Following recent political reforms, Lucas Stewart investigates the impact on writers in the country, and whether there is real change in the air for ethnic literature and languagesHis name is Saw Myint Zaw. He is from Karen State in Eastern Burma. He writes in the Sgaw language. You probably have never heard of him. I hadn’t either until a few months ago. Yet he offers a symbol of what we don’t know about ‘Burmese’ literature. A literature that belongs to 40% of Burma’s people and yet is barely read or recognised within their own borders. A literature that has been systemically repressed by successive governments in an attempt to ‘Burmanise’ the 135 ethnic groups in Burma. A literature without translation.I came to Burma two and half years ago. I now co-ordinate Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, a 3-year British Council project encouraging freedom of expression for ethnic groups in Burma through short stories. Eager to dig into this genre, but shamefully constrained by my poor Burmese, I bought every anthology translated into English that I could find.In the beginning I found two wonderful short story collections by Daw Khin Myo Chit, both over 40 years old and largely set in Yangon, the city she lived in; a 60-year-old Columbia University reprint of Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay’s biography of her husband, U Chit Maung, also written and set in Yangon, and a cultural guide to Burmese festivals.In all, I discovered only 24 translated works of any genre, spanning six decades, of which only two were short story collections published in the last 10 years: Myanmar Short stories translated by Ma Thanegi and Classic Night at Café Blue’s by San Lin Tun.Burmese novelist and literary activist Dr Ma Thida (Sanchuang) defined the reasons for this in her recent Guardian article on literature and censorship. But things have changed now, right?In the time I have been here, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division has been abolished, writers such as Nay Phone Latt, Zarganar and U Zeyar have been released from jail, and ethnic minorities have been given the legal right to teach and develop their own literature. Sweeping, total changes that demand to be applauded.And yet, for every literary reform policy that bursts free from Thein Sein’s office – and is so duly celebrated by the international press – those reforms, when looked at closely, aren’t always what they seem.Pre-publication censorship has been abolished, true; but a new media bill, drafted by the Ministry of Information without consultation with writers, editors or journalists, and recently passed through the lower house of parliament, threatens to replace the old, draconian 1962 Printers and Publishers Registration Act with similarly repressive parameters. Only now, you can be arrested and imprisoned after publication, not before.Writers have been released, but some political prisoners have been forced to sign an official release letter which states that any future arrests, regardless of the offence, will result in the offender being returned to jail to see out the remainder of their sentence. Put simply, the blogger Nay Phone Latt, sentenced to 20-and-a-half years for ‘creating public alarm’ but freed after four, could spend another 16 years in jail for not paying his parking tickets.Which leads me to the writers from ethnic communities.On 15 June 2012, the Minister for Education, Dr Mya Aye, announced that ethnic languages and literature would be taught up to second grade in state schools for the first time.Teaching ethnic literature in schools has been forbidden since 1964, because of a fear of communities rallying behind an identity that is not ‘Burmese’. Similarly, the publication of ethnic language texts, both educational and literary, was banned. The effect this has had on the creative output of ethnic writers, who have been forced to write in Burmese or publish in their own language in the underground press, needs no exaggeration.To halt the decline in their literature, these ethnic communities formed regional cultural and literature organisations in the 1950’s and 60’s. Surprisingly, the central government turned a blind eye to the activities of these associations; as one Karen literature committee member put it to me recently, “It’s a grey area. They know exactly what we do, they have informers, but as long as we don’t do anything political they leave us alone.”And yet, I have still to read a significant work of fiction, in translation, from an ethnic author.This might be because all but one of the regional literature associations are still illegal, despite the recent reforms. The associations are wary of placing themselves under the central control of a government noted for its corruption. A five-decade-old policy of linguistic and literary suppression has bred a suspicion in the associations that will be hard to dispel. One Karen Literature committee member suggested to me they would consider registering their association when Karen state elects an ethnic Karen Chief Minister. To give an example of a different region – in the Kayin State the current State Chief Minister is U Zaw Min, an ex-general, a USDP party