Korean writer Kim Loves Rotten
Born in 1980, The Korean writer Kim Ae-rook has published five novels, four of which are short stories and one is long. Her writing career began in 2003, when she was 23 years old, a junior in college, majoring in drama at Korea National University of the Arts, and she wrote a short story, "Home Without Knocking," about five girls who didn't know each other in a shared house, and won the novel prize at the inaugural Oyama Literature Prize.
In the decade since, she published the short story collections "Daddy, Run" (2005) and "Full of Saliva" (2007), and won a number of literary awards such as the Korea Daily Literature Award and the Manhae Literature Award. In 2013, she won the Lee Box Literary Prize for her third short story collection, "Is Your Summer Okay," becoming the youngest winner to date. During this decade, she left the campus and entered the workplace, starting a family at the age of thirty and becoming a writer who attracted the attention of young Koreans. Her latest collection of short stories is Summer Outside, published in 2017.
Ten years is also the timescale that Jin Ai's characters often use to sort out their past lives. In the short story "Thirty Years Old", the protagonist wrote to his sister: "In the past ten years, I have moved six times, worked more than a dozen jobs, and made two or three boyfriends. That's all, that's really all. In the short story "Li Dong", the husband talked about his life with his wife: "The wife took the ninth-level civil service examination three times, fell off the list three times, and as a result, she failed to become a civil servant, but went to the Luliangjin civil servant examination counseling agency as a clerk. After marriage, he first treated infertility, then experienced two miscarriages, and finally gave birth to Rongyu, and finally bought a house after moving five times. These have all been done in a hurry over the past decade. ”
Important events of life experience are placed in the timescale of "ten years", gradually changing, it seems to reduce its own weight, and it can be mentioned in a way that is no longer heavy by the role of time. So, where did all the weight that was cut go? It should be placed somewhere. This is the secret of Jin's love rotten novel. This secret is not created by her, but from the writer's experience and observation in daily life.
When writing Home Without Knocking, Jin Ai-rum already understood that there was another kind of time in the world of fiction. Thus, the invisible loneliness that a girl feels in a shared house is given shape in the time of the novel, the cries coming from the room at the end of the corridor, the smell of alcohol and vomit in the shared bathroom, the slippers that appear at the door of each room at midnight and the note "Please don't touch my clothes" on the storage basket, and these things in the novel each share the weight of loneliness.
"Home Without Knocking" was later included in "Daddy, Run", which is a re-enactment of Jin Airu's life experience as a student. The short story collection of the same name goes back to childhood, and the narrator tells in a girlish tone that she has lived with her mother who drives a taxi since birth and has never met her father. In Mom's memory, Dad always seemed to be a person who disappeared at a critical moment. The narrator begins to imagine Dad running around the world: "Dad is wearing pink luminous shorts and he has a pair of furry little legs. Dad's figure running straight up with his waist, his legs raised and his knees raised, like the face of a dead-headed official who conforms to the rules, makes people feel quite funny. My imaginary father has been running non-stop for more than ten years, and his expression and posture are also unchanged. ”
As long as the imaginary dad kept running, he had a reason not to go back to himself and his mom. The missing parts of the past and growth are decorated with childlike fantasies by the narrator, and the narrator comforts himself in this way until one day he receives a letter from abroad. The letter said that Dad had started a family in a foreign country and had a son, and when he received the letter, Dad had died in a car accident. When Mom asked if anything else was said in the Letter written in English, the narrator lied, and apart from the news of her death, she told Mom only: "Daddy he said... I feel very sorry. He felt guilty all his life. The letter said. ”
How do you understand the narrator's lies? A teenage girl who has long comforted herself with her imagination chooses to bear it alone in the face of the fact that "Dad didn't run, Dad abandoned us to live with others." The fantasies of pink luminous shorts, the figures that crossed Fukuoka and ran to the Greenwich Observatory at this moment faded away from the original romance and innocence, lost the meaning of decoration, and became a simple need for a person to maintain his current life with those around him.
The vanished dad is often mentioned in Jin Ai's rotten novels. In the short story "Greetings of Love", the protagonist sees the Loch Ness monster that appears around the world as a vanished father quietly greeting himself, because his father once left him a copy of the "Unsolved Mysteries of the World" in the park, and then disappeared for several years.
