The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories (review)

The seven stories in The Golden Phoenix are not exactly short, and most are contemporary only in the sense of having been written after 1945, the year Korean critics use to distinguish pre-1945 Korean fiction (kŭndae, "early-modern" or "modern") from fiction written thereafter (hyŏndae, "contemporary"). The works are more accurately chungp'yŏn sosŏl, "middle-length fiction," the Korean term for any work intermediate between a short story and a novel. The chungp'yŏn sosŏl has been increasingly in evidence in Korea in recent decades as stories have become more discursive and less tightly focused. Averaging forty pages apiece of rather dense type, the stories in The Golden Phoenix would each be difficult to read at one sitting before the next class meeting—a possible concern for instructors contemplating the book as a course text. As for contemporaneity, translator Suh Ji-moon states in her introduction that "since the long-yearned-for and fought-for termination of military dictatorship in the late 1980s, . . . Korean literature is experiencing a dynamic resurgence, experimenting exuberantly and delighting in uninhibited self-expression." The Golden Phoenix, though, contains scant evidence of any such resurgence. Only two of the stories were published after the 1987 democratization movement; the remainder first appeared in print in the 1970s and early 1980s. It may be that Professor Suh overstates the case. In terms of dynamism, exuberance, and uninhibited self-expression, are there any postdemocratization fiction writers who can compare with Ch'ae Man-shik and Yi Sang, who flourished in the mid-1930s?

The 1990s saw the publication of a dozen-odd collections of Korean fiction in English translation. What can The Golden Phoenix offer this increasingly crowded field? Among the seven authors, O Chŏng-hŭi and Yun Hŭng-gil are already well represented in English, and Yi Mun-yŏl and Ch'oe Yun are gaining ground. The remaining three—Yun Hu-myŏng, Yi Mun-gu, and Kim Yŏng-hyŏn—are mostly new to an English-language audience.

Yi Mun-yŏl enjoys tremendous respect in his homeland but a comparatively limited following outside it (except in France, where, thanks to translations of his works by Patrick Maurus and Ch'oe Yun, he enjoys modest recognition). Primarily a novelist rather than a writer of short fiction, Yi has tackled some of the most weighty issues of modern Korean history—the fate of a younger generation made to suffer because of the political misadventures of the older generation; the territorial division of the nation; the vanishing of Korean tradition; conflicting expectations of the role of women in Korean society today. And he has a style to match, deliberate verging on tendentious. Yi is represented here by the title story (1981), one of his best-known works in Korea, but the esoteric background of calligraphy and art and the discourse on Eastern aesthetics make it a forbidding read in English for readers new to Korea.

Yi Mun-gu, on the other hand, deserves more representation in English for his colorful stories of farm village life, his strong characterization, and his sense of humor. "The Sunset Over My Hometown" (1972), the first selection of his acclaimed Kwanch'on supil (Kwanch'on essays, 1977) collection, is a nostalgic remembrance of a grandfather, inspired by the narrator's first visit to his ancestral home in a decade. It is one of the more successful stories in The Golden Phoenix.

Yun Hu-myŏng is known for his poignant 1996 Yi Sang Literature Prize-winning story "Hayan pae" (The white boat), a tale of ethnic Koreans in the former Soviet Union. The story translated here, though, "The Girl from the Wind-Whipped House" (1982), reads like two narratives patched together. It would be more compelling if the first part—about a village girl orphaned by a bombing raid during the civil war—survived alone.

Kim...