Lonesome You, by Park Wan-Suh

Translated by Elizabeth Haejin Yoon

(1998, translated 2013)

Library of Korean Literature

(Short Story Collection)

Park Wan-Suh did not begin writing until she was in her forties. Many of the stories in this collection focus on the shallowness of modern life and the breakdown of Confucian values. Several feature elderly characters or families that are trying to determine what to do with aging parents who are physically or mentally ill. The author is a master of the short story form and In Lonesome You she is at the height of her powers. Expect realism, unflinching criticism of society, great wit, and a never-ending reinvention of the art of storytelling.

“Withered Flower”

Park’s elderly widowed narrator begins with a rumination on symbols and storytelling. Should a story be romantic and filigreed? Or, perhaps there is greater power in telling a tale simply, directly, and in an unadorned style? That way, too, can cut like a knife. And so she proceeds to tell about her complex relationship with her family, the younger generation, and her new male friend. The widow has traveled to Daigu–alone–to attend the wedding of her nephew. Expecting to be afforded the privilege of her status as an elder, she has carefully prepared for her involvement in the tradition of the pyebaek, a ceremony where the family of the groom is presented to the bride. In her mind’s eye, she relishes the moment when the young couple will bow deeply to each of the elders and offer them traditional gifts. The widow, dressed in a large and somewhat dated bright pink hanbok that all but engulfs her, is too late in discovering that the young couple has decided to forego the traditional pyebaek ceremony. And though she anticipated that the family would put her up for the night or at least drive her back to Seoul, in the end, her good-natured relatives cheerfully shuttle her off to the bus depot. Once on the bus, her fortunes change. She meets an older gentleman, a widower who is a former professor. He gives her his card and the two become companions. But when the children of the widow and widower discover they are spending so much time together, they turn all their attention, anxieties, and hopes on the two. The narrator is chagrined to discover the degree to which her children are suddenly acutely interested in everything she does, surveilling her and attempting to manipulate the man into marrying her. The widow increasingly resists the pressures of the role reversal and is frustrated that it has shattered the new life she has constructed for herself.  Ever practical, she realizes that the daughter of her male friend is eager to have her father remarry because then the daughter will be absolved of her duties to serve as her father’s caretaker in his old age. How can children be so cruel, and how then shall the widow resolve her dilemma? Her next move is critical, as it will determine the src of the final years of her life.

“People say nowadays that young celebrities ‘pop’ in their performance or demeanor. I felt something akin to that inside me, a playful and bouncy ping pong ball invigorating my every move. Moreover, I couldn’t deny that there were elements of playacting in what we did. The carefree joy I felt inside came from frivolous gestures performed for amusement. This kind of fun was by nature far removed from reality. When fantasies come true as in a dream, the reality bares no difference from the dream itself.” (25)

 “Psychedelic Butterfly”

What happens when an aging parent begins to suffer the effects of Alzheimer’s or dementia? The narrator is a woman who had an exceptionally strong relationship with her mother. Indeed, the narrator views their relationship as a partnership, and she is especially grateful that her mother encouraged her to return to school as an adult and pursue a degree. Now the mother’s mind is slipping away. She is combative, confused, and obsessed with escaping from whatever home she is in to the house of another of her children. She bolts from any house she is staying in. Contributing to her confusion is the construction of a tunnel through a local mountain that can speed her travel between her sons and daughters. An essential dilemma for the narrator is that she desires to be the sole caretaker for her mother, yet tradition dictates that her son must perform that role. While all the children experience emotional and financial stress as their mother’s conduct becomes more erratic and dangerous, the narrator reflects on their old home, their suffering during the post-war period, and the joy they felt when new housing was constructed in the 1960s. For the first time they felt a kind of security, but the new homes were western, all identical, and shoddily built. Worse, they were emotionally and spiritually empty. Building on these reflections, Ms. Park tells a parallel story of a traditional home that somehow survived the war. She knows a fortune teller lives there, but when she goes there seeking advice for what she should do to help her mother, she discovers that since the family discovered that there is no money anymore in divining, they have dressed the daughter as a nun and decorated the house as a Buddhist temple. They have even gone so far as to hire a disreputable monk to visit the town and bless the new temple. These two stories intersect when the mother makes her final run for freedom, and the dilemma resolves itself in a moment of exquisite fantasy or magic realism.

