Flowers of Mold, by Ha Seong-Nan

Translated by Janet Hong

(1999, translated 2019)

Open Letter

(Short Story Collection)

“Waxen Wings”

Ms. Ha’s heroine is a lonely girl obsessed with the idea of flight. In kindergarten, she practices increasingly long leaps from the schoolyard swings. Later she pursues gymnastics, battling both her maturing body and gravity. Eventually, she becomes enamored of the freedom of hang gliding. In addition to precise and poetic imagery, Ms. Ha experiments with the rarely-used technique of the second-person narrative. “Waxen Wings” also appears in Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea.

“One day, after pumping yourself up as high as the beam, you let go of the chains. Freed from the swing, your body soars—only for the briefest moment, but you feel as though you’re flying. If not for the law of gravity you would have risen into the air, past the leaves of the sycamores flanking the field, and disappeared beyond the five-story school building. But like Newton’s apple, your small, light body is pulled to earth, and you land deftly on the sand.” (“Waxen Wings’)

“Nightmare”

“Nightmare” takes place in a large family-run pear orchard. Twice a year, the orchard puts out a call for migrant workers. Many of these itinerant workers come from far away to congregate on the farm where they take up residence for a few weeks at a time in primitive barracks. First they come to hand pollinate the delicate pear blossoms which are only open for about ten days. Then they return in the fall to harvest and pack the fruit for shipping. The work is exhausting and the laborers are rough, weather-beaten men who gamble, fight, and drink once the sun goes down. The “Nightmare” begins on the first page, when the orchard owner’s daughter awakes to confront the evidence of what happened in the night: a worker had climbed through her second story window and sexually assaulted her. Ha manages to construct a world that is both vividly real and ambiguously dream-like. At times she envisions her father avenging her, but then the parents seem to treat the attack as a predictable event, as something that is within the expected bounds of the seasonal risks that all farmers face.

“She had dashed down the stairs in the middle of the night. Though she weighed next to nothing, her steps rang out on the hollow wooden steps. The master bedroom door opened and a woman’s face emerged, glancing about. Shortly afterward, the living-room lights switched on. The woman stuck her hand under her pajamas and scratched loudly. Then her sleepy and wrinkled eyes widened. Her daughter’s pajama top was open, the buttons torn off, exposing her breasts. Her pale nipples were erect, and there was a towel stuffed in her mouth. The woman knew immediately what had happened.” (24-25).

“The Retreat”

Ha sets this black comedy in a dilapidated building abutting an amusement park and a red-light district. The building is home to a variety of small businesses that are all just barely afloat. Among them are a fried chicken joint, a martial arts school, a kebab style “skewer business,” and an “Academy of Mental Calculation.” The building his owned by Mr. Kwak. His father had bought the building years ago and had managed it as a cram school. With relentless effort, Kwak’s father made enough money to send his son to school in the US—a good thing, because his son could not get into any Korean schools. On his father’s death, Kwak inherited the building. He is a bad manager, he has not maintained the property, and his tenants can barely pay their rent. Nevertheless, tomorrow is the annual retreat for the business owners in Kwaks’ building, a tradition his father started long ago and which he is honor-bound to continue—even though he has a scheme to sell the property without telling anyone.

“Two years before, she had blindly trusted a newspaper ad about a skewer business being lucrative, and had opened a shop using the insurance settlement she had received from her husband’s death. But within a few days of opening, she realized she was late in the game. There were over fifty skewer franchises in the country alone. Skewer businesses had once been hot, but were fading fast. All the shops looked the same with their wooden interiors and seating so cramped one’s knees touched those of the person opposite. Even the menus were the same. Her franchisor also proved to be unstable.” (49)

 “The Woman Next Door”

Ha focuses on the plight of the apartment-living, middle-class, homemaker and mother, Yeongmi. She worked in a bank as a teller. She wasn’t making much progress there when she married her husband, a banker. Since then her life has revolved around keeping up with the cleaning and cooking and watching over her six-year-old son. The appliances are starting to run down, and so is Yeongmi. Her social and emotional life has decayed to such a point that she has taken to naming her appliances and talking to them, urging them to work for at least a few more days. For example, she calls the groaning washing machine Yeongmi—her name. But then a new neighbor moves in and in spite of her husband’s disapproval, Yeongmi finds herself with a new friend, a twenty-something go-getter with a great sense of humor and a modern “lean-in” attitude. Myeonghui teaches composition four days a week. She is great with her son, and in spite of his initial reticence, her husband gets on well with her. The two are so close that Myeonghui asks for permission to call Yeongmi onni: older sister.

