Who Ate Up All the Shinga? Read online

  Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

  Weatherhead Books on Asia

  WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIA INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  Weatherhead Books on Asia WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIA INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  Literature DAVID DER-WEI WANG, EDITOR

  Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)

  Oda Makoto, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)

  Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)

  Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)

  Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)

  Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)

  Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)

  Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)

  Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006)

  Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, translated by Teruko Craig (2006)

  Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, translated by Julia Lovell (2007)

  Kim Sowŏl, Azaleas: A Book of Poems, translated by David McCann (2007)

  Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, translated by Michael Berry (2008)

  Ch’oe Yun, There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton (2008)

  Inoue Yasushi, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Joshua A. Fogel (2009)

  Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou, translated by Patrick Hanan (2009)

  History, Society, and Culture CAROL GLUCK, EDITOR

  Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, translated with an introduction by Richard Calichman (2005)

  Contemporary Japanese Thought, translated by Richard Calichman (2005)

  Overcoming Modernity, Yasuda et al., translated by Richard Calichman (2008)

  Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings (2009)

  PARK WAN-SUH

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

  TRANSLATED BY

  YU YOUNG-NAN

  STEPHEN J. EPSTEIN

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Daesan Foundation toward the cost of translating and publishing this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52036-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pak, Wan-so, 1931–

  [Ku mant’on singa nun nuga ta mogossulkka. English]

  Who ate up all the shinga? : an autobiographical novel / Park Wan-suh ;

  translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein.

  p. cm. — (Weatherhead books on Asia)

  ISBN 978-0-231-14898-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

  I. Yu, Yong-nan. II. Epstein, Stephen J., 1962– III. Title. IV. Series.

  PL992.62.W34K82513 2009

  895. 7’34—dc22

  2009000332

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Days in the Wild

  2. Seoul, So Far Away

  3. Beyond the Gates

  4. Friendless Child

  5. The Triangle-Yard House

  6. Grandmother and Grandfather

  7. Mother and Brother

  8. Spring in My Hometown

  9. The Hurled Nameplate

  10. Groping in the Dark

  11. The Eve Before the Storm

  12. Epiphany

  Introduction

  PARK WAN-SUH (ALSO ROMANIZED AS PAK WAN-SŎ), although little known in the West, is by common consent the most notable female author in contemporary South Korea, where she is held in high esteem by both the literary establishment and the public for her skill as a storyteller and for the wit, compassion, and incisive social criticism evident in her writing. Her works not only have received numerous prestigious literary awards but also routinely appear at the top of best-seller lists; several have been successfully adapted for the screen. Remarkably, Park did not publish any work until she was almost forty. Her prizewinning first novel, The Naked Tree, created a minor sensation, however, not least because a debut by a woman her age was so rare. Since its appearance in 1970, Park has maintained a prolific output of high-quality work, with some 20 novels and more than 150 shorter pieces to her credit. Awareness of her talent is slowly reaching an international audience, as her writing is translated into a variety of languages. Works available in English include The Naked Tree and two collections of short fiction, My Very Last Possession and Other Stories and Sketch of the Fading Sun, as well as a number of short stories that have appeared in journals or anthologies.

  Park’s fiction has occasionally been described as reminiscent of stories told by a chatty neighbor. Although such a description captures the warmth and colloquial flavor of much of her writing, it belies her razor-sharp critiques of Korean society and her versatility and virtuosity as a stylist able to range with equal success from the earthy to the elegant. Her favorite themes include the tragedy of the Korean War, the hypocrisy and materialism of the middle class, and the concerns of women—topics that she embeds within lively tales about compelling, realistically drawn characters. Far from running out of ideas, Park has become even more accomplished and imaginative as she continues into the latter stages of her career, remaining productive well into her seventies.

  The author’s potted biography informs us that she was born in 1931 near Kaesŏng, in what is now North Korea. She entered Seoul National University, the nation’s top university, in June 1950, but the Korean War, which broke out almost immediately afterward, cut her studies short. These two spare biographical details, which essentially bookend the memoir that follows, hint at the upheavals of Park’s early years but not the skill with which she re-creates this turbulent period of Korean history. Simply put, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary work about extraordinary times. Although deceptively little in the book, until its final page, suggests that the protagonist herself will eventually become the grande dame of Korean literature, her evocation of the dramatic vicissitudes experienced by her family is enthralling. The work became a best seller in its native South Korea and has remained a steady favorite since, having sold more than 1.3 million copies.

