŏnmidong saramdŭl is a compilation of loosely inter-connected short stories that exemplify the traumas brought about by South Korea’s headlong plunge into modernization, industrialization and urbanization. In a series of pieces initially published in literary journals between 1985 and 1987 and subsequently collected into an enormously popular single volume, Yang depicts the lives of the residents of Wŏnmi-dong, a district in Puch’ŏn, one of the satellite cities of Seoul that developed rapidly during the 1980s. Drawing on her own experience as a resident of the neighborhood for these imaginative tales, Yang portrays the effects of radical social change with sympathy, irony and poignant flashes of humor.
The title of the English version, A Distant and Beautiful Place , rests upon an astute decision to apply a translation of the first story’s title, Mŏlgo arŭmdaun tongne, to the whole anthology. Not only is A Distant and Beautiful Place more evocatively resonant in English than a literal rendering of the original Korean title, the phrase draws etymological attention to the Chinese characters that compose the name Wŏnmi-dong (wŏn, “far”; mi, “beautiful”). The transference to their native Korean equivalents in Mŏlgo arŭmdaun tongne (mŏlda, “far”; arŭmdapda, “beautiful”) brings out the productive dissonance in having Wŏnmi-dong as the stories’ setting and encourages the reader to reflect upon the multiple ironies involved. Wŏnmi-dong, psychologically distant from Seoul, yet a mere subway ride away, becomes a site that offers a melancholy beauty of its own: here urban sprawl collides with a tranquil agrarian past; here hopes go hand in hand with disillusion, and the invocation of dreams inevitably conjures up their failure. The title also underscores the central role of the neighborhood itself; while several characters reappear throughout the stories, the overall protagonist of the collection is clearly Wŏnmi-dong. And although each tale is firmly rooted in a sense of place, firm localization does not mean stability. Despite the constant presence of Wŏnmi-san, the mountain that looms above, Yang notes repeatedly the changing face of this suburban landscape, as fields are whittled away to make room for housing and retail developments, and new stores replace others that fail.
The title story depicts the move of a family, a thinly disguised version of the author’s own, from Seoul to Puch’ŏn. Driven from the capital proper by the rapid escalation of real estate prices, they depart for a small apartment on its outskirts. And although the apartment is the first dwelling they purchase instead of merely renting, this ostensible move upward is accompanied by dread that aspirations for a better life will be shattered. Yang depicts the move from the perspective of the husband, whose first impression of Puch’ŏn is paradigmatic: “The city looked brand-new one moment, as if it was starting out fresh; then the next instant it seemed old, as if it was already feeble and broken” (17). Wŏnmi-dong thus becomes a metaphor for the unfulfilled promises and evanescent benefits of Korea’s economic miracle, as class relations are simply remapped in a reconstituted relationship between center and periphery. The protagonist feels that “ Seoul had shoved them aside. It had gathered all its forces to drive them out only to bid them a treacherous farewell” (24).
The next story of the collection, “The Spark” (Pulssi) is similar in theme, narrative perspective and a mood of despair that dampens its few intimations of hope. The inequities of Korean life are seen through the eyes of an alienated everyman, who has lost his office job as a budget manager. In his struggle to support his wife and child, the protagonist ultimately takes work as a salesman, a job for which his temperament is poorly suited and which entails obvious humiliation. The story ends as he makes his first successful sale to a bus terminal porter, who in turn tells him his own tale of woe. Yang implies that moments of human connection remain possible, but the mood is bittersweet. The porter relates how he has left the countryside to seek a better life for his family in an uncaring city; although everyone in his village knew his full name, “here in Seoul, I’m just Kwon, the porter” (46). The final line of the story further highlights the loss of identity that comes with migration to the metropolis: “The crowds came and went, and the porter’s story continued over the sound of a nasal female voice asking so-and-so’s mother from Kimje to come to the public address booth as soon as possible” (46).
In contrast to the harried protagonists of the first two stories, who have little choice but to capitulate meekly and adapt as best they can to the new Korea, Old Kang, the central figure in “The Last Land” (Majimak ttang), steadfastly refuses to concede. A long-time resident of Wŏnmi-dong from its days as a farming village, Kang clings to the past, as the world changes inexorably around him. Kang persists in using “night soil” for his fields despite ever-growing neighborhood complaints about the smell, and belligerently rejects compromise. This elderly curmudgeon, who maintains an almost religious belief in the sanctity of the land, represents a doomed world; for him, a person’s worth is bound up inextricably with the productive labor that comes with the “joys of planting seeds and reaping the harvest” (67). The author presents here one of her most engaging and complex characters, a thoroughly unlikable figure who nonetheless compels grudging admiration.
“The Underground Man” (Chiha saenghwalja) offers an interesting counter- point to “The Last Land”; here we meet a character who wishes to do the right thing, but whose weakness verges on the pathetic. Forced to take a cheap room in a basement apartment, the protagonist finds he adapts well to an underground existence, but for the fact that his landlord upstairs denies him the access to her bathroom promised when he signed his rental contract. Unable to force a showdown with her, the protagonist merely suffers through embarrassing alternatives. In this story Yang hits upon a powerful symbol to explore the degradation foisted upon an urban proletariat. Waking every morning with an overwhelming need to defecate, but with no access to a toilet, the protagonist sneaks out under the cover of darkness to squat between parked cars and void his bowels like a dog. Excrement again serves as metaphor, but while it was truly a “fertile” symbol in “The Last Land” and suggested a holistic relationship between human beings and nature, here excrement is merely a foul addition to the urban environment, a marker of a life reduced to waste product. The nameless protagonist of “The Underground Man,” in his very anonymity, becomes perhaps the anthology’s most affecting and viscerally unsettling symbol of social change.