Sometimes, dad disappears in a different way, he exists in family life but is absent when he should have taken on the family responsibilities of being a husband and father. The first story, "Doya Life," in the short story collection "Spit on Your Mouth," tells the story of Mom who runs a dumpling restaurant to feed the family, and Dad takes care of the takeaways in the store, sneaking into gambling tables or parked in front of doll machines on the street during the busiest hours. Because dad guaranteed a loan for a friend, the dumpling shop went bankrupt. Life is in trouble, the protagonist is about to go to Seoul to study at a university, and when her mother sells her property, she insists on leaving the piano and moving it into the basement where the protagonist rents.
Leaving the piano is the last line of life that the mother wants to keep, but the piano has become a burden in the narrow world of the protagonist. It took up a large part of the basement, and the landlord stipulated that it could not be played, and could only watch it being eroded when torrential rain poured into the basement. There is a detail in the novel that on the day the piano is carried into the basement, the protagonist sees that "the vine pattern of the piano sways like a broken spring". She suddenly realized, "The pattern relief that I have always thought is actually just glued with glue paint." Whether it is the bottom line or dignity that my mother wants to keep, she takes off her appearance in the basement of a different place, revealing the unbearable part that has been covered up.
Compared with the weak father who often disappears, the mothers in Jin Ai's rotten novels are always tough, they shout loudly, work cleanly, treat their families in a rough way with pity mixed with love, their expressions and behaviors always seem to be declaring, nothing can knock them down, and they will live with their children. In the short story "The Seal of the Knife", the mother is the "woman holding the knife", "the tip of the mother's knife contains a kind of indifference, which is characteristic of a person who has been taking care of the family's diet all his life." With a knife that had been used for twenty-five years, a noodle shop, the mother supported three daughters and the father who was out in trouble. The narrator writes: "Eating the food made by my mother, I also swallowed the knife marks on the ingredients together." Inside my dark body, there were countless knife marks. They flowed through my veins and provoked my nerves. ”
The flesh and blood nourished by the mother continue to grow, and together they bury the hard and indigestible emotions of the knife mark. It is carried around for years, hooking up on Mom's body and mind, and neither the time of reality nor the time of fiction can do anything about it. At her mother's funeral, the narrator feels a dull pain caused by the knife imprint inside her body, and she goes into her mother's kitchen and swallows the apple slice cut by the knife. Even if it is dull pain, she still can't let go of this emotion that only comes from her mother.
The childhood and adolescence in Jin Ai's novels are similar to her own experiences, her mother did open a restaurant called "Good Taste", and the piano in "Doya Life" really exists. The teenage boys and girls who experienced the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and went to Seoul in 1999 to study coincided with the trajectory of Kim's life. After leaving college, Jin Worked as a lecturer at the Cram School, where she began to write stories about young people in the workplace.
The short story "Spitting" tells what happened between her sister, who was a lecturer at the cram school, and the student she took in. Originally just a door-to-door overnight night, the student sister was left behind because she talked with the student sister very happily, and the life of living alone changed, from the diligent and enthusiastic student sister, the student sister felt comforted, "There is one more person at the dinner table, so that I feel like a normal person." After a few months, xuejie gradually became dissatisfied with xuemei, and her heart was picky about xuemei's living habits, and she resented Xuejie's more and more similar speech and behavior to herself. One night when she came home, the student sister euphemistically told the student sister to move out at the end of the month and end the relationship.
Young people always seem to be hovering at the poles of contradiction, neither the courage to live alone nor the ability to establish long-term relationships with others, and to engage in a marathon long struggle with their own loneliness. When the student sister in the novel needs it, she allows the student to enter her life and feels tired - especially after seeing her own shadow from the student sister, she is eager to get rid of it.
Jin Airu's discussion of this relationship does not stop there. On the night of the night the student sister spent the night, she told the student sister that she had been abandoned by her mother in the library and had lived a life without a fixed place to live. The next day, the student sister noticed the travel bag that the student sister carried with her, "the student sister had her own travel bag next to her, just like a package that could be sent anywhere, sitting in the center." Associating the teenagers who appear in the first person and are abandoned by their families in Jin Ai's novels, the act of the student sister accepting the student sister seems to be waving to the "self" of the past by the grown-up "self".