  Non-Korean readers will also find that the story has ready cross-cultural appeal and that the author’s insight into human nature resonates with those outside the conservative, patriarchal Confucian framework in which Park was raised. Of course, introductions to works of Korean literature in translation often do have to provide background that authors have taken for granted in their audience, and readers of Who Ate Up All the Shinga? should be aware of at least the broad outlines of the troubled middle decades of the twentieth century in Korea—all the more so, since South Korea’s current image as an economically dynamic, culturally stylish, and technologically savvy nation is effacing memories of darker days, when extreme poverty was rife and the Korean people experienced the successive hardships of occupation b
y Japan and a devastating internecine war. Nonetheless, even in 1992, when Park published Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, she was conscious of how remote the period had become for many of her readers, who were coming of age amid rising prosperity and the optimism of a freshly democratized polity, and she fills in necessary information while avoiding didacticism.

  This feature, in conjunction with the author’s eye for colorful detail and her gifts of characterization, makes the text a rich and thoroughly accessible source of social history. For Park, spinning a good yarn has always been the primary concern, and the personalities who surrounded her in her early years stand out vividly, exemplifying the mores of the day without becoming reduced to types. Most particularly, the author paints a sympathetic but critical picture of her mother, highlighting her numerous contradictions. In Park’s eloquent rendering, we see a resourceful, determined woman who kicks forcefully against the strictures of the time while conforming to many of them. She is desperate to shift her daughter from the countryside to Seoul so she can become a “New Woman” (shin yŏsŏng), equipped with a modern education, but has an incomplete understanding of what such a project entails.

  Colonization by Japan, which began in earnest when Korea was annexed in 1910, brought a contradictory mix of enlightenment and oppression, which is still being disentangled in Korea’s fraught relations with its close but distant neighbor. Even now, Korean popular discourse speaks too often in simplistic terms of noble, downtrodden Korean victims resisting evil Japanese oppressors and their collaborators. Although Park does not shy away from pointed criticisms of the banal everyday violence of colonial existence, her reminiscences, in their nuanced sense of how people went about their lives amid a demeaning political structure, offer a useful corrective to such black-and-white portrayals. Most notably, Park portrays the experience of assimilation into the Japanese Empire from a child’s perspective. In doing so, she uncovers occasionally surprising combinations of acquiescence and resistance. The author describes with good-natured humor, for example, her own tribulations of learning Japanese in school, seemingly interminable school ceremonies in honor of the emperor, and benighted attempts to make students devoted subjects of the empire. Descriptions of fears among the Korean populace about having daughters abducted to become “comfort women” in Japanese military brothels or seeing sons forcibly conscripted to work in labor camps appear in conjunction with approving comments on the fairness of Japanese financial institutions and their role in enabling Park’s family to obtain a loan toward purchasing a house in Seoul.

  Of particular interest is the debate that arises within her family over whether to comply with the policy of assuming Japanese names, an issue that underpins Richard Kim’s fine fictionalized account of growing up under the Japanese occupation, Lost Names, and the two texts can profitably be read in tandem. Park’s tale, however, reveals that the policy was by no means as compulsory as often suggested and that self-interest rather than coercion often drove capitulation: while her brother insists on clinging to the family name, her uncle worries that doing so may hurt his business. The author herself longs for the family to take a Japanese name for a much more trivial reason: the resemblance between the Japanese pronunciation of her Korean name and the word for “air-raid drill” led to frequent teasing by her schoolmates that she longed to escape.

  Park experienced adolescence during the heady era of post-Liberation Korea, when new political concepts excited the populace and a growing ideological divide penetrated even high schools. Park draws from personal example to show how initial euphoria over freedom from the Japanese yielded to serious concerns that society was teetering on the brink of chaos. Ominously, her laconic, thoughtful brother becomes involved with the underground leftist movement. The book’s last sections are also its most harrowing in their depiction of how one not atypical family becomes trapped in the crossfire of the Korean War’s destructive passions: when the Communists capture Seoul in their initial blitzkrieg attack, neighbors kowtow to her family, assuming that her brother has a high place in the leftist hierarchy. Soon after General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inch’ŏn, however, the United Nations forces and the army of the Republic of Korea (ROK) retake Seoul, and a period of excruciating hardship descends on the family as presumed Red sympathizers; the author is regularly summoned for interrogations and made to literally crawl before her tormentors. Her brother, forcibly conscripted by the Korean People’s Army (KPA), eventually straggles home from the front, suffering on his return from what we would now diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder. The final scenes are riveting: Park must take flight with her mother, her now lame brother (“accidentally” shot in the leg by an ROK soldier), her sister-in-law, and their two infant children, one of whom was born prematurely and remains desperately malnourished.