“Flag”

The opening scene of “Flag” features a lineman dispatched to repair a shorted-out telephone line. As he ascends the pole he strips away the clothing that festoons the pole and finally finds the cause of the problem: a belt buckle. Ha then cuts away to one of a cadre of car salesmen who are responsible for moving high-end products that might not be especially suited to Seoul life: Chrysler automobiles. The man is a devoted but unsuccessful salesman. He works as often as he can, and though he seems caught up in car culture, he takes a crowded bus to work every day. The highlight of his trip is a billboard featuring a bronze-skinned woman dressed in a lei and bikini top who beckons weary citizens to fly to exotic beaches in places like Bangkok and Hawaii. As time passes, the protagonist begins to fear that he may never sell a Chrysler when one day a beautiful woman enters the showroom and asks him about the car atop the turning pedestal. It turns out that the beauty may have been “just looking,” but as she drives off in a late-model sports car, he realizes that she is the same woman on the billboard: Choi Myeong-Ai!

“She had on heavy eye makeup, but this time, too, I recognized her right away. A silver fox-fur coat came down to her ankles. I recalled what a customer had once told me. If a fox suffers high stress levels, the fur loses its sheen. And so, electrocution is the preferred method, since foxes have to be put to death in a way that doesn’t damage the pelt. Her coat shimmered under the blue stage lights. She was mesmerizing.” (97)

“Your Rearview Mirror”

Like many modern writers, Ha is critical of social isolation and the ugliness of consumerism. “Your Rearview Mirror” focuses on an essential element of any sales enterprise: the security guard. The hero is one of a pair of men who stand on elevated platforms between “Marilyn”- style mannequins, observing shoppers directly and via a bank of camera monitors. For both security and fashion, the walls of the stores are lined with mirrors. Our hero is quite good at his work. The customers know him by his mirrored glasses and the high school girls have nicknamed him “Mirror Man.” He is single, living a life of takeout food and lonely nights. His world starts to go sideways when a young woman begins visiting the shop only to stare at a gray dress on a mannequin. After prolonged surveillance, he comes to know her and she develops the confidence to share with him her avocation: she is an illusionist.

“There are surveillance cameras around the store that slowly turn left and right. Three monitors placed before the man play images captured by these cameras, but there are certain areas that don’t show up, like right below the cameras, or to the left of the camera when it’s facing right or to the right when it’s facing left. He calls these the blind spots. Blind spots in a car’s rearview mirror create a great deal of problems for new drivers. (107-108)

“Flowers of Mold”

Again, in “Flowers of Mold,” Ha turns a critical eye on social isolation and consumerism, but this time she drives hard to a darker, repulsive place. Her hero is a man who lives alone in an overcrowded and derelict apartment complex. Almost a year ago he was visited by a mob of angry women from the complex who accused him of violating a new local ordinance requiring all residents to place their trash in a specific type of trash bag. Lazy, perhaps trying to save a dime, the hero continued to use his own cheap bags. Not wanting to avoid fines, the women went through the rotting garbage to identify scofflaws. Their strategy worked: he began using the required trash bags. But he also realized that it was possible to learn a great deal about a person by going through their trash. Desiring to get to know the woman he observes playing with a child in the park far below his balcony or the neighbor who lives across the way, each night he takes the stairs to the basement, dives into the dumpster at the base of the garbage chute and returns with a bag of reeking trash. Using gloves, he pours the contents of the bags into his bathroom and begins to sort through the refuse, hoping to learn enough about these women so that he might have some advantage should he ever have the opportunity to speak with them.

