In recent years, whether "Parasite" won the Oscar or "Squid Game" topped the Netflix playlist, Korean pop culture is like a whirlwind that has swept East Asia and even the whole world. However, outside of the popular film and television comprehensives, we seem to pay little attention to Korean literature, let alone find that a group of female writers have set off a "new wave" in the Korean literary world.
South Korean female writer Cho Nam-ju's phenomenal novel "Kim Ji-young Born in '82" has been translated into ten languages in five years, sold more than 300,000 copies overseas, and won the box office championship after the release of her eponymous film. In the 2020 Korean literature bestseller list and the annual novel list selected by 50 Korean authors, female writers occupy an absolute advantage, and there is even only one male writer in the top ten.
"There is almost no Korean literature without women or feminism these days," says So J. Lee, a contemporary Korean translator of women's poetry and fiction.
The key to Korean women's literature to arouse empathy is the attention to the general plight of women. This is a dilemma that fluctuates between love and pain, related to family, mother-daughter relationship, marriage, workplace, sexual assault, appearance anxiety, poverty, etc., these issues are the shared life experience of women in the same similar social structure, as Zhao Nanzhu said, "There is empathy between women, and there is an invisible bond between women."
How do these Korean women writers write about being women? Why should we pay attention to Korean women's literature?
Cover of "Kim Ji-young born in '82"
#01
"If you believe that you will not be destroyed, you will not be destroyed"
In order to escape the latent indifference and violence from her husband, family and society, a woman decides to become a tree.
This is the content of the award-winning work "Vegetarian" by contemporary Korean female writer Han Jiang.
After a nightmare, the virtuous and docile wife Young-hye suddenly begins to refuse to eat meat and treat herself like a plant, but this rebellious behavior turns her into a patriarchal monster, a "crazy woman in the attic". Her indifferent husband abandoned her, the artist's brother-in-law used her body as an object of desire, her father who forced her to eat meat also rejected her, and doctors even forced her to intubate her into liquid food.
In the novel, it is said: "If you don't eat meat now, the world will eat you", and Young-hye would rather bring herself close to death than insist on being mentally vegetative and masculine. In a world where the self is constantly scrutinized and disciplined, the heroine's desire to make herself disappear is desperate, but it can also be understood.
Author: Han Jiang, Publisher: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House/Grinding Iron Books, publication year: 2021-9
Writer Han Jiang, born in 1970, won the 29th South Korean Lee Box Literature Award in 2005 with his novella "Birthmark", and defeated Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and others, becoming the first East Asian Booker Literature Prize winner, and is also regarded as an important candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature among contemporary Korean writers. She said at the Booker Prize in Literature that when she writes, she often thinks about the extent of human violence: "I want to explore the extent of human violence; how to define sanity and madness; To what extent we can understand others. ”
If "The Vegetarian" is about the heavy reality faced by women, Han Jiang's new work "Bai" is more like a cold wonderland of prose poetry.
In Korean, in addition to representing color, white is also permeated with a bleak view of life and death. The author has wandered through war-torn Poland, where more than 95 percent of the buildings were bombed during World War II and have only now been rebuilt, and the history of the past is displayed in the Warsaw Resistance Museum. Imagining the wandering spirits who died here and suffered violence, Han Jiang found that this was a "white" city.
She recalls her sister, who shared a similar fate to the city, the baby girl who was born before her but lived only two hours. Before she died, her mother kept whispering to her, "You must live." The writer realized that only with the help of her own life and body can she rebuild her sister's lost life, so she wrote this white book, the book of memory, trying to record the part of "white" that is clean, unbroken, and cannot be destroyed in any way, in order to resist the darkness and decay that erodes human nature.
Author: Han Jiang, Publisher: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House/Grinding Iron Books, publication year: 2022-9
Swaddling, salt, snow, ice, moon, gray hair, womb... The 63 common white things in life are all endowed by Hanjiang with an antiseptic, disinfecting and healing power. The freshly washed white pillowcase seems to remind its owner: "You are a precious person, your sleep is pure, and it is not a shame for you to live", and the white vapor exhaled on a cooler morning is evidence that we are alive, telling us that life is a miracle that spreads into the void in a white and clear form.
"At the end of a long day, it takes some time to remain silent. It's like subconsciously stretching out your stiff hand to the silent, faint heat in front of a fire." When winter arrives, white is this heat.
For Han Jiang, the process of writing the book itself was like white ointment smeared on the swelling, like gauze spread over a wound. And the reader weaves through the labyrinth of white, constantly searching for the heart of the world—the things that save us in moments when we sway, crack, or shatter.