  Park readily acknowledges the extent to which Who Ate Up All the Shinga? draws on the often unreliable medium of memory. As she writes in a piece that became the foreword to later editions of the text, she frequently found herself forced to fill in the interstices of erased recollections with the mortar of imagination. And while she concedes that such a technique is perhaps only to be expected, a more serious problem for her involved confronting discrepancies in the memory of events between herself and other members of her family. Such comparisons, reminiscent of Rashomon (or, perhaps more appropriately here, the work of the acclaimed director Hong Sang-soo), instilled in her a realization that memory may ultimately be no different from imagination. In the hands of a less skillful writer, that declaration might prove alarming for those who want a reliable picture of the author’s experiences, but Park has a deserved reputation for unflinching honesty. She notes the difficulty of resisting the temptation to embellish herself, but the portraits she draws of herself and her family are astonishingly frank, verging on the confessional and even self-flagellating. Throughout her career, Park has written herself into her protagonists, but clearly fictionalized elements have rendered problematic easy identification of the author with her protagonists. Those elements are entirely absent here, and to pursue the question of whether Who Ate Up All the Shinga? should be regarded as fiction or nonfiction is unlikely to prove profitable. Indeed, Park has been described as acting like a surgeon wielding a scalpel in the way her writing exposes hypocrisy with almost clinical precision. The metaphor is no less applicable when she turns her attention to her own life story.

  ************

  A few additional remarks before we begin. Those about to embark on the work may rightly wonder just what a shinga is. Although the nature of this edible plant, which grew in abundance around Park’s native Kaesŏng, will become clearer as the text proceeds, curious readers should rest assured that they are not alone in their perplexity. The author deliberately opted for a title that would leave the majority of Koreans scratching their heads, and the Korean name of the plant has no precise English equivalent (the Latin name seems to be Aconogonon alpinum, for the insatiably curious), hence our decision to romanize the term in our title.

  And since the issue of romanization has come up, it is perhaps germane to note that we have, after considerable reflection, settled on the McCune-Reischauer system of transliterating Korean words for our translation, except for names that have become well known in English by more idiosyncratic spellings (for example, Syngman Rhee). Such exceptions are most obvious in the case of the author herself, whose clearly stated preference for the romanized spelling of her own name as Park Wan-suh has been honored, even though the alternative McCune-Reischauer rendering, as Pak Wan-sŏ, can also occasionally be found. When we refer to her clan name as a whole, however, we do adhere to its standard romanization as Pak.

  My co-translator, Yu Young-nan, and I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Daesan Foundation, which provided us with a grant toward the translation of the text. We also extend a note of deep thanks to Park Wan-suh, who was unstintingly generous in fielding queries about difficult points in her text. We have long been cognizant of her
prodigious talent, and over the years we have experienced firsthand her graciousness and kindness as well. It is a privilege to translate one of her most important works.

  Finally, those who follow the translation of Korean literature will be aware of the increasing trend toward teams that bring together native speakers of the source and target languages. Although both of us often had worked on our own in translation, collaboration proved highly productive. As we sent versions electronically back and forth a dozen times or more with extensive annotation and commentary, teasing out the finest nuances of the original text and possible renderings, we found ourselves engaged in a rejuvenating project of discovery. Both of us agree that we have put more energy into this translation than into any other text that either of us has worked on, not least as a measure of our respect for Who Ate Up All the Shinga? and its author. We hope that the end result justifies the effort.

  Stephen J. Epstein

  1. Days in the Wild

  I USED TO GO AROUND WITH A RUNNY NOSE. Not the occasional droplet, either, but thick yellow mucus, the kind you couldn’t just snuffle back up. I was hardly alone. Back then, all kids were the same. You can see it in the nickname grown-ups gave us—“snifflers.” Not too surprisingly, when I became a mom, the thing I found most remarkable about my kids was that they never had a runny nose unless they had a cold. And not just mine, but all kids. Children used to have a handkerchief pinned to their chest when they first attended school, but that custom is long gone. At this point, even I wonder why we always had mucus dangling from our nostrils, instead of finding it strange that kids these days don’t.

  When I was small, cloth was hard to come by. So was paper. I didn’t even know such a thing as handkerchiefs existed. As the snot got down to my mouth, I’d swipe at it. By the end of winter, the edges of my sleeves would be clotted with a greasy black layer, like thick ointment. One well-padded jacket tided me over for the season. When my mother changed its collar, she’d take advantage of the opportunity and scrub my sleeves to get rid of the gunk that had coagulated, but it didn’t make much difference.