“He wakes to a woman’s shrieks. It’s a little past two in the morning. Glass shatters on the floor. Frantic footsteps echo throughout the apartment. A woman is screaming at the top of her lungs, but he can’t make out her words. His wardrobe and stereo system are placed against the wall, which is all that separates his room from 507. He gets up from his bed, walks over to the wardrobe, and listens.” (129)

 “Toothpaste”

This was a surprise: Ha returns us to the billboard model in “Flag,” but this time the story appears to head in a more hopeful direction. Seoul is once again ugly, and we are again considering the life of a single salaryman whose personal and professional life has atrophied. He works in an advertising firm and his current headache is that he is tasked with putting together an ad campaign for yet another mint-flavored toothpaste. Like the car salesman in “Flag,” he rides the bus to work along the same route that passes the beneficent smile of the lei-wearing model who beckons travelers to follow her to costly island paradises. This fellow knows something that the car salesman did not: the rooftop billboards conceal anti-aircraft cannons. The hero knows this because he maintained the weapons as part of his military service; he can appreciate the model’s beauty while also remembering the disciplinary beatings and humiliation he suffered behind those advertisements. And just like the man in “Flag,” he runs into the exact same model: Choi Myeong-Ai.

“Once again, the bus didn’t arrive on time that morning, and the station swarmed with twice as many passengers as usual. The bus suddenly cuts into the left-turn lane, and a woman standing close behind slams into him with the force of a heavy suitcase. His hand is wrenched from the strap and he falls, his face mashing against the window.” (150)

 “Early Beans”

Ha skewers the modern relationship between men and women in “Early Beans.” As in many of her stories, the stink of the city and bodily fluids play a strong role. The tale begins with our modern hero trying to keep his shoes clean while tip-toeing through an alley full of rotting trash; the garbage collectors in Ha’s Seoul seem to be on perpetual strike, or the rot signifies something grotesque at the heart of the culture. The heavily-cologned dapper fellow is rushing to rendezvous with a potential lover. He plans to meet her at a mall, so he imagines if he arrives early he can purchase her a gift. Early arrival will also give him time to come up with a winning joke; his beloved, a cold woman four years his senior, has made it clear that she will give himself to her if he can make her laugh. Unfortunately, while making his way through traffic, he strikes a courier, wrecking his vehicle and the young man’s motorcycle. After accompanying the affable victim to the hospital, he agrees to complete the courier’s delivery. If he does everything right, he should be able to deliver the package and meet his girl with time to spare. But he finds public transportation confusing, and once on the subway he becomes distracted by the three high school girls who sit opposite him. He struggles to avoid his desire to sneak glances at their short skirts and increasingly relaxed poses while trying to decipher the directions scrawled across the package and calculate how much time he has before he meets the woman he desires.

“Dressed in pointy shoes and a white dress shirt with the top two buttons undone and tucked into snug jeans, he looked like an amateur cowboy who had just stepped out of a Western movie. He shaded his face with one hand, and with the other, clutched a cell phone instead of a pistol. He didn’t run into a single person as he walked to the parking lot. Even the playground was deserted. The stench and the unbearable heat were to blame.” (170)

“Onion”

Ha’s exploration of fate, broken, lonely characters, and the grotesque detritus of life reaches its apotheosis in “Onion.” As with many of her stories, the narrative whips backward and forwards. It begins with an accident scene investigation and ends with a god’s-eye view of the entire drama where it is revealed that the eye in the sky is so far removed from the scene that it cannot recognize the difference between a tragedy and a comedy and can’t quite understand how it happened that its creativity has devolved to remote observation. The two central characters are a struggling sushi chef and a “teacher” at a crowded day-care center. The hands of the sushi chef are scarred, the cuts a curriculum vitae of his career working as a fisherman, factory fish processor, fish vendor, and sushi chef. The woman’s scars are more psychological. She is frightened. Constantly distracted by the shouts, tears, and cruelties of her charges, her thoughts are scattered. She looks out at the world from behind perpetually bedraggled hair that the chef describes as squid-like, her bug-eyes wide, searching and alarmed.

“When the fat officer yanks off the loose glove-box door, the junk inside comes cascading out. An empty disposable lighter, two pairs of cotton gloves still in their packages, cheap facial tissue, a cassette tape of old pop music, its ribbon loose and tangled. He puts each item in a plastic bag. Something glints from deep under the seat. He sticks his hand under the seat, his face pressed against the rubber mat, and pulls out the object. It’s a sashimi knife about thirty centimeters long, wrapped in something like a long strip of cotton gauze.” (193)