member, personally appointed by Thein Sein and presumably recommended for the position by the Tatmadaw army chiefs. No surprise literature associations are cautious about registering.But by refusing to register, they receive no assistance, money or resources from the Ministries of Culture or Education. As illegal organisations they are also unable to receive external funding through the regular channels.As a result these regional literature associations survive solely on community donations from villagers, merchants and religious institutions. Each with varied degrees of success…The Karen Culture and Literature Association, formed in the early 1950’s, is better funded than others due to its proximity to the Thai border. Black market trade has allowed the association to print Karen language proverbs; a Karen-English dictionary is in the draft stage; while the bulk of the Association’s budget goes towards an annual summer camp. For four weeks between April and May, up to 10,000 junior and high school students in 30 to 40 villages across Karen state are tutored in the local languages though creative writing, short stories and essay competitions. The summer camp ends in June with a 3-day regional summit for 2,500 people at a cost of $30,000.Others, such as the Kachin Culture Association and its sub-committee, the Kachin Literature Association, far in the north of Upper Burma, still operate within a civil war environment where cross-border trade has become negligible and people have become dislocated from their communities through forced resettlement. They have yet to see the benefits of last year’s ‘historic’ edict.“We work out of churches, most of our teachers can’t even write Jingpaw [the dominant language among the 6 major Kachin ethnic groups] and we have no money,” a Kachin Literature sub-committee official told me. “What about English translations of Kachin literature?” I asked. The committee member replied, “We can’t afford the paper.”And they are not the only ones.Political instability, remoteness and a non-existent market for ethnic works in Burma’s main cities have only served to isolate the regional literature associations from their peers in the literary centres of big cities like Yangon and Mandalay. Yangon-based publishing and writers associations, such as the Myanmar Publisher and Booksellers Association and the Myanmar Writers Union, both formed only a year ago out of the ashes of the government-regulated Myanmar Writers and Journalistic Association, are facing their own struggles in terms of indigenous readership. General print runs of paperbacks in any genre, literary or commercial, range from only 500 to a 1000, with national bestsellers rarely running at more th
an 5,000. With the sale cost of a printed work in Yangon running at an average of $2,40, 50% goes to the publishers, 15-20% to the author and the rest to the bookseller. Literature doesn’t make anyone rich in Burma.Add to this a decayed educational system that values rote learning, a dearth of qualified translators, a decentralised process by which works get selected for translation, and a depressed editorial profession that is only just starting to breathe again. It is no wonder that the entire Burmese-language-literature in English translation is reduced to post-war reprints and cultural commentaries, such as Dr Maung Maung’s fascinating Aung San of Burma and A Trial in Burma.For the ethnic writers, their situation at the moment is even more dismal. Translation from their regional language into Burmese has a limited market and limited interest in the major Burmese cities. Translation into English is the territory of 19th
Century ethno-linguistic academics like Jonathon Wades Thesaurus of Karen Knowledge. For now, the ethnic regional literature committees are on their own.Yet, Thein Sein has triggered a cautious renaissance that will be difficult to subdue, regardless of what happens in the coming years. The growth of regional literature associations is intertwined with the growth of publishers and professional writers’ organisations in Yangon. One hopes that as publishing companies start being in touch with the international literary world, so too will the regional associations be provided with translation opportunities for their own writers.Writers such as Saw Myint Zaw.About the authorLucas Stewart have lived in Qatar, Iraq, Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea and Myanmar. He is currently working as Literature Advisor to the British Council’s Hidden Words Hidden Worlds ethnic literature project and assisted British Council in organising the first Burmese Book Slam. He blogs at sadaik.com (an English language blog on Myanmar literature).Additional informationDr Maung Maung’s Aung San of Burma and A Trial in Burma, both originally published overseas in 1962, was reprinted in Burma through Unity Publishers last year.U Thaw Kaung’s Myanmar Wonderland, 38 short essays written in the 1980’s and 1990’s for the Today Journal and was published collectively this year.Thesaurus of Karen Knowledge, published in 1850 is accessible through www.burmalibrary.org and small, overseas ethnic community organisations such as the Karen Drum Publication Group.