In "White", Han Jiang still writes with a unique female experience, she writes about the mother who gave birth to a child alone, felt a pain in her chest and clumsily squeezed milk. At first it was thin, yellowish milk, and only then white milk flowed.
It can be said that Han Jiang's writing attempts to melt the cold reality with the warm body temperature of women, and to re-establish a new order for women and life with complete rebellion and decisive writing. To love, to be angry, to fight against established frameworks and destiny. As writer Choi Eun-young said, "Feminism is a kind of battle for love."
Writer Han Jiang
#02
"One East Asia, One Mother"
In contrast to Han Jiang's surreal dreams and women's decisive postures, another part of Korean novels represented by "Kim Ji-young born in 82" tells the daily plight of women's growth in a simple tone.
Kim Ji-young was born on April 1, 1982 in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of a Seoul hospital. With the most common name, he grew up in an ordinary civil service family, and a family of six lived in a house of 33 square meters. Since childhood, Kim Ji-young has had a lot of confusion, such as the best things in the family should always be given priority to his younger brother, male classmates bullying girls is taken for granted, and girls are always taught to dress conservatively and behave properly. Female executives are hardly found in corporate offices, and they have to endure pornographic jokes and endless persuasion from customers after work.
At the age of thirty-one, Kim Ji-young got married and had children, and under the "logical" expectation of everyone, she quit her job and became a full-time mother.
Full-time mothers, at the time, had a more insulting synonym: mom worm, used to insinuate that mothers with young children did nothing all day and lived a life supported by their husbands. Kim Ji-young was in the coffee shop and heard male office workers whispering: "I really want to use the money my husband earns to buy coffee and drink, and hang around all day... The mom worm is really dead... I don't want to marry a Korean woman at all..."
Stills from the movie "Kim Ji-young born in 82"
Although he has a gentle and considerate husband and a lovely daughter, who is the real Kim Ji-young himself between the good daughter-in-law, good wife, and good mother who is obedient? Kim Ji-young faces a common dilemma for women today, and her life faithfully presents her life as a woman.
The author's plain narrative tone, collection of social statistics and survey data at that time further blurred the boundary between the truth and fiction of the story, making this work closer to realistic "non-fiction". Some readers said that this is not a novel, but my life report.
"I wanted to write about issues that women couldn't talk about before because they were taken for granted," author Zhao Nanzhu said in an interview with The New York Times. After the publication of "Kim Ji-young Born in 82", Cho Nanzhu received letters from girls from all over the world, in which they shared their own empathetic stories: native family, sexual harassment, marriage, helplessness about becoming a "woman"....
"My novels make people speak out," Zhao said, "and if we women have all experienced these experiences, then we should discuss them together in an open way."
After Kim Ji-young, Cho Nam-joo, together with six other female writers representing the Korean literary scene, published a collection of novels, Letters to Hyun Nam-ge, which explores issues such as women's alienated bodies, unequal relations between the sexes, and the intergenerational cycle of female misogyny. In "Her Name Is", Zhao Nanzhu listens to and records the stories of more than sixty women in an anthropological way. From a 9-year-old girl to a 69-year-old grandmother, from school to family to society, women of all ages face surprisingly consistent choices.
The mother-daughter relationship is also a topic often discussed in Korean women's literature. Some scholars refer to the family structure in East Asian countries as the "womb family" or "matrilineal family", that is, two models in one family - the "patrilineal family" centered on the male head of the family; As well as the exclusion of it, the "womb family" or "matrilineal family" centered on the relationship between mother and child. The obligation to raise children as mothers, the story between mother and child, is portrayed as the dedication and sacrifice of mothers, while mother-daughter-in-law is full of jealousy, betrayal and competition. When the son is absent, the relationship between mother and daughter gradually emerges.
Contemporary writer Shin Kyung-sook's masterpiece Please Take Care of My Mother has been called "the only Korean novel that surpasses Haruki Murakami's "1Q84". Rarely written in the second person, this autobiographical novel tells the story of a lost mother and her family. The mother suddenly disappeared, but the husband and children complained to each other, and in the process of searching, it was found that no one really knew the mother. Fate made her mother born in an era when she could not control her own life, she forgot her dreams, became a mother, dedicated her life to her family and children, but silently hid herself. This is the epitome of a generation of mothers.
In contrast, writer Kim Hye-jin chose to write about the daughter of a "sexual minority" in her best-selling novel "About the Daughter", which is a rare choice to write about the daughter of a "sexual minority" in the voice of a lonely mother. The mother, who cares for a lonely elderly person in a nursing home, discovers one day that her daughter has brought her gay person home.
