nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 12, 2008

‘Exile’ includes excellent writing

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

“I was moved to laughter, but my frozen cheeks would not form into a smile of their own accord.” So relates the protagonist of Pak Wanso’s short story, “Winter Outing,” with one emotion trapped underneath another in that brutal Korean cold that stands as a foreboding metaphor, quite apart from its formidable physical manifestation. It’s a high point of the short-fiction anthology, “Land Of Exile,” now revised and expanded with four new stories, which collects South Korean work post-1945, capturing a vibrant cross-section of lives intersecting, if often failing to truly connect, through war, privation, political and social dyspepsia, and those soul-destroying winters.

Marshall R. Pihl, who died in 1995, and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, currently associated with the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, bring a lifetime of translation and Korean cultural studies to the table, with a memorable array of impressions and emotions.

Cho Chongnae’s “Land Of Exile” blends the muted anxiety of h
ospital admissions with the inner thoughts of the involved parties — thoughts running to regrets, ruefulness and the occasional homicidal fantasy, as the old, young, professional and merely unlucky struggle to make sense of their lives.

“The Boozer,” from Ch’oe Inho, surveys alcohol, its merriments and its tolls, as a young fellow tests himself against older, more bolstered drunks, trying to prove his manhood and careen through chaos (A representative line: “As if suddenly waking up, the one-armed man went for his knife”) with that manhood, and indeed, life itself, intact.

“A Shared Journey,” by Im Ch’oru, relates in first person a fugitive from a political act gone terrifyingly wrong. The fracturing of an action runs deep, spoiling human interactions as it poisons successive levels of emotion: “I felt awkward sitting shoulder to shoulder with you in the taxi. … It was the melancholy expressed in your thick beard, in your puffy, lifeless cheeks, in the ever-worrisome look in your eyes that belied your attempts at indifference.”

Kim Minsuk’s “Scarlet Fingernails” tackles the sticky subject of South Koreans defecting to North Korea, though at its end the family finds itself together again, however tentatively.

“Conviction,” from university Professor Ch’oe Such’ol, takes place as life, and appreciation for life, wind down and sputter to stops, virtually every page a vision of the looming subterranean.

The finale, Kim Hun’s “From Powder to Powder,” begins in death, an ordinary woman’s passage into eternity, followed by an ordinary husband’s preparations for the funeral and cremation. In its pinpoint details, Kim captures the continuum of life and love worth remembering.

Faced with cold, brutal nature, and humanity both indifferent and hostile, the characters of “Land Of Exile” sometimes acquiesce, sometimes fight back, as do their respective authors; and the shapes, the methodologies, of their affirmations and negations never cease to provoke and surprise. It collects sage reportage on the Korean condition as aptly as it collects names and texts. n

“Land Of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction,” translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Published by M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 2007. $27.95

Andrew Hamlin can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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