“In a few days, another lock was presented, and this time, it was to keep Mother inside her room. They said they had no choice. Confined indoors, Mother spent the whole day opening and closing every door in the apartment. Because she kept reopening and reclosing every bathroom and closet door, Mother thought that the house had a countless number of rooms. ‘Here’s a room. Here’s another one! How can a home have this many rooms? All shamefully empty, too. That no good, lazy housewife! Why doesn’t she rent them out?’” (54)

 “An Unbearable Secret”

This short story is markedly different from the first two in the collection. The genre is closer to a ghost story or psychological drama. Ha Young is a middle-aged woman who is staying at an inn on the eastern seaboard. She rises early one overcast morning to walk the shore when she encounters a small crowd gathered around the body of a local young man. Ha Young flies into a panic, and throws herself on the body in a paroxysm of grief, but when she discovers the man has taken poison and not drowned, she rises with an awkward smile and reveals a tearless face. She wanders from shop to shop, orders a bottle of soju before noon and drinks it alone, and then recalls that a village nearby may be the home of Heo Nanseolheon’s, a poet and the sister of Heo Gyun, the author if the iconic Korean Tale of Hong Gildong. She visits the home of the heroic poet—clearly at least a former idol of Ha Young— but finds home/museum/memorial dull and uninspiring. However, she is transported by her discovery of a simple nearby garden tended by an elderly woman. She relishes a fantasy that the poet spent hours contemplating these same flowers, but when Ha Young laments the fall of the Heo family and the poor condition of the poet’s home, the old woman matter-of-factly states that this is to be expected in families beset by treason. This word triggers a series of memories among which is Ha Young’s deep-rooted belief that she is cursed to destroy any person she loves, a curse that drives her to regularly to flee her husband and children.

“The instant transformation of the weather from one extreme to another over the treacherous and winding Daekwan Pass represented something of a hope or the will to change for Ha Young. She had no appreciation for the kind of transformation that was gradual; she wanted complete, groundbreaking change. But she had no idea how to make this kind of change happen.” (86)

“Long Boring Movie”

Park’s narrator is a middle-aged woman, a housewife married to Jung Seobang. Her antagonist is her older brother. Although he is a High School ethics teacher and his wife is an elementary school teacher, he constantly complains of his poverty and shirks his filial duties. When his mother developed stomach cancer, he was slow to act and his sister took on the care of their mother in her final days. Her brother complains that his sister was motivated by a desire to make him look bad.  When she broaches the issue that their father, who is in his eighties, will soon need care, her brother suggests that she is selfishly positioning herself to inherit their parents’ home in a neighborhood in Seoul that is ripe for redevelopment. This present dilemma causes her to reflect on the life of her mother, who devoted s significant portion of her life to caring for the declining health of her parents-in-law while her husband occupied himself in a series of very public and humiliating affairs. The narrator considers her mother something of a saint for enduring her father’s abuses, and is therefore frustrated that fate rewards her mother’s pure life by giving her a disease that robs her of her ability to keep herself clean. One of the special wonders of this short story is the frank discussion of the body: Park’s characters commiserate over soiled underclothing and guffaw over a range of farts. Meanwhile, her father, an absolute rogue, continues to live on, his charm and ability to attract the female gaze surviving life’s vicissitudes. Who will have the persistence to witness the final, painful, and predictable acts of her father’s life?

“I needed an endless supply of undergarments. Tucked in carefully between the layers of clothing, I found scented soaps of all kinds. When our grandmother passed away, we found folded bills stashed inside every beoson, but for Mother, it was scented soaps. I also found loosely capped miniature bottles of perfume samples that came free with cosmetic purchases. Mother must have been afraid of smelling like an old woman. It was a fitting act of self-preservation for someone so terrified of the physical and emotional degradation that comes with old age.” (112)

“Lonesome You”

This story begins with a graduation from college. Chae Jong, who finished college a few years ago, has arranged for her estranged parents to meet at a café to celebrate their son’s graduation. Waiting in the upscale café, the mother feels old and out of place. The European name, menu, and décor make her feel distinctly unsettled. Curiously, the black uniforms of the wait staff and unisex haircuts even disrupt her ability to determine the genders of the servers and bus persons. What is this modern world, really? When her husband finally arrives, her worst fears come true. He is poorly dressed, sweating profusely, and talking too loudly. Whenever he opens his mouth it seems to be to criticize the moral failures of the present generation. How out of touch can he be? Initially, the couple separated when Chae Jong became the first student from her high school to earn a prize spot at a university in Seoul. Their father insisted that his daughter must not live alone in the city and that his son, Chae Hoon, who had just entered high school, must earn a place in an even better college. Thus, the father remained at home in his position as a grade school principal while the wife took the children to Seoul, rented a half-basement apartment and began supplementing her income to pay for tutors for her children. She sold cosmetics and eventually bought her own store. Now, at the end of her long labors, she has come with her married daughter and her parents-in-laws and her husband with his threadbare jacket and his old-fashioned ideals to celebrate her son’s graduation. If the two can just get through this public ritual, they can return to their lives apart.