The mother is anxious that others will look at her daughter who deviates from the norm in a different light, worried that her childless daughter will fall into a lonely situation when she is old, she loves her daughter, but she also knows that the current society will not treat her daughter as kindly as her.
Author: Jin Huizhen, Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press/One Page Folio, Publication Year: 2022-10
"I seem to have my daughter read too much. I hope my daughter can study to the fullest, go to college, go to graduate school, so that she can become a university teacher. Meet a good husband. But ah, my daughter is such an idiot, and she doesn't know what she is thinking. Recently, just thinking about that child, my chest felt like it was blocked. ”
It seems that getting ahead, having a stable job, being elegant and dignified, and marrying a good husband are a sign of women's success, and traditional women who are dominated by this collective consciousness will naturally be disgusted with their daughters' "decent" life, and even blame themselves. "So am I being punished by heaven? Did you just pass on some kind of fault to your daughter? ”
As the review puts it: "The whole book is a long gaze of the East Asian family on the parent-child relationship, and both the mother and the daughter are victims of patriarchy." In such a society, being a woman alone is enough to plunge oneself into crisis.
In addition, Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin's novel "Winter in Sokcho" focuses on the appearance anxiety faced by women, and the heroine's mother and boyfriend suggest that she undergo plastic surgery because they believe that women's looks and bodies will enable her to succeed in the workplace competition.
In "Li Xiye, No More Silence", known as the Korean version of "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise", author Choi Jin-young describes the confusion of the young girl Li Xiye after being sexually assaulted in the form of a diary: "It was he who violated me, why are people blaming me?" Until today's social media, this phrase still rings loudly.
In their essay collection "Two Women, Living Together", Kim Ha Na and Huang Sun-woo recorded the wonderful cohabitation life after the two bought a house together, allowing us to see that there is not only one pattern of family composition, and being single and living alone does not necessarily mean ending alone.
#03
Another kind of Hallyu is sweeping the world
The writing of Korean women writers seems to start from themselves, telling the private experiences and emotions of women, but in fact, their perspectives have gone far beyond the issue of female identity, penetrating into all areas of urban life and class, using personal experience to connect the social picture, and finding a good balance between delicate psychological reality and vast social reality.
Kim Ai-rot, a popular writer of the post-80s generation in Korea, is good at narrating urban life experiences and the stories of small people from a civilian perspective, so he is known as an "observer of urban life".
Author: Jin Ailang, Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House, publication year: 2022-10
In his early works "Dad, Run" and "Droofl", Kim Ai Lang wrote about a stranger working hard in a big city, a woman who can't sleep no matter what, a candidate who lives in an examination institute and studies hard, and in the short story collection "Is Your Summer Alright?" ", Jin Ailang's perspective radiates to the discipline of the female body by consumerism, the disintegration of middle-class families, and low-level couples living in apartments on the cliff. Six of the articles in "It's Summer Outside" were written after the 2014 Sewol shipwreck, and the protagonists had to face a sudden loss.
Kim is very good at capturing the subtle psychology of contemporary people. For example, in the article "Thirty Years Old", "I" told my sister that I had a dream of working hard in the city, and found that my youth was gone, but I almost "achieved nothing".
"It feels like youth has passed like this, and it makes me panic. How have I changed over the years? It seems that he has just become extravagant, no longer trusts people, has become high-minded, and has become a layman. This disturbs me. In my twenties, whatever I did, it felt like it was just a process. Now, it seems that everything is the result. ”
This accurate capture of the state of life can't help but make people shout while reading: "It's so real!" ”
Outside of South Korea, more young people have a similar experience: longing for a stable job in a big city, facing the uncertainty of a sudden crisis, and for women, constantly making difficult choices between appearance, age, family and work. Sometimes we realize that we are on the same train as them, and the end point is unknown.
French writer Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, once said that what he glimpsed in the works of Kim Ailang and Han Jiang was a South Korea where history and memory were mixed, a reality intertwined with material and desire.
In addition to reality, a number of imaginative forms of writing have also emerged in Korea. Kim Kuba's science fiction collection "If We Can't Go at the Speed of Light" has sold 250,000 copies in Korea, blending women's real life with romantic fantasy. In "About My Space Heroes", the discriminated female astronaut chooses to jump into the sea, in "Emotional Entity", intangible emotions can be transformed into visible goods, and the hero finds that his girlfriend has purchased a "melancholy body" because she wants to "touch her own melancholy".
Just as Liu Cixin commented: the imaginary world of Golden Grass Leaf is based on rich and beautiful science fiction ideas and constructed with a long and distant human aria as the latitude.