Tag: South East Asia
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Way to an unknown world
Krys Lee reports for PEN Atlas from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she appeared on the panel ‘New American Voices’. For more on the festival, please also see Daniel Hahn’s piece The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of those rare events that bring readers, critics, and writers together in an atmosphere of comfort and challenge. Hundreds of discussions happen simultaneously during the panels, at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, in cafes, and in the authors’ cozy yurt (which actually is a yurt). Many will disagree among one another; there are not many clear-cut answers when it comes to literature. But the festival is the beginning of a conversation between writers and moderators, writers and readers, writers and writers, and readers with each other, as well as a celebration of books. I don’t think there was a single panel I went to where there wasn’t at least a slight difference of opinion between panelists or where audience members weren’t contradicting one another. This colorful cacophony, perhaps, reflects the liveliness of readers and reading and mirrors the complexity of literature. But the best conversations begin in challenge and disagreement.On the panel I participated in, some of the conversations circulated around dislocation and belonging. The panel was titled New American Voices. Panelist Nell Freudenberger’s latest novel The Newlyweds braids the narrative of a 24-year old Bangladeshi woman named Amina who has left her native country for America to marry a man she corresponded with online. The Guardian sees it as an effort to translate the American experience for the 21st century. My own story collection Drifting House focuses on outsiders and survivors in the Korean diaspora, spanning South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. The books, ostensibly, have been paired up to reflect America’s roots as a nation of immigrants.The most interesting comment raised was by a young man that ended on the note that, we can live for a long time in a country and yet never really understand it. This American man had lived in Japan and never felt as if he was accepted by or quite comprehended the country, and he questioned the ability of anyone else to do so. It was a comment disguising its challenge to us, the panelists, and our ability to successfully write the stories of people whom he saw as ‘the other’. While I sympathize with his frustrations, ironically, Freudenberger’s entire body of work questions his assumption that one may not be able to inhabit other worlds through the transformative act of fiction, directly challenging such sceptics. The Newlyweds was also based on the true story of a Bangladeshi woman whom Freudenberger struck up a friendship with on a plane ride. As for myself, I had spent over half my life in Seoul, South Korea, and at this point, am more intimate with South Koreans and Korean culture than America. My everyday spoken language is Korean and Seoul is my hometown, and most likely, my hopefully distant future burial site, will be in South Korea. I was literally writing about what I know, and not the ‘otherness’ that he indicated.What he was really getting at was the question of authenticity and who has the right to speak for another. The indeterminate space between two cultures, from his perspective, disqualified one to speak for another. This was the narrative space that he was challenging.But literature, not to mention history, society, and culture, has always been about dislocation. Some of our greatest modern writers, including Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway made it their subject, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yiyun Lee, Nam Le, Salman Rushdie, Yi Munyoland Xiaolu Guoall assume a form of dislocation at the heart of their narratives.We live in a time of dislocation. Perhaps we always have. The story of immigration, that great passage of people making their way to an unknown world, is only one kind of dislocation. “Displaced” is a synonym for “dislocated”; as is “to be put out of place”. Dislocation is also one form of discomfort and, in its most extreme form, alienation. In this sense dislocation is also timeless. It is the story of migrations, journeys that sometimes end badly, as well as the displacement from being one kind of person to being another.The poet Susan Mitchell says, “The world is wily and doesn’t want to be caught.” Writers attempt, or in some postmodern literature, question the attempt, to capture the elusive. This despite the challenge by the well-intended audience member: is it even possible for a writer to inhabit and understand other worlds and other voices? I suppose the next natural questions are: how do you define what is your world, and what is your voice? About the AuthorKrys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller, UK.www.krys.lee.comAlso by Krys Lee for PEN AtlasKorean Women Writers, Part 1 What we don’t know about North KoreaAdditional InformationSusan Mitchell (born in 1944) is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon.Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Dissident and The Newlyweds and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. The Newlyweds was published in the UK by Viking in August 2012. Read more about The Newlyweds here at Curtis Brown.