“Not once did she visit her husband in the countryside. She wanted to show the kids how indifferent she was toward him. If he did such a good job of looking after himself there without any help from her, then maybe he, too, wanted to make this separation work. It was like a battle of wills between them. She didn’t ask for his participation in this battle, but she might as well have. It was what she wanted from him anyway, so why should she care how he lived? Like an old hut rotting away and collapsing into a pile of dust, their relationship suffered a silent demise—silent enough to go unnoticed by the children living under the same roof.”  (129)

“That Girl’s House”

This is a frame story that begins with a middle-aged woman discovering that a childhood acquaintance, a man who has late in life become a poet, will be presenting at a local reading. A fan of his romantic poetry, she travels to the venue while reminiscing about a long-ago country romance. When the narrator was a young girl she—like everyone in her village—admired two exceptional children. Man-deuk and Gop-dan were each beautiful and their characters so admirable and exquisitely Korean that even the old folks who grumbled at everything wished that the two teens would someday marry. Townspeople envied their chaste romance and gossips could find no fault in their blushes. Then the Korean War began. Many young men married their brides and left for war, but Man-deuk’s love for Gop-dan was different. Because he would not risk leaving her behind as a widow, Man-deuk left for the war a single man. As time passed, the villagers and parents grew anxious for the fate of Gop-dan. How could she remain without a male protector in time of war? And so it happened that they found a protector for Gop-dan. Although the story has a fairy-tale quality, it is one of the most sophisticated and revelatory piece in the collection, not only for what it reveals about Korean culture, but also what it says about the nature of love, the institution of marriage, and the mysteries of memory, imagination, and art.

“Although men studied at the schoolhouse and women became barely literate by looking over the shoulders of male students, modern education was a distant dream for the villagers who lived at least eight kilometers away from the nearest town. But this dream was something that they wanted to afford to their children, if possible. I think they thought of romance in a similar way. They harbored an irresistible curiosity toward the newfangled ways of life enjoyed by educated city folks. Thus, Gop-dan and Man-deuk’s relationship had the seal of approval not only from the younger generation but also from the officious older folks who criticized every little thing. Even before the two ever had any feelings for each other, it was the elderly who delighted in imagining, with their eyes half closed, the two of them together.“ (153)

“Thorn Inside Petals”

Once again, Park focuses on the elderly and approaching death. In this instance, a story of families separated after the war and living apart in the United States and Korea, none of the major characters—all women–have names. They are in some sense Korean “Everywoman,” or rather every unni and yeodongsaeng, as the power dynamics between elder and younger sister and between niece and aunt are surging just below the surface in these relationships. The narrator is an old woman. She is alone in the world, having outlived her brothers and all but one of her sisters, a woman who moved to the U.S. thirty years ago and never returned, until now: she is coming to Banpu to attend the wedding of her grandson. The elder sister travels to her niece-in-law’s family to meet her younger sister, who is almost unrecognizable in colors that are too bright for her age and a horrendous perm. As the family hovers over their aged guest, they eye the old woman’s tacky duffle bag and the more appropriate Luis Vuitton suitcase, trying to guess what fabulous gifts they contain for the young couple and the many relatives. The bags do contain many surprises and at least one “Thorn Inside Petals.” But the short story is revelatory in other ways. The narrator may not be the beloved auntie she claims to be and the story of the younger sister, the memoir that seems about to be erased by the outrageous creativity of her final act – somehow survives.

“Look how in just a few months your mother is oozing with elegance and charm.” I beamed, directing intentional praise and flattery to my niece-in-law. It was true that I was grateful to her for putting up with such a difficult mother-in-law all this time and sending her off in style like this. In front of the departure gate, it was nice to see that people were hugging and rubbing cheeks like Westerners. Like them, I embraced my sister. She had plenty of family members seeing her off, but I was the only one among the whole entourage who could embrace her like this. I was the only one who was truly sad to see her go.” (184)

“A Ball-Playing Woman”