Korean writer Cho Paola, who was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, created an Angela Carter-esque experience in her novel "The Cursed Rabbit", because there is no male in the place to give birth to a single mother with blood clots, a robot companion who rebels against humans, a rabbit lamp with curse powers, a head sticking out of the toilet... These grotesque dark fairy tales, creepy whimsy blur the line between magical realism, horror stories and science fiction, exploring the female dilemma, human love, Universal humanity such as capital alienation.
Author: Zheng Baola, Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press/1 page folio, publication year: 2022-10
From "Parasite" to "My Liberation Diary", from Kim Ji-young to Ko Manni, another Korean wave is sweeping the world. This kind of Korean wave abandons the exaggerated style of the past, no longer over-bakes the vigorous romantic supremacy in the past Korean dramas, and chooses to write the sour, full of daily emotions and sharp reality of ordinary people, no longer about the domineering chaebols and silly white sweets with faces, but portrays three-dimensional and vivid people, busy switching different masks in complex lives, but still insisting on finding themselves.
This Korean wave is the flower of idealism that blooms from the soil of reality, a sympathy for every ordinary person who lives hard, a relentless critique of harsh reality, an effort to resist grand narratives with private memory, and "love the concrete, not the abstract." When we read and watch these works, we can feel a sense of substitution and participation.
The rise of Korean women's literature is a phenomenon because it is not the success of one book or one writer, but the victory of many writers and thousands of Kim Ji-young. Reading becomes an invitation to all women, it's okay, there's no need to be ashamed, and you can be bold enough to tell stories that make you feel uncomfortable, and these "trivia" are meaningful and important.
And in the second half of the 20th century, women remained on the margins of Korean literature. However, with the modernization of the Korean economy and society, women's education has increased and they have begun to move to the front and center of the public sphere. The new class of young Korean women writers is more concerned with gender-based identity politics, individual destinies and emotions than national and historical frameworks, and these themes are also common issues of concern around the world.
As Kim Ailang said: "Previous writers cared about the sky, I probably cared about the ceiling of the country, I wrote about convenience stores, I wrote about the small house I live in, the tiny examination institute, the not-so-grand narrative of my time."
This individual-driven force of society also happens to carry the wave of internationalization. The South Korean government implements an open policy of cultural nationhood, and streaming media platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV have given Korean independent artists and pop culture new export channels. In recent years, the sex scandals that have continued to break out in the Korean entertainment industry, the random femicide incident in Gangnam in Seoul in 2016, and the subsequent N room have continued to rise the #MeToo movement on social media, and have also helped Korean women's literature find the incision to be discovered.
"These books (Korean feminist literature) expose Korea's dirty little secret that social progress lags far behind the economy despite seemingly wealthy, modern, enlightened, and cool," said Yony Hong, author of The Birth of Korean Cool: How a Country Conquered the World Through Popular Culture. "South Korea is a rich country, but there are still some seriously wrong things".
The wage gap between the sexes in South Korea is the highest in the developed world, with women earning only 63 percent of men's wages — one of the largest of the 29 developed countries. The Economist also ranked South Korea as the least suitable country for career women in its Glass Ceiling Index, with women holding only 2 percent of boards of women in key positions of power at work. In addition, women also face potential sexual harassment: "those in power believe they can do whatever they want".
Traditional societal expectations of gender roles, beauty standards, and patterns of female behavior are widespread. Some Koreans still call their wives Djip-saram, which means people at home, while naming their husbands Bakat-Yangban, the man on the outside, suggests a stereotype that women should stay at home to raise their children and do unpaid work.
Critic Jonathan Franzen once said, "Can a novel save the world?" There is always a little bit of hope, but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. Still, it holds great promise to save your soul." We don't know what kind of highlight will be in Korean women's literature in the future, but as long as they are still writing, the world cannot ignore women's voices.
... ...
Resources:
1. "Kim Ji-young Born in 82" and "Home on the Ramp" are selling well, how to understand the "rise" of Japanese and Korean women's literature in recent years? | Beijing News Book Review Weekly
2. Zhao Nanzhu: It turns out that I am also Kim Ji-young | China Youth Daily
3. The Korean Wave has been scraping for so long, why did Korean literature not get attention until "Kim Ji-young"? | Yenching Book Review
4. Literary breakthrough under disease, field, and power - a glimpse of Korean literature in 2020| Xu Liming
5.Gender equality: Korea has come a long way, but there is more work to do.｜OECD
6.Kim Ji-young, Born 1982: Feminist film reignites tensions in South Korea.｜BBC
7.The Heroine of This Korean Best Seller Is Extremely Ordinary. That’s the Point.｜The New York Times
Source: Phoenix Network Reading
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