Images that suggest the reduction of human beings to animals and animal functions recur frequently in A Distant and Beautiful Place . Im, the laborer at the center of “On Rainy Days I Have to Go to Karibong-dong” (Pi onŭn narimyŏn karibongdonge kaya handa), relates at one point how he scraped by in the dog trade; his interlocutor finds himself thinking that Im’s life “was really no different from the lives of the dogs he had dragged off to slaughter” (119). Other stories suggest how ordinary Koreans have been bestialized not merely by economics, but by a violent authoritarian regime that has wrested away their humanity. We are told, for example, how the deeply troubled protagonist of “A Vagabond Mouse” (Han mariŭi nagŭne chui) had been present during May in “that southern city” while on a business trip five years earlier. This unmistakable reference to the Kwangju Uprising leads to his reflections on what he has witnessed and how it has changed him:
[H]e had seen the sharp claws that those packs of countless beasts with human faces used to protect themselves…
Perhaps that was when it had all started. His heart pounded whenever he went someplace where many people gathered. He was afraid of hearing the cries of the beasts hidden behind the smiling white teeth. And the image of himself, transformed in to a wolf attacking a passer-by who happened to poke him in the side to ask directions, rose again and again in his mind. (96–97)
“The Wonmi-dong Poet” (Wŏnmidong siin) similarly reveals the dehumanizing effects of the atmosphere of fear in Korea during the Chun Doo-hwan era. In this story, a young man returns home after expulsion from university, mentally and emotionally scarred by his experiences of protest. He retreats into a world of his own, doing menial chores for the owner of the local supermarket and finding solace in poetry. When some thugs single him out at random for a beating, he flees to the market for refuge; the thugs, however, falsely hint that they come from the authorities, and the market owner turns a blind eye in order to protect himself from repercussions. He stands by fearfully, as the young man is dragged from his store, “like a dog” (79; cf. 80). As the actual situation is revealed, a neighborhood bystander notes that the world is a vicious place and that the thugs “don’t deserve to be called humans” (82). When the market owner hypocritically chimes in and suddenly becomes solicitous of the young man, one is left wondering about the multiple directions in which this dehumanization extends.
“ Cold Water Pass” (Hangyeryŏng) provides a fitting coda to the anthology. Writing autobiographically from the first-person perspective that she has suppressed elsewhere in the collection, Yang describes an encounter with a figure who suddenly reappears from her past. Ŭnja, a childhood friend known for her singing, telephones Yang after seeing her name regularly in the papers, and urges her to come visit the Puch’ŏn nightclub where she is now performing. The invitation proves oddly unsettling to Yang, who relates how she once wrote a story in which Ŭnja is the central character. Despite her friend’s aggressive importuning, Yang finds it difficult to muster the courage to go see her, for Ŭnja represents her “last road sign pointing home” (236); Chŏnju, her hometown, has become unrecognizable to her, and Yang fears that meeting Ŭnja may cause her to lose this very last road sign. Interwoven with the main narrative is an account of Yang’s eldest brother and his own inability to come to grips with the dissolution of the old neighborhood where they grew up. The intertwining of these two storylines, with their movingly personal revelations, offers an effective final emphasis to the collection’s overall themes of dislocation and discontinuity with the past.
A Distant and Beautiful Place marks Yang Kwi-ja clearly as an author of great talent. Deft descriptive touches, a knack for well-chosen images, and an abiding concern with narrative structure are matched by insightful exploration of issues of real social importance. In the afterword to her recent bestseller Mosun (Contradictions), Yang notes that in writing a novel, she finds it difficult to maintain the complete concentration she can devote to her short stories. A Distant and Beautiful Place, however, benefits both from the careful crafting of each piece as a self-standing entity and the depth allowed by carrying over narrative threads and themes from one story to the next. The collection stands as an important literary document of Korea in the ‘80s, and these stories would make valuable additions to courses on Korean literature in translation or contemporary Korean society.
Finally, a tip of the hat to translators Kim and Pickering. In the last decade, the quality of Korean literature available in English has improved dramatically, and A Distant and Beautiful Place can take its place among a handful of very well-rendered texts that do not carry a whiff in the first instance of translation. Intractable problems remain, such as the best way to handle dialect and terms of address, and readers may well quibble with choices Kim and Pickering have made, but none of these potential points of contention detract from the volume’s readability. A suggestion in closing, though, and I address this to all fellow translators of Korean literature. Although the absence of footnotes may give a book a smoother overall appearance and eases the flow of reading, as translators we still should ensure that crucial information is not lost to readers without access to the original text. In “The Wonmi-dong Poet,” for example, a footnote should have indicated, as Yang herself does, the poets who are quoted; as it stands, readers may easily—and mistakenly—assume that these snippets of poetry are Yang’s own creations, and credit should be given to their creators. Similarly, although the translators explain the meaning of the name Wŏnmidong in passing in the introduction, a footnote would prove helpful for the many readers in English who are likely to miss this crucial point when it recurs. Likewise, the translators have hit upon a clever solution at the end of “The Tearoom Woman” (Ch’atjip yŏja) in having the letter that falls from the sign for the “Happiness Photo Studio” cause the name to read “Happness”; nonetheless, a footnote explaining why this appropriately expresses the equivalent change of haengbok to haengbo would not have gone amiss. I would also urge that provision of the Korean titles of stories, along with their original publication dates and venues, become standard procedure. These are minor points of recommendation, however; the translators are to be thanked for bringing this important anthology into English, and for doing so with aplomb.
Citation:
Epstein, Stephen 2006
Review of A Distant and Beautiful Place, by Yang Kwi-Ja, trans. Kim So-young and Julie Pickering, (2003)
Korean Studies Review 2006, no. 02
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr06-02.htm