Paul Fulcher's Reviews > The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women

The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women is a recent (2016) update of an original 1997 anthology of short stories, [Wayfarer] adding 4 new and more recently active authors, and, perhaps a little disappointingly, losing 3 others from the original to make space.

This makes for a slightly odd combination - for those who have read Wayfarer, half the book is duplicated, and for those who haven't some worthwhile stories are lost. Nevertheless, the resulting book, on a stand-alone basis, is an excellent overview of Korean women's fiction over the last 45 years.

With Han Kang having taken the inaugural version of the new format Man Booker International and Kyung Sook-shin having achieved best-seller status, one might argue that fiction by contemporary Korean women in English translation is already relatively high profile, but that is largely thanks to anthologies such as this that bring new writers to the attention not just of readers, but also of publishers. And the low profile of writers such as the magnificent Bae Suah suggest there is still much work to do.

The anthology has been assembled and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, who have over the decades done a magnificent and highly valuable service in bringing Korean literature to English speakers, particularly via anthologies.

One small pet peeve is the use the McCune-Reischauer system of romanisation, one that to me seems rather pointless as it makes confusing use of apostrophes, and uses diacritics that don't exist in spoken English. One may as well learn the Korean script, indeed the Fultons observe "Hangŭl, the Korean alphabet, is one of the most precise phonetic scripts in the world; its rudiments can be grasped in a matter of hours" (Or hangeul as modern romanisation would have it.)

They offer a slightly odd dedication as well, not for what it says but rather for what it hints at between the lines with the 'once upon a time':

"Two of the authors represented herein, Pak Wan-sŏ and Kim Chi-wŏn, have passed on since Wayfarer was released in 1997. Both women exemplified the mutual trust and respect that, once upon a time, characterized relations between Korean writers and their translators. It is with deep affection that we dedicate this volume to the memory of these two gracious individuals"
The authors and stories included in this book, with dates of original Korean publication are (my / Goodreads romanisation):

Oh Jung-hee, Wayfarer, 1983
Kim Jiwon, Almaden, 1979
Seo Yeongeun, Dear Distant Love, 1983
Pak Wansuh, Identical Apartments, 1974
Gong Seonok, The Flowering Of Our Lives, 1994
and the new stories:
Han Yujoo, I Ain’t Necessarily Sp, 2012
Kim Sagwa, It’s One of Those The-More-I’m-in-Motion-the-Weirder-it-Gets Days and It’s Really Blowing My Mind, 2010
Cheon Un-yeong, Ali Skips Rope, 2008
Kim Ae-ran, The Future of Silence, 2012

Relatively few of the authors had novels in English (my preferred form) although in part this reflects the relatively higher importance, versus English, of the short story in Korean literature.
Of those I know there are (as at March 2021) – to my point above about the importance of anthologies, the last three of were published subsequent to this collection:

Pak Wansuh: Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel
Oh Jung-hee: The Bird
Han Yujoo: The Impossible Fairy Tale
Kim Sagwa: Mina
Kim Ae-ran My Brilliant Life

As to the stories here:

Wayfarer is an fascinating psychological study of a women who has returned from a 2 year spell in hospital, her husband having left her (seemingly at her, resigned, suggestion), taking the children.

She would frantically rummage through the house for some trace of them. It was as if she wanted to obliterate all the time she had been away. The stickers on the wall, the long, black strands of glossy hair in the hairbrush, the handkerchief with the embroidered corner she discovered these and other traces, but all they did was make her powerfully, vividly aware of the enormous gap that now separated her from them.

Even her (former) friends are uninterested to hear from her: To Min and her friends, the story about her was merely a single day two years before, and rather awkward when they do meet: everyone asked about her health. Is the gunpowder in a safe place? was how it sounded to her.

Gradually we find out why she was in hospital but the delayed revelation isn't so much the strength of this story as the isolation of someone, particularly a woman, who doesn't neatly fit with society's norms.

