Oh Jung-Hee :: “Wayfarer”

I have a weak spot for mysteries that offer an answer and leave me puzzling over the question. The final pages become a source of relief, not just resolution. Oh Jung-Hee’s “Wayfarer” works like this– and it is all the more formidable for its extreme brevity and emotional thrust.

The desolation faced by Hye-Ja– at the hands of her family, former colleagues, the Korean justice system, and prevailing ideas of mental health/rehabilitation– reminds me of Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark.

Lessing’s protagonist finds herself with some free time during her summer holidays. She makes a series of un-ladylike decisions that are particularly unbecoming of a married, middle-aged parent of adult children. Yet her responses seem intuitive– almost imperative. And as a result, the expectations she’s up against are implicitly condemned.

In “Wayfarer,” individual agency is much more problematic. Hye-Ja displays precious little of it, and yet she is dismissed for that “precious little” by a specific and conflicting set of cultural mores which cannot be easily dismissed. For reasons beyond Hye-Ja’s control, both action and inaction work against her. From the final pages:

What she had seen then was not the man’s face but her own nearly naked body. It was pure terror [...]. (80-81)

I don’t want to reveal too much about the context of this passage. But nothing else does such an efficient job of conveying what Hye-Ja is up against. The moment she is exposed, she is already damned. An outside party invades her sphere, but the circumstances are of little consequence. Once she considers herself, the damage is irreparable. Her decision to independently defend her sphere is ultimately what destroys it.

Oh Jung-Hee :: “Chinatown”

I’ve lived in Korea for about 18 months, but I’ve only visited the city of Incheon once. The trip goes something like this: Line 1 to Guro. Wait a while. Line 1 to Incheon. Pray for a seat. It’s a frustrating trip because the city really isn’t that far away from my neighbourhood, as the crow flies. It is a place I really, really like, though– and one I intend to visit again, as soon as spring figures out whether it’s coming or going.

I have Oh Jung-Hee’s story “Chinatown” (the first of three, in a little book of the same name) to thank for a reminder of Incheon. When I visited the old downtown core in 2009, it struck me as a place left holding its breath for purposes unknown. “Chinatown” gave me much the same impression. A young girl and her family leave the countryside and take up residence in post-war Incheon, surrounded by the sea– its wealth and its foetidness– and the inexplicable (for a 9-year-old, at least) Chinese.

Incheon’s Chinese streets are today little more than a set of charming relics. But Oh’s protagonist gives me its ghosts:

[In] the evening the Chinese flocked there, creeping like dusk through interlocking alleys. The women had great thick ears and wore silver earrings. They tottered on bound feet, baskets over their arms, and their heads bobbed, the tight buns looking like cow dung. (23)

“Chinatown” is a coming-of-age story (for lack of a better term– more on that later), so it’s appropriate that this first descriptive passage is relatively unmediated. The protagonist is open to the Chinese, and takes them– paints them, even– as they are. On the following page, though, the culture she’s set to inherit seeps into her vignette:

Smugglers, opium addicts, coolies who squirreled away gold inside every panel of their ragged quilted clothing, mounted bandits who swept over the frozen earth to the beat of their horses’ hoofs, barbarians who sliced up the raw liver of a slaughtered enemy and ate it according to rank, outcaste butchers who made wonton out of human flesh, people whose turds had frozen upright on the northern Manchurian plain before they could pull up their pants [...]. (24)

I shared this passage with my fiancé. He was immediately struck by how different  these stereotypes are from the ones we include in our North American cultural baggage. Thieves and opium smokers, sure– plenty of common ground there. But cavalrymen and cannibals? The Chinese? My, how unexpectedly intimidating.

As for the coming-of-age bit: that’s how the back cover describes “Chinatown,” but the protagonist didn’t exactly leave me humming “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” I ached for her gradual loss of childhood, but an entrance into womanhood is only hinted at on the very last page. The women around her are cautionary, almost tragic beings– spectres, even– of the difficult life she will soon gain in exchange for the aesthetic, spontaneous priorities of children.