A Good Family by Seo Ha-jin

Translated by Ally H. Wang and Amy C. Smith

(2008, translated 2015)

Dalkey Archive Press

(Short Story Collection)

  “What Grows out of Sadness”

Seo’s first piece stuns with its realistic, honest, and deeply affecting portrait of fifty-four-year-old Hee-sook, who is diagnosed with peritoneal cancer. Seo reveals Hee-sook in part by describing the degree to which she is overlooked by her husband, her two sons, and her extended family. She is devoted to the quiet service of others, accepts her traditional role fully and asks for nothing in return. Hee-sook is also dedicated to helping the larger community: for the last eight years, she has volunteered in a cancer ward, visiting with patients and assisting in their care. Seo details the predictable, inevitable course of Hee-sook’s decline; nevertheless, there are surprises–none so great as the vindictive bedside confession of an old friend, another long-suffering housewife. 

“Hee-sook was nowhere near ordinary. But she was a person who learned how to fit in, showing the appropriate feelings at the appropriate moments, to the extent she didn’t realize this fact for a long time. While she spent her time and energy on marriage, housekeeping, childbirth, and raising children, her thirties, and forties flew past like water. ‘Getting used to the current, feeling it smooth or wild and, sometimes, flowing backward, isn’t that what we call living?’ she thought.” (10)

“Dad’s Private Life”

Seo’s heroine is young, no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. She has recently discovered evidence from her father’s cell phone and computer that he may be having an affair. As the evidence accumulates, she shares her suspicion with her art school friend, Mina. Older, more worldly, and reckless, Mina is certain that her friend’s handsome father, a professor of poetry, must be having an affair with the woman who signs her texts “MermaidL.” When they discover that the father is using the excuse of a poetry reading to book a romantic rendezvous in Hong Kong, Mina convinces her friend to put on disguises, book seats on the same flight, and follow the faithless husband. Though this seems like a nightmarish version of The Parent Trap, where one friend is trying to convince the other that her parents ought to divorce, Seo’s portrayal of the young girls is engaging and believable. The daughter seems to see her father’s escapade mostly as a betrayal of her relationship with him; she does not mention her mother at all. She is deeply hurt, nevertheless, a wound that manifests itself through increasing levels of nausea as her understanding of her family and personal identity begin to shatter. And Mina is brilliantly flighty and controlling. It comes as no surprise that she recognizes an exterior setting from Wong Kar Wai’s Chonqing Express and we learn that she styles herself as the character Faye, the impulsive gamin who breaks into her lover’s apartment to clean it. It turns out that her friend’s philandering father is also a Wong Kar Wai fan. Mina’s ringtone is “California Dreamin’” from the Chonqing Express soundtrack, and the professor’s is “Qizás, quizás, quizás” from Wong’s masterpiece In the Mood for Love.

“It’s not like Dad to make a reservation for a restaurant, but now I’m starting to get confused about this person I call Dad. After about twenty minutes the taxi stops in front of a shabby restaurant. There’s a signboard in Chinese characters that I can’t read. The restaurant has a long line out front, and waiters holding menus are going through the line and taking orders. Dad and Lady Unidentified, having exited the taxi, calmly approach the end of the line” (47)

“A Good Family”

To what extent do we each perform different roles throughout our days? The woman in “A Good Family” starts out her day as a fatigued mother who long ago lost all authority over her video-game-playing son. She then skips her makeup routine and throws on a wool scarf and her daughter’s tired faux-fur jacket to meet with a group of women who simply refer to her as “Ji-woo’s mom.” They are all in the same pickle: their sons, all seventeen and friends from school, rented a room for karaoke, got drunk, and beat up one of the boys. Now the mother of the injured boy is threatening a lawsuit. No matter what these women think of each other, they will have to perform a persuasive, emotional ritual of self-abasement so that their son’s records will remain clean. After returning home, she prepares another outfit to visit with Director Koo, the wunderkind from her husband’s place of work. There she threatens a lawsuit of her own with a show of stunning brinkmanship. Finally, after missing a chance to help her daughter, who is grieving at the site of the arson and destruction of the Namdaemun, the iconic South Gate of the fortress of old Seoul, she rushes off to help with feeding and cleaning her mother, who suffers from dementia.  It is a brilliant portrait of a day in the life of an extraordinary woman.

“As she expected, he asked her opinion. She guessed that she was a chronic offender. There had probably been many previous attempts, only it had never become a problem for him before. ‘I think Chief Cho needs to see Director Koo and set things straight. Tell her to meet with him in s bright, crowded place and make herself clear. Tell her to tell him ‘I don’t want to sleep with you. Don’t ever make such a demand of me. If there is another incident like this I will report it to the President.’ And ask her to tell you what happens afterward.” (85)

“Where is Everyone Going?”

The hero is M, a middle-aged practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. He is self-involved, emotionally detached, and involved in a smattering of extra-marital affairs. As a doctor, he is uninspired, cold, and unsympathetic. He gets in a fender-bender one night and when he complains of back pain at the emergency room, he is sent for X-rays, which reveal that he has a number of growths along his spine. M is certain he has cancer, as are his specialists. They suspect one of the growths has completely enveloped a portion of the spine and all evidence points to M possibly having no more than a year to live. Several lifetimes are lived in the three-day period he and his family must wait before exploratory surgery. During that time, his wife and children, as well as friends, relatives, and coworkers share not only condolences but also deeply suppressed emotions and closely guarded secrets with the terminal patient. How will this new knowledge affect him and will his experience with his own mortality cause him to change the way he interacts with loved ones and associates?

