A Distant and Beautiful Place

Introduction

1 Introduction Since her literary debut in 1978, Yang Kwija (b. 1955) has garnered a critical and popular following enjoyed by few Korean authors. Yang grew up amid South Korea’s breakneck drive for industrialization and economic development. Not surprisingly, her writing explores the modern urban experience in a changing society: the opportunities and disappointments of the new economy and the social mobility that it seems to promise; the deterioration of traditional ties of trust and reciprocity; and the underlying, yet ubiquitous, atmosphere of violence and fear that characterized South Korean life prior to democratization in 1987. Throughout her work, Yang explores these themes with straightforward prose, compassion, and humor. Yang Kwija started out writing short fiction, as do most Korean fiction writers. She is remarkable, however, for her consistent productivity . Beginning with her debut work, which won the Newcomers Award from the prestigious literary journal Munhak sasang in 1978, she has published a steady stream of stories, first from the Chôlla region, where she was born and raised, and then from Seoul, the South Korean capital, and its environs, where she settled in 1980. Since the mid-1980s, she has added dozens of novellas and full-length novels to her body of work, publishing best-selling and prizewinning works on a regular basis. As with so many of her contemporaries, Yang’s roots are in the provinces, but she has lived most of her life in and around the 2 Introduction nation’s large urban centers. Her early works draw on this experience , examining the lives of ordinary people struggling to survive with dignity as their society shifts from a traditional rural way of life, where community and family are paramount, to an urban-centered lifestyle, where individual needs and ambitions reign. The protagonists in her early stories are often “salary men,” faceless office workers struggling to overcome the alienation and loneliness of Korea’s newly industrializing cities. The short story “Rust”* chronicles the dismal existence of a would-be journalist sidetracked in the advertising department at a metropolitan newspaper company . The melancholy protagonist is frustrated and angry at what seems to be the broken promise of modern Korea’s remarkable growth. This theme of middle-class alienation is one of several running through A Distant and Beautiful Place, Yang’s best-selling collection of linked stories published individually in literary journals from 1985 to 1987 and as a collection, Wonmi-dong saramdûl (The people of Wonmi-dong), in 1987. A Distant and Beautiful Place documents the lives of those on the periphery of Seoul, struggling to find refuge, if not prosperity, somewhere between the modern metropolis and traditional society. Wonmi-dong (literally, a distant and beautiful neighborhood) is located in the satellite city of Puch’ôn, Kyônggi Province, just west of Seoul. Yang, her husband, and their newborn daughter moved there in 1982, after housing costs drove them from the capital, where they had lived for two years. Her portrayal of the community is based on personal experiences and observations. In A Distant and Beautiful Place, Yang captures the essence of modern Korea in transition. Once a traditional agrarian community , Wonmi-dong was swept up in the storm of change generated by South Korea’s forced march toward industrialization and economic development in the 1970s and 1980s. As the population of the Seoul metropolitan area grew, housing prices in the capital rose beyond the reach of the average citizen, driving hundreds of thousands to seek shelter in the surrounding suburbs. The resultant population and real estate boom shook long- * “Rust,” trans. Ahn Jung-hyo, in Reunion So Far Away (Seoul: Korean National Commission for UNESCO, 1994), pp. 149–178. Introduction 3 established rural communities. Local families sold farmland to housing contractors who, in turn, built inexpensive apartments and shops to accommodate new arrivals from Seoul and the hinterlands . The newcomers had no place in the traditional network of reciprocal obligations maintained by the local people and instead pinned their hopes on industrialization’s promise of upward mobility and a better life. However, like the frustrated journalist in “Rust,” many found that promise was too often broken. In A Distant and Beautiful Place, Yang weaves these themes of alienation amid change, a lost sense of community, the deterioration of traditional values, and the subtle undercurrent of violence and fear into a tapestry of vivid characterizations and rich dialogue. The middle-class protagonists in the...