Almaden is a rather more straightforward story. It is set in New York and the female protagonist runs a wine and spirit shop.

It opens: The young man usually dropped by the woman’s West Side wine and spirit shop around 5 p.m. for a bottle of Almaden Chablis.

Trapped in a rather loveless marriage, she wonders if her husband treats others with the same disdain he does her. And she increasingly fantasises about this particular customer until one day he speaks to her directly: Can you trust me? His voice shook. It sounded distinctly higher than usual.

Except it isn't what she hopes (although rather what the reader guesses).

Dear Distant Love tells of Mun-ja, almost 40 and a spinster (in England that term would typically be used for an older person but in a Korean cultural context it works for any unmarried person much over 30), working in a publishing company where the other employees, mostly young graduates, come and go:

The young excluded Mun-ja from their conversations. What pride could they take from having an old maid as a co-worker who had always occupied the bottom of the totem pole at this insignificant publishing house, where they had no future even if they stayed for the rest of their careers? Everything about her was out of date, the clothing redeemed only by the lack of holes: her overcoat with its frayed cuffs, the ballet flats she wore summer and winter, the short, wide-cut dark gray pants that left her ankles sticking out, the lumpy socks with their layer of lint, the handbag smelling of her lunch whenever she pulled it from her desk drawer. They liked to think that a frigid wind whirled at Mun-ja’s back as she hunched over the proofs on her desk. They imagined coarse gooseflesh sprouting on her chin.

Except Mun-ja has a secret of sorts... She bit her lip gently, stifling an urge to burst out laughing. What a splendid job she had done fooling everyone! None of them knew her silence originated from an absolute confidence that she could live under any conditions, a self-assurance that had been forming in an ongoing contest with a higher power, far above the plane of their existence, a confidence that hardened with each step she took along a solitary road that was longer than they could ever imagine.

Her road - a rather masochistic and overwrought relationship with a married man who doesn't treat her well, yet the worse he treats her, the more her almost religious zeal to please him increases.

This story felt a little overwrought if treated as matter-of-fact, but more powerful read as a parable of the suffering of women in unequal relationships in then Korean society.

Identical Apartments opens with the married female narrator and her husband rather awkwardly living with her parents. Eventually they save up enough to get an apartment of their own as society dictates they should, only for her to find that (Ch’ŏri’s mom being her neighbour):

All around us the apartments are the same, as much so as mine and Ch’ŏri’s mom’s. Sure, there are differences one apartment might have a washer, someone else might have a piano, but no one enjoys these advantages long enough to indulge in a sense of superiority. Because someone soon copies her.

Eventually coveting one's neighbours goods extends to coveting her husband …

The Flowering of Our Lives was one I struggled with. Our narrator is a widow having difficulties both with her relationship with her 8yo daughter and her memories of her relationship, when she was a youth, with her own mother, and in each case physically absence herself, taking solace in drink.

The narrator is much the most complex of the characters in the collection but I found it hard to follow her thoughts. This, from which the story takes its title, is a typical passage:

I could finally look at my daughter as once again she resigned herself to the presence of her brazen mom, despondent precisely because of her mom’s lack of despair. Would I grow flustered in her presence? Or would I be indifferent? Was I running away from not having a reason, and toward having a reason? Is that what drinking does to me? I dare to christen that lack of a reason ‘the flowering of our lives’. First my daughter showers me with arrows of criticism. And she opposes me by herself. Perhaps one of these days when Mom is intoxicated by the scent of those flowers, my daughter will suffocate and the next moment be dead and gone. That is something quite possible to imagine.

I ain't necessarily so offers a complete change of style and quality as we move into the next generation of Korean writers.

Like Han Yujoo's novel, An Impossible Fairy Tale, this has at its heart word-play (In Korean 말 (mal) can be a horse but also a word), leading to obvious translation difficulties, albeit ones the Fultons manage extremely well. The story begins: My left hand is the king, my right hand the king’s scribe.