Park’s heroine is a difficult woman, Aran. She is aged thirty, unmarried, attractive, single, sexually active, and preoccupied by a sense that the world owes her something for her suffering. She is involved with an abusive man she will not marry until he passes the bar exam and is thus transformed into a man with enough status for a woman like her to wed. She grew up with her mother, a woman who worked countless menial jobs throughout her life and died young. Aran loathed her mother for failing to provide a life worthy of her. In her youth, Aran learned that her mother was a mistress of the aged Chairman Jin and that she was his daughter. Her mother had fought and won the right for her daughter’s name to be added to the Jin family register. But when Jin’s family discovered the mistress, Chairman Jin had to give up Aran’s mother. From Aran’s point of view, her mother has failed as a woman and a mother. If she had only tried harder to use her intelligence and her beauty, she could have enticed Jin to continue their relationship and she and her daughter could have lived in luxury. All of these old tensions resurface when Jin’s lawyers call Aran and inform her that her father has left her the apartment he died in.

“Her mother had to endure greater abuse from her daughter after Aran officially became a part of the Jin family. And to her daughter’s abuse she always gave the same reply: she was never after their money or power but simply wanted the truth to be known. Proud to the end . . . Aran was sick and tired of her mother’s pride and arrogance. She knew that what her mother said outwardly and what she felt inwardly were two different things. Declaring that she now had no more regrets in life, her mother quickly lost her energy for life, became ill, and died before Aran entered college.” (207)

“J-1 Visa”

Again, Park uses a simple story to open up a constellation of urgent topics. At the heart of the matter is a high school teacher, Lee Chang Guwho seems to be uninspired and paralyzed by self-doubt. He came of age in the early 80s in a time of great political turmoil. As a college student, he participated in countless protests but regrets that he never felt the commitment of the true zealots. Instead, he settled for a life as a teacher, telling himself that he could still fight for true reform by mentoring the youth. The story takes an unexpected turn when he receives a letter from a star pupil who earned a spot in Seoul University and then left to further her education in the United States. The former student is a graduate student at a California University. She has written a thesis about her teacher’s novel, The Satgatjae Village, and she is calling to invite him to be a star panelist on her university’s symposium on “The Experience of Colonialism Modernity: The Cases of Korea, Japan and China.” It turns out that the high school teacher devotes his summers to writing and submitting his work to the many literary magazines  and literary competitions that are the stepping-stones to a career as a write in South Korea. He has quietly published a number of stories, but he is shocked to learn that his novel has excited interest in the U.S. When he expresses wonder that there is such a large Korean-speaking audience in America, his former student informs him that Americans are reading a translation by Helen Kang, a Korean-American woman. The name brings up a painful incident. He found Ms. Kang a very limited translator. Worse, having grown up in the states, she had to ask Teacher Lee the meaning of “Comfort Women.” Her ignorance was too much for him, especially as his novel was built directly on the experiences of his mother and her family. Despite his reservations, Teacher Lee agrees to attend the symposium, at which point he begins a Sisyphean effort to secure a J-1 Visa, an epic adventure in bristling with both bureaucratic obstacles and graduate-level symbolism.

“He was timid by nature and unsociable, so mingling with foreigners in his broken English was quite beyond his imagination. He had just wanted to see other people with different physical traits and cultural backgrounds working in the same field, to get a glimpse of their world. That desire to keep open a thin line of communication with the outside world was not unrelated to his suspicion that his writing was somehow crude by global standards. But these occasional strolls into the open world of literature always left him feeling ostracized. It was more than his inability to communicate in a universal language or the lack of opportunity to express his views. It was an odd feeling different from those frustrations. He and his countrymen were somehow invisible, even if they were to show up en masse and occupy all the seats.” (230)

“An Anecdote: The Bane of My Existence”

A brief reflection on the author’s love-hate relationship with her computer. The inciting incident is the tragic loss of the first quarter of a novel she was in the process of writing. She details her attempts to recover her file, some logical, some relying on more primitive thinking, as well as her interactions with help-desk operators and other technological gurus. Following the incident she determines that the computer may be affected by early-onset senility. Ultimately, she arranges for a company representative to visit her and inspect the device. In the process, he solves the problem but continues to express confusion that a woman—and a woman of Park’s age and poor typing skills–could be the true primary user of the virus-infected computer.

“Still, I couldn’t just trash the bane of my existence. For one thing, its word-processing capability was unaffected despite the abuse inflicted upon it. For another, I still maintained a relationship with it in the form of anger and resentment for having swallowed up the fruits of my labor, the pages begotten from my sweat, blood and tears. I am one of the few remaining writers from the old school who can claim with a straight face that the inspiration for writing comes from a hot-blooded heart and a noble conscience. That same person was now in a relationship from hell with a scrap of machine.” (249)