But the attempt failed. Xuejie chases each other with loneliness in the game, and Xuejie is also chasing with the sense of wandering security, and when she decides to stay, she stays with the idea that she can leave at any time. After informing the student sister to move out at the end of the month, the student sister came out of the bathroom and found that "the student's travel bag that was hanging under the clothes all the time was missing." The student sister is gone."
In 2012, at the age of 32, The Third Short Story Collection, "Is Your Summer Okay?", was published. It continues the calm narrative tone and life-like depictions cultivated in previous novels, and the protagonists expand from the perspective of students, working youth and teenagers to young couples. Increased social pressures have transformed the family structure, the situation of being like a mother, having family members support the family alone is no longer applicable, the house has become the main topic, and both husband and wife need to work together to transition from renting to buying a house, and then having children. This is the scene in the short story "Li Dong" mentioned above.
The short story "Bugs" is one of the articles in "Are You Okay for Summer?". A couple had just rented an apartment on the hill, and a month later, they learned it was designated as a demolition area. Under the cliffs not far from the hill, The Area A home, which has been built for more than three decades, is being demolished, while the wife who is waiting to give birth at home finds more and more bugs invading the apartment.
Stills from the movie Parasite
This short story is reminiscent of Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite, which uses space and bugs as metaphors for the state of existence. The different residential areas above and below the cliff seem to represent the class that grew up in different eras, settled down in the past and now with a yearning for a new life, and finally could not escape the end of the demolition of the residence. When the wife entered Zone A late at night in search of a ring, which was "like an abyss that devours everything in the world, with a big black mouth", the wife saw "a large number of bugs moving in droves under the roots of a large tree." The long queue of bugs splits into rows and flocks like refugees to the city— the city."
The bugs that emerge from the roots of trees are the ones that have appeared in apartments countless times. The pace of modernization has not stopped, resources have continued to move closer to the city, and the resulting population movement has caused panic among those who had already occupied a place in the city. This is probably worrying the wife. Will the apartment be occupied by swarms of insects? When the apartments are demolished, do you want to join them and migrate to higher places?
The short story "Goliath in the Water" reveals a stronger fear of losing one's home. During the rainy season, the narrator and mom live in an apartment they moved into more than two decades ago and are told when the mortgage is being paid off that the apartment is going to be demolished. Dad died not long ago, and the narrator and Mom became the only two people left in the apartment without water and electricity.
The continuous heavy rain erases time, day and night can no longer be distinguished, and the mother and daughter surrounded by rain are the outcasts of the world, living on their own in an increasingly sour, moldy room. Compared to another life without a fixed home after leaving the apartment, this apartment with savings and even life is their only choice.
Sighingly, looking back at the novels that Jin Ai-yan first started to create when he was in his twenties, the remaining realistic background decorated with innocence and fantasy has disappeared. In the short story collection "Is Your Summer Okay", her pen goes deep into the texture of reality and talks more about the social phenomena of workplace ecology, housing, and class. This is closely related to the changes in Age and Identity of Jin Ai-rover. As he grows older, the writer himself seems to realize that it is difficult for a person, especially an ordinary person, to start his life with an imaginary posture, and he needs to try to imitate the gesture of reality, whether it is too difficult or too simple, and how long it will last.
When the fourth short story collection, "Outside is Summer," Was Published, Kim Was rotten at the age of 37, and the "loss" of the past continues to the present, appearing in the novel in a more intensive way. In the short story "Li Dong", Rong Yu died unexpectedly; the short story "Covered Hand" tells the story of a single mother in the kitchen to recall a series of past events of giving birth, divorce, and mother's death, and the children who have grown up are drifting away from her. "Loss" is the realization that at this stage of life, the inner world seems to have few opportunities to be opened.
Now, five years after the publication of the short story collection "Outside is Summer", Jin Ailuo has entered his forties. How will this writer, who is accustomed to writing about different characters and different life states at different stages of life, continue to move forward in the time of the novel? We'll see.