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Women Writers, Part I
PEN Atlas contributor Krys Lee considers the impact of Kyung-sook Shin’s Man Asian Literary Prize win and where Korean women writers stand today
Last month, the phrase the “Asian Booker Prize” constantly popped up in the Korean media. Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Momwas awarded the Man Asian Prize for 2012, and was greeted by a local media blitz that is rarely seen in literature. While an award is always exciting, especially for smaller countries as it helps to gain recognition and a larger prospective audience of readers for local literature, Shin is only one of many Korean women writers today whose debts lie in the past.One word in the Korean language that fascinates me is the word shinyoga (new woman). This was the title of Korea’s first short-lived feminist magazine launched in March 1920 and a term used for women associated with an education, Western-style clothing and modern ideas. At a time, when men of middle-class standing and beyond commonly had concubines, while women married in their teens and lived under the unforgiving eye of their mother-in-laws, many of these earlier female intellectuals, artists and writers suffered greatly as they struggled to make a life in a society that wasn’t ready for them. Writers like Na Hye-sok, now seen as an early role model for women writers and feminists, died a divorced woman, abandoned by society, friends, and even her own family, after an alleged love affair she conducted in Paris where her husband had been stationed. It didn’t matter that men often had other women; the more she belatedly defended her position in public, the more she was ostracized. Other writers like Kim Won-ju, a friend of Na Hye-sok’s and an editor at Shinyoga, left marriage for a monk’s life. The word shinyoga came to be associated with radicalism, rebellion and being modern.Two major women writers who benefited from these predecessors were Pak Wan-seo and Park Kyeong-ni.Pak Wan-seo, who passed away in 2011, was known for writing autobiographical fiction that vividly documents aspects of her personal life as well as the life of a rapidly changing nation. Pak’s life spanned a colonized Korea under Japanese rule, the Korean War that left the country divided, and South Korea’s dramatic industrialization and democratization. In books such as her debut novel,The Naked Tree, and the autobiographicalnovel,Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, her detailed impressions of a nation as well as ordinary families living in challenging times help bring Korean history to life in a way that few writers have accomplished. In Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, in particular, the mother’s attempts to remake the main character into a shinyoga are interrupted by the Korean War. Politics, in Pak’s work, is always personal. She was known as a chronicler, a storyteller, and a compassionate individual who understood suffering. In a literary world vastly dominated by men, Pak managed to gain both attention and respect for making history personal, yet still powerful.Pak Kyung-ni, another one of South Korea’s great writers died in May 2008.Toji, or Land, is widely considered her masterpiece. The 16-volume saga follows the struggles of several generations of villagers from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century under Japanese imperialism, and includes the lives of hundreds of characters, creating a comprehensive, complex portrait of the lives of Koreans. Pak’s life was tumultuous and filled with tragedy as a direct result of Korea’s history; her work is certainly influenced by a preoccupation of how the fate of a nation influences individual lives, but her approach to fiction is less autobiographical than Pak Wan-seo’s work. She strives to comprehend a nation and its people, in all their variety in a way that few writers have the courage to attempt. Even in a school curriculum dominated by men, Pak’s Land is considered essential reading.Shinyoga in Korea have come a long way. And yet not as much has changed as one would have hoped. According to Hankyoreh newspaper, discrimination against women in Korea in the workplace today ranks 104th
worst in the world. Women score higher on most entrance exams than men but few women reach beyond mid-managerial positions. The more highly educated a woman is, the more undesirable she is considered by matchmaking agencies. Most working women are still too fearful to take their full maternity leave; the unforgiving beauty standard for women has heavily contributed to plastic surgery’s mainstream status; and unmarried women who are independent, successful, and in their thirties are treated with pity and asked almost daily, “Why aren’t you married?” Women have changed, but society is still catching up.Yet, there are writers arguing, challenging, and making space for women’s voices in a society whose patriarchal structures are largely intact. Some exciting women writers today gaining praise from critics and readers include Ch’oi Yun, Jeong Yi-hyun, Kim In-Sukand Kim Sun Woo. Younger writers such as Han Ganghave not been widely translated into English, but I expect the recognition of books such as the Man Asian Prize winner Please Look After Mom will lead to new forays into the translation of Korean women writers.About the author
Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.com
Additional Information
Kyung-sook Shin (1963) is the author of 6 novels in addition to Please Look After Mother, which will be published in 19 countries, and has sold almost 1.5 million copies in South Korea alone. She is one of the country’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists, having won the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Isang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. She lives in Seoul and in New York.Park Wan-seo , also Park Wan suh (1931-2011) is a household name in Korea and draws standing-room-only crowds in North American cities with substantial Korean populations. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is a major work, being both a rare account of a woman coming of age in colonial Korea and the first book-length memoir in English by a Korean writer resident in and writing about Korea. (Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia). Park Kyung-ni (or Pak Kyong Ni) (1926 – 2008) was a prominent South Korean novelist. She is well known for her 16-volume story The Land, an epic saga set on the turbulent history of Korea during 19th and 20th century.Na Hye-sok ( 1896 – 1948) was a Korean poeter, feminist writer and painter, educators, journalists. She was the first female Korean artist of Western painting and the second Korean artist who held an oil painting exhibition. She became well-known as a liberal feminist with her criticism against the marital institution in the early 20th century.
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What We Don’t Know About North Korea
This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about) North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.
About the author
Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/
Additional Information
Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012. American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim: ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010. Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948): ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.
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What We Don't Know About North Korea
This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about) North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.
About the author
Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/
Additional Information
Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012. American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim: ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010. Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948): ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.