 “‘Doesn’t this look a little off?’ Even from a cursory glance, it was obvious that M’s spinal column looked weird in the X-ray Dr. Yi brought over. Four white masses that looked like snowballs, about two inches in diameter, surrounded his spinal column. Dr. Yi’s lips quivered and his face turned slightly pale.” (96)

“The Interview”

This is the first of two stories in the collection that focus on the lives of women writers. Manja is the narrator of “The Interview.” Perhaps in her thirties, she is a novelist who writes under the pen name Yi Hye-young. She is delighted to have been chosen to interview one of her early heroes, the great writer Kim Yeon-sook. Seo shows us Manja’s struggle to be taken seriously as a writer and as a woman: some of the most hilarious scenes as she tries to give directions to the two male recording technicians who are driving her to the author’s home. Though their mission is in the service of high art, the two are bumbling idiots, unkempt, hungover, and perhaps a little reluctant to heed the advice of the woman crammed into the back seat. The interview itself does not go as planned; both the interviewer and her subject reveal surprising truths about themselves and a bit of criminal trespass reveals the gulf between the successful writer’s lodgings and the house of her dreams. Throughout, Seo deliciously contrasts the mundane frustrations of life, the business of selling books, and the yearning to live life as an artist, and the quest for self-fulfillment.

“Manja was a little discouraged because she had expected a more ambitious spirit from a writer at Yeon-Sook Kim Seonsaeng level–a writer who doggedly wrote unpopular novels, no matter what it took, and supported herself entirely on her earnings as a writer. Manja knew that she had not become a writer in the hopes of one day having her handwritten manuscripts displayed in glass boxes, and the thought that there was no guarantee of remaining on display was a truly lonely one.” (139)

“Sugar or Salt”

Of all the pieces in the collection, “Sugar or Salt” is the one that most baldly explores the ideas of performance, disguise, and identity. H is an enigma. From the start, we witness her lying about her identity and confessing to living behind a string of aliases.  She seems to reveal fragments of her youth in flashbacks, but the pieces seem too extreme or too complex to put into any logical timeline.  Did her birth mother abandon her, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and two sisters? Did her adoptive mother pass just recently after a long battle with breast cancer? Is her father in a home suffering from dementia?  H is on the move. She has just flown from Korea to visit a college friend somewhere on the North American west coast. H and K were friends from high school and university. L was extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent. They were rivals. They traveled in the same set and dated in the same crowd. H may even have desired K; after all, she confesses to the reader that the people she has betrayed in love include both men and women. And now she has arrived at K’s door, eager to touch base and meet this new “Mr. Perfect” K has found. IS anyone prepared for who K has become or who she always was?

“The name of the man on the phone hadn’t even entered my mind until I had left my room. Nor did the name he had called me, H. It was a name that had been thrown away and forgotten, onee I had used a long time ago, back when I was in my twenties. All those names that were mine–J, O, and E–passed through my mind one after another. Those names had all been eventually abandoned, as naturally as an insect leaves behind its cocoon.”  (148)

“Who are You?”

Seo again presents us with a woman novelist. This one is middle-aged. She has just had the misfortune of wandering into the cramped neighborhood bookstore to find signed copies of her first novels up for sale. She should know better, but she feels compelled to discover which of her friends or acquaintances has chosen to put up her novels for a bit of cash. As it turns out, it is K. The discovery is devastating to her. Her relationship goes back many years. It may have been romantic. She shared her work with him. He was always her first audience and critic. He was honest with her to the point of cruelty. They were each married to other people, but K would always pick up the phone when she called and would listen. He was both her muse and her harshest critic. And now he appears to want to sever all ties with her. 

“Sometimes she dreamed of a final parting from K, a permanent farewell. The dream was sweet, pitiful, and tormenting. K was the only person who knew her novels, their origin, creation, and extinction, as a whole. Traffic started up around the Pangyo interchange. Two tow trucks were driving on the shoulder with loud sirens blazing. It was almost time to pick up her child.” (184)

“The Little Thing”

Seo’s final piece focuses on the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace. A business that has just achieved its long-range goal is rocked by an email alleging that Director Shin is guilty of making repeated sexual advances on a female employee. Twenty-nine-year-old Yi Young-ju is a brilliant hire from a high-ranking university. In her first years, she has carefully rejected three formal proposals of marriage from fellow employees. She has married and is raising a child. Her issue is that she works under the most powerful man in the company, Mr. Shin, aged fifty-five, a man who lives life according to traditional values and mores. Seo allows us to see what takes place from the point of view of a variety of stakeholders, including the company’s Department of Internal Affairs, lawyers, public relations officers, women employees, the victim, and the victim’s wife. 

“It’s wrong of you to just assume that I’ve intended to do this from the beginning. The state of affairs became overwhelming because the same situation was repeated again and again, and as you know, this is an extremely personal matter. For myself, I did not want to be involved in this ugly situation…She stopped talking for a moment and fidgeted with her hands. The four men looked at her long, pale fingers.” (202)