A refrain repeated throughout this highly rhythmic and abstract story. A typical passage reads, set as the king (or author's left hand) is about to leave for his summer palace:

The king’s men having taken the king’s horses, the king is left with no horse. The scribe having mis-recorded the king’s words as the king’s horses, the king is left with no word. And so the king’s departure, his progress, his arrival are placed on indefinite hold. For the king there’s no summer. All at once words are released from the mouths of the jesters and the retainers, the ladies-in-waiting and the ministers, and that very instant my left hand speaks to my right.

“For this I want your head.”
“For that you get eternal silence.”

So went the summer and so went the winter, my left hand the king and my right hand the king’s scribe. I haven’t decided my second book’s title. So goes today and so goes tomorrow, my left hand the king and my right hand the king’s scribe. I still can’t divest myself of my hopeless belief that today will be followed by tomorrow. I still haven’t decided my third book’s title, which makes me wonder if I’ve decided the title of my first. Perhaps my first book and my second will be The Impossible Fairy Tale, perhaps my third book and my fourth as well

Wonderful and worth reading the collection for this alone.

It’s One of Those The-More-I’m-in-Motion-the-Weirder-it-Gets Days and It’s Really Blowing My Mind maintains the high quality.

Kim Sagwa's story has a well educated and ostensibly successful company worker increasingly raging at the reality of his life:

The last few years I’ve spent more time in this conference room than anywhere else. We’re gathered here now, a collection of squirming beings that somehow manage to resemble people. A’s mouth is moving. I’ve been working with her on a project for three months. The day I met her she introduced herself as a branding consultant, and damned if her business card didn’t say exactly that. And then she launched into a spiel about all her whoopity-do degrees, parading her education. But what I saw in her eyes was fear. I felt that same fear …All I see are the eyes of an animal frozen with fear. Those are the eyes I always see.
…
What if I stripped A naked and beat her with the cactus on the far right, the one that looks like a club. Her glittering golden nail polish does that to me—every time they reflect the light those fingernails do a number inside my head. I want to rip out each of those fingernails. But instead I feed my imagination.

He leaves that evening, determined not to return, but increasingly his actions start to follow his imagination, at times in rather surreal fashion.

Ali Skips Rope begins with the protagonist trying to face down some school bullies:

My name is Ali. Ali the Great. What’s even greater than my name is my father’s foresight in choosing it. If not for my name I’d be quaking in my shoes this very instant, I wouldn’t know what to think..

We gradually learn the backstory of how she got her name, the ways she trains with Ali-style skipping to, not always successfully, try to beat the bullies, and we also meet her grandmother "Jeannine", now elderly and senile but who comes to life when she is called by the stage name under which she once danced. A charming story if less innovative than the other modern writers showcased.

The Future of Silence is a very impressive end to the collection, a dystopian story about language and loss.

It is narrated by the spirit of the breath and energy released from a language at the moment of its extinction. I am a gigantic eye, a huge mouth. I am given life for a day, a brief span in which I look back over my previous life. I am both singular and plural, a collective and its parts, a fog bank and its separate wisps. I am the synthesis of all that helps me to be me, and the weight of the silence that makes such syntheses erase themselves. I am the volume of absence, the density of loss, the force generated when a light flickers on only to be snuffed out.

And is set in the Museum of Moribund Languages, established with the goal of preserving dying languages and educating the world about their importance by 'The Centre'.

Reading this on the Korean island of Jeju, which seems to have a museum for everything (https://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2...) this raised a smile: The Center expected tourists to bring in enough revenue to offset expenses and debt. But not many visitors traveled to this distant, dust-swept place. If it were a museum for automobiles or dinosaur fossils, then maybe.

But the Center's agenda for the museum may have a more sinister side:

The Center established this complex to protect and raise awareness of languages throughout the world that face extinction. However, the outcome proved to be the opposite, and perhaps that was The Center’s covert wish they mourned in order to forget, praised in order to disdain, commemorated in order to kill off.

Highly recommended