Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 156

US, Asia, and the World: 1914–2012
RESOURCES
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS
Waxen Wings
The Acta Koreana Anthology
of Short Fiction from Korea
B RUCE F ULTON , E DITOR
S T . P AUL , M INNESOTA , K ORYO P RESS , 2011
250 PAGES , ISBN: 978-1597432030, PAPERBACK
Reviewed by Tracy Kaminer
A
s a teacher of world literature
to high school seniors, I have
experimented with many
works in translation, attempting to in-
troduce unfamiliar cultures through
story. When the references are too
vague or the background too intimidat-
ing, students close the book before they
give the literature (and sometimes the
culture) a chance. That is why Waxen
Wings is a welcome work. While Ko-
rean readers or scholars who are
steeped in tradition and literary arts can
appreciate the stories on a deeper level,
the novice can find works that are dif-
ferent enough to be interesting but universal enough to be accessible and
appealing. Some of the stories are based on folktales and myth, while oth-
ers have such diverse themes as politics, fantasy and imagination, nature,
Western popular culture, and the macabre. The first of the nine stories in
the collection was published in 1936 and the last in 2006.
Yi Hyosŏk (1907–1942), who, Fulton tells us, escaped to the country-
side when Japanese occupiers clamped down on his writing, starts the col-
lection with his less controversial “In the Mountains.” The brief story is a
poetic yearning for communion with nature from a character who has been
unfairly accused by his village employer of consorting with the employer’s
concubine. He runs away to cleanse himself of the filth in the village by
sleeping in the leaves, eating what the earth provides, and becoming like a
tree himself. The landscape does not let him down, and the only price is
loneliness. He has less-than-honorable thoughts about how to deal with
that loneliness, for example, by kidnapping a girl from the village, but at the
end, as he slept, he “felt himself turning into a star.”
“Constable Maeng” by Ch’ae Manshik, born in 1902, exposes the false-
hoods we all tell ourselves. The story may need some introduction to un-
derstand that liberation from Japanese occupation took a heavy toll on
those who collaborated during that time. Constable Maeng is one such
character. Although he considers himself an “upright” man, we learn that
he can lie to himself because he was not as successful as others in extort-
ing big bribes from other Koreans and enriching himself during the occu-
pation. Now he has little except for a shrew of a young wife, whom he finds
“amusing,” and his own fear about working as a constable again after learn-
ing that others like him had been beaten to death by those who were angry
about being mistreated under the old rule. The translation by Joel Steven-
son is lively and playful, such as in this dialogue when the young wife is
complaining that her husband has never given her a silk dress: “You are
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When the references are too vague or the
background too intimidating, students
close the book before they give the literature
(and sometimes the culture) a chance.
such a jerk. If you had a mouth as big as a wicker basket there’s nothing
you could say for yourself.” Here is a man who is slow to recognize that so-
ciety has changed, and he is on the wrong side of history. With alternating
humor and gravity, the story engages us in a reflection on the ways in which
we make excuses for the wrongs we have committed when we choose to ex-
pect very little of ourselves.
“Weaver Woman” by O Chŏnghŭi and “We Teach Shame” by Pak
Wansŏ, both written in the 1970s, follow. These two women are responsi-
ble for much of the success of Korean women writers today, says Fulton in
his introduction. While the first story recalls the folktale of a herder boy
and weaver girl, the second is a story that readers can relate to on many
levels—from the widening wealth gap brought to the forefront by both the
Occupy and the Tea Party movements in the US right now—to questions
we hold in our hearts about our lives’ purposes and directions. The sensi-
tive narrator reflects on her three sham marriages, her evacuation from
Seoul in 1951, and life in a camp town with American soldiers. How, then,
can people chase wealth all around her, be content to use and discard each
other, and disparage their own countrymen? What happened to the “in-
expressible harmony” of black tiles and white snow of the South Gate,
which remained as she fled Seoul into unspeakable misfortune?
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