Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Ju-chan Fulton

A look at modern Koreans’ lives

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The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories ~ edited by Bruce Fulton

(Penguin Books, London, 2023, ISBN# 978-0-241-44848-9)

Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2024)

It might seem intimidating to tackle such a large volume as The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, but editor Bruce Fulton has put together a delightful collection of modern Korean short stories, ranging in length from 6 to 44 pages. Fulton, a professor of Korean literature and translation at the University of British Columbia, clearly holds these writers in great esteem. He and his wife Ju-Chan Fulton have translated many of these works over the years.

These 25 stories were written between 1934 and 2013; in the collection, they are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Youngmin Kwon, a professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University, provides an excellent introduction to these themes, and also adds a brief chronology of Korean history from the late 19th century to the present, which places each story in its proper historical context.

The first section, Tradition, highlights the struggles and resilience Koreans demonstrated during the Japanese colonial period (1911-1945, when Korea was colonized and ruled by Japan).  Hyosok Yi’s When the Buckwheat Blooms introduces the character Saengwon Ho, a middle-aged peddler of goods in the countryside who reflects on the trajectory of his life with fellow stragglers. Ho relates the story of a lost love, the town beauty whose family fell on hard times. The two had one night of passion before she mysteriously disappeared with her family. Ho’s comrades are tired of hearing about his bad luck in love and life. But a new young companion he meets on the road seems to offer him a new perspective. Is there a glimmer of hope, in the midst of oppression and sadness?

A powerful theme in the collection is gender roles. In his introduction to this section, Kwon notes that until the modern period in Korea, writing was considered to mainly the domain writers who were upper-class men, and women writers were discouraged from publishing their work. Luckily this is changing, and today women fiction writers are growing in numbers and acclaim.

In Yujong Kim’s Spicebush Blossoms, a teenage boy and his family work as tenant farmers for the rich family of a girl around the same age as him. The girl continuously antagonizes him, sending her rooster to attack his smaller rooster. Hijinks ensue, including the boy feeding his rooster gochujang (Korean spicy pepper paste) in order to goad him into attack mode. Clearly, there are gender and class roles that must be followed here, but they are challenged in a humorous way.

In The Last of Hanak’o  by  Yun Ch’oe, a group of 30-something men have been a bit obsessed with one of their woman classmates from their university days. Among one another, they call her Hanak’o, meaning “the Nose,” because it was her most striking feature. In college, she was the cool girl, always up for a drink or a late-night meal with them, listening to their problems with their girlfriends with no judgement. Many years later, one of them tracks down Hanak’o, and happens to read a feature story about her in a prestigious magazine. He realizes how little they actually knew about her. Why had he and his friends never considered anything about her personal life, or asked her any questions at all, as they passively fantasized about her?

Any collection of 20th century Korean literature will include stories about the Korean War, and there are a few powerful stories on this topic in th section entitled Peace and War.  In Land of Exile, Chongnae Cho writes not about the horrific three-year period of fighting between the North and South, but about how that time  left deep scars on the Korean people – emotional, political, and economic.

Another powerful section is Hell Choson, which Kwon describes as:

the discontent of a generation of young people who have dutifully obtained a university education only to find a paucity of jobs commensurate with their education. More generally the term reflects disappointment with a lifestyle marked by economic inequality, crony capitalism, excessive work hours and inadequate salary, and the societal manifestations of this malaise, such as the highest suicide rate among the OECD nations, a negative birthrate and a divorce rate that hovers around 30 percent.

This theme is perhaps best illustrated by the renowned writer Kyung-sook Shin in her House on the Prairie. The title may conjure up warm and homey images of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel Little House on the Prairie, and it indeed begins with a young, hopeful couple moving into an abandoned cottage on a prairie. During the next few years, they create a beautiful life, with the husband working at a construction site not far away, and the wife delivering home-cooked lunches to him every day. Soon they have a baby to complete their idyllic picture of domesticity, but clearly there is a crack in the frame. Shin, a master storyteller who has touched on themes of loss and grief in her many novels such as Please Look After Momand I’ll Be Right There, somehow captures the feeling of Hell Choson in her slim short story of only six pages.

It must have been a difficult task to choose only 25 short stories for The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, but Fulton has done an excellent job of curating a wide range of works by acclaimed Korean authors – some light and funny, others dark and tragic, with most somewhere in between. For an introduction to modern Korean literature, this collection is not to be missed.

Exploring the comfort women’s history

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One Left: A novel ~ By Soom Kim (translated by Ju-chan and Bruce Fulton)

(University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2020, ISBN #978-0-29574766-8)

Review by Bill Drucker (Spring 2023)

As the old woman folds her blanket, she hears on the television that the last one has passed.  An onni – sister, a comfort woman.  “No,” the old woman mutters.  “There is still me.”  She cleans her room and walks out to the veranda.  She sees a dead magpie next to her shoes, a gift from her cat, Nabi. 

So begins a fictional story that describes a very real group of war survivors.  One Left is a beautifully-written novel, dedicated to the Korean women who were forcibly drafted into and survived military sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II era. The story has emotional honesty and gravitas, and can be a hard read at time.  After just a few chapters, the reader may have to pause.  The narrative tugs at our hearts. 

The quiet, low-key story begins with the description of an old woman who lives in squalor in a depressed neighborhood.  The woman had lived in a tiny apartment for the last five years where her nephew had placed her. Her nephew’s motive is to have an address in an area he believes will get renovated and be more valuable in the near future.

Her self-isolation is due, in part, to the fact that she is afraid of her own past as a so-called “comfort woman,” or military sex slave.  Kidnapped at age 13 by the Japanese military, she survived and went back to Korea after seven years to an unwelcoming family and country. The TV news of the death of the woman assumed to be the last onni makes her want to speak the words “I was a victim too.”

The scenario is realistic, as only a few hundred women in South Korea came forward starting in 1991 to publicly tell their stories of the war crimes committed against them. Many became activists for the cause. The total number of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery is estimated at 170,000 to 200,000; only a fraction of that number survived.  Due to the shame of publicly admitting even forced prostitution, it was always understood by the comfort women’s activist movement that there must be hundreds of survivors who remained anonymous.  

Magpies figure into the story.  In the West, the magpie is a harbinger of bad news.  In Korean culture, it is a national bird, the bearer of good news and luck.  In Korea, magpie songs can mean that guests or good news will arrive soon.  

In the story, the woman’s cat drags a dead magpie to her door, leaving her anxious about what it could mean.  The stray cat’s name is Nabi, Korean for “butterfly.” The butterfly is the symbol for the global human rights and justice movement of the former comfort women and their supporters.

In actuality, there are less than a dozen declared former comfort women alive today in South Korea.  These elderly women have been dying at a faster pace as the years pass. However, the awareness of the global human rights campaign of the former comfort women is alive and growing today, due to the reach of the internet and the many women’s rights and human rights activists who have taken up the cause.   

Their campaign, which began in 1991 and extends to the present day, is to demand justice and reparations from the Japanese for their war crimes against them, including educating the next generation in Japan about the true war history, which is sanitized in Japanese culture. The movement also supports other movements to support women in war.

One Left is Soom Kim’s first novel that has been translated into English. She is a prize-winning writer of nine novels and six collections of short stories.  The book is well-researched, with interviews of the actual comfort women, and reviews of the records compilations.  Award-winning translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are familiar names, with their fluid translations of literary works from Korean to English.

In this a telling of a tragic history from the perspective of one elderly former sex slave who sees herself as “the last one,” Kim revitalizes energy for this irreconcilable injustice in a new generation of readers.  

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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