Sok-Yong Hwang

"The days of our youth are probably now nothing but photographs in some treasured album, yellowing and fading like memories over time."

Park Minwoo is a successful Seoul architect in his 60's, though he grew up in one of the shantytowns on the hills surrounding the city. As he ages, he begins to look back on his past, and how he got to where he is today. He thinks frequently of his first love, the daughter of the noodle-maker in the shantytown. As teenagers, they bonded over a mutual love of reading and the desire for an education. They have been out of touch for years, when he receives a cryptic message from her.

In sections that alternate with Minwoo's story, we get the story of a young woman struggling to get by in present day Seoul (both sections are in the first person). She works days as a playwright/director/jack-of-all-trades at fringe urban theater (generally unpaid), and then rushes to her all-night job as a convenience store clerk before heading home for a few hours of sleep in a mold-infested basement.

As the sections progress, we wonder how these two lives will intersect.

I liked this quiet introspective novel quite a lot. It seems to give a realistic and detailed look at what life is like for many in present day Seoul. I would like to read more by this author.

3 1/2 stars… (meer)

Well…wouldn’t you know it. The little I knew about the Korean war from my U.S. education was shamefully wrong. No wonder governments and the people who shill for them are afraid of writers.
In her piece for The Nation marking the 70th anniversary of the Armistice between the bifurcated Koreas, Grace M. Cho states that “writers such as Hyun Ki-Young and Hwang Sok-Yong, who shed light on civilian massacres through their fictional works, faced imprisonment, torture, and exile. To be a south Korean citizen who did not actively disavow communism or who was related to a suspected communist was to risk a terrible fate at the hands of the state.”
Hwang Sok-yong faced some or all of that for his works. The brilliant Mater 2-10 is my first encounter with his writing.
Mater 2-10 is a multi-generational novel that highlights the struggles of the Korean people and workers for independence from Imperial powers and against the oppression of elite capitalism and the state mechanisms that support it. The clever narrative mechanism to relate the story is a striking worker staging a sit-in atop a factory chimney and his conversations with the ghosts of his ancestors and other family acquaintances who take him back generations to tell the story of his family and nation(s). I had no real idea of how the Koreans were used and suffered from the imperial Japanese and U.S. occupations. I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to fill in the huge holes in how most of us understand this history.
I’ll be on the lookout for other books of his, especially the one about his reluctant service in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps supporting the U.S.… (meer)

Hwang Sok-yong's book is an adept critique of Korean modernization. The story sucked me in and I couldn't stop reading it. I sit here wondering how the author can end a book with such sadness and poignancy and still leave you feeling satisfied that the book ends well and ends the way it should.

It struck me that in the late 80s through the mid 90s, I was living in Korea when this huge growth spurt was just beginning. My introduction to Korea as an english teacher was going out every night to a street vendor (a pojangmacha...a sort of large picnic table on wheels with the food prep taking place on one side and benches for customers on the other) and having dinner...lunch was in a small cinder-block building with a metal corrugated roof that made the best bokkumbap (fried rice) and ramen!

People all around me were making a living doing simple commerce...shoeshine, food vendors, selling kitchen goods, etc...Some of the areas around Choryang-dong in downtown Busan, where I worked, were run-down, some areas had newer modern office buildings, but it had not become the streamlined, glitzy, k-pop, multi-media economic powerhouse that it is today. Much of this way of life has disappeared now, especially in the big cities like Seoul and Busan. I miss it whenever we go back.

Quibbles? Only that the same translator, Sora Kim-Russell, translated The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun which I read last year and I still struggle with her english word choice. Some of her vocabulary seems outdated as if she is using 1950s Korean-English dictionaries.

Regardless, Kim-Russell, did an excellent job of translation overall and I definitely want to read more of Hwang Sok-yong